Ace Hotel Series – Kaori Suzuki, John Krausbauer, Caspar Sonnet, Dolphin Midwives

Sounds et al hosts this monthly performance series at the Ace Hotel Portland.

This month we’ve got four amazing artists – Kaori Suzuki (Oakland), John Krausbauer (Oakland), Caspar Sonnet (LA/ Portland) and Dolphin Midwives (Portland).

The series showcases a wide variety of sound artists, mainly focusing on experimental and electronic performances – always worth hearing.

Free entry, all ages
First Thursdays every month
6-8pm in the hotel lobby

Kaori Suzuki (b. Tokyo) is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music living in Oakland, CA. Her musical works are concerned with inner-sensory responses and transformative states, often emphasizing duration and dynamics through meticulous synthesis techniques. Her projects include her handmade instrument building platform Magic Echo Music, solo/collaborative compositions with analog synthesis, and solo computer music utilizing spectral properties of transducer-driven objects, combined with the use of auditory distortion products and other inner-ear phenomena. She has performed at various venues in the Bay Area and Pacific Northwest including Jack Straw Productions, Debacle Fest, TUFFest (Seattle, WA), S1 (Portland, OR), Berkeley Art Museum, Studio Grand, CCRMA (SF Bay Area), and recently the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. She holds a master’s degree in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College.

John Krausbauer is a music conceptualist/multi-instrumentalist currently living in Los Angeles, CA. He has performed and presented his music in a multitude of settings for 20 years – from basements, sidewalks, and rock clubs to colleges, churches, and art galleries. Numerous recordings of his work have been released on independent labels in the US, Europe, and Japan (soon). His recent musical work involves ritual-endurance happenings for solo voice, violin, and synth, and with the Ecstatic Music Band (a rotating 10+ member collective), both of which utilize ‘just’ tunings for amplified bowed strings at high volumes and long durations, with live stroboscopic lighting for TOTAL/immersive environments; The Essentialists (w/David Kendall), an electric country-blues-boogie-raga guitar/violin duo; the minimalist psych-punk group, Night Collectors; his systems-based phase compositions; and a new collaboration with the steel bodied resonator guitar player, R. Keenan Lawler.

Caspar Sonnet is an experimental multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter currently living in Portland, Oregon. Primarily self taught, his unusual song structures, extended techniques and haunting voice have been inspired by an array of eclectic sources, including: Native American mythology, Pre-war blues, world music and minimalist composition/orchestration. Sonnet continues his work which now includes voice, prepared acoustic lap-steel guitar, harmonica & percussion.

Dolphin Midwives – Ecstatic noise harp ritual experiments by harpist/sound artist/composer Sage Elaine Fisher.