Mon 7 August @ 10pm - with Eyewash (Forward Motion Theater)

Mon 21 August @ 10pm - with Gisburg, Moth (Sam Hillmer
and Ben Gerstein) & Matthew Welsch's Blarvuster

Mon 28 August @ 8pm- with ICE
(International Contemporary Ensemble) & Emily Manzo

Mon 11 September @10pm - with David Linton & Unity Gain

Mon 18 September @10pm - with Ignivomous presents the
AV Geeks "School-a-delic", LoVid and the Found Footage
Festival.

Mon 25 September @9pm - with S.E.M. Ensemble - 9PM
START FOR THIS SHOW ONLY

FESTIVAL DESCRIPTION:
Darmstadt presents a premiere series of experimental
contemporary music and new media.

Darmstadt, "Classics of the Avant Garde", the Brooklyn based
contemporary music outfit lead by Zach Layton and Nick
Hallett, presents a special series of concerts for the
Speigeltent. Internationally acclaimed chamber ensembles
play contemporary music by young composers and classic
20th Century works by John Cage and Xenakis. Major figures
from New York’s leading experimental new media community
present live real-time improvisatory electronic audio visual
performances. Homemade synthesizers, oddball educational
films and psychedelic visuals round out the series.
A downtown premiere series sure to be unlike anything
you’ve ever seen at the South Street Seaport.

Please note that the programme changes each week.


Mon 7 August - with Eyewash (Forward Motion Theater)
Forward Motion Theater is a New York City-based dance-theater-media company founded in 1995 by choreographer
Eric Dunlap and media artist Holly Daggers. The mission of
FMT is to explore the combination of movement and
technology through both live performance and digital media.
Works with themes ranging from science fiction, spirituality,
and the mutability of the human form are realized through
innovative stage and lighting effects and formalized
composition.

Mon 21 August - with Gisburg, Moth (Sam Hillmer and Ben
Gerstein) & Matthew Welsch's Blarvuster

Gisberg

W.A.L.S.C.H 2
A film noir music theater piece about a hit man who has a
contract on himself and who is big fan of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder.

Gisburg is a singer/ composer from Salzburg, Austria.
She has toured around the world as a concert singer for
new music theater with Dieter Schnebel and his vocal group:
Die Maulwerker.  1985 until 1992 she lived in Berlin where
she attended the Berlin University as a guest student for
composition and modern music theatre with Prof. Dieter
Schnebel and Prof. Witold Szalonek and for visual arts with
Eva Maria Schön.

Settling down in NYC in 1992 she recorded 3 CDs with her
own composition on John Zorn’s label Tzadik.  She received
composition grants from the state of Austria, the City of
Vienna and Salzburg, and the CCP grant from American
Composers Forum, and the Jerome Foundation.  She is a
member and assistant conductor for the Chinese Hai-Tien
choir with Mrs. Pi-Chu Hsiao and recorded with Gary Lucas
Chinese pop music of the 30’s and 50’s for label blue.  She
also worked as a sound and music editor for film with
directors such as Woody Allen, Abigail Child, Ethan Coen,
Robert Duvall, Ann Hui, and Rob Marshall.  With Phil Painson
she founded the experimental trip hop band Douce which
released recently their first sound track CD High Life on GP
Music.

Moth is Sam Hillmer (Zs, Wet Ink) on tenor saxophone, and
Ben Gerstein (Matt Maneri, Tony Malaby) on trombone. Sam
and Ben have been playing together since 1998.

"Their improvisations bring angular modernistic harmonic
material to an aesthetic reminiscent of early twentieth
century field recordings of eastern european folk music
while engaging noise music and free jazz equally."

Labyrinthine and florid melodies streaming over alien funk
counterpoint make the ecstatic music of Blarvuster, the latest
brainchild of critically acclaimed bagpiper/composer Matthew
Welch. Inspired equally by Celtic lines and South East Asian
ensemble textures as well as avant-garde rock and
minimalism, Blarvuster's line-up of some of the brightest
young stars in the New York experimental scene ardently
evoke a seamless hybrid of musical languages that issues
forth its own fictional tradition.

"The Brooklyn-based composer leaps vast geographical
distances, imagining statistically implausible musical
melting pots that sound utterly natural...a composer
possessed of both rich imagination and the skill to bring
his fancies to life."
- TimeOut NY

Mon 28 August - with ICE
(International Contemporary Ensemble)
ICE will perform works by Cage, Andriessen, Xenakis and
Du Yun. ICE was founded in 2001, and has rapidly
established itself as one of the leading new-music ensembles
of its generation, winning first prize in the 2005 CMA/ASCAP
Awards for Adventurous Programming, and performing over
forty concerts a year in the United States and abroad. A
champion of music by emerging composers, ICE has given
over 200 world premieres to date, and has performed the
music of young composers from 15 different countries.
ICE will perform this season at Merkin Concert Hall in New
York City, at the Chicago Cultural Center, on the CAL
Performances Series in San Francisco, and on tour in Mexico,
Ecuador, Poland and China. The ensemble will release two
commercial CDs in 2006, on the Bridge Records and Naxos
Records labels.

Mon 11 September - with David Linton & Unity Gain
If TV is a zoo, then the a/v collective Unity Gain is the real
wilderness. Abstract, specific, loud, soft, fast, meditative -
the process reveals and creates worlds within worlds
within worlds. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction
never had such liveliness. Here individual performers are
woven into a gestalt of all things media (complete with
advertising and branding). While they borrow some of the
battling lingo of DJ culture (sound provider versus image
maker) which of course goes back into jazz and the dozens,
they really don't square off. UG is most interestingly a group,
or more accurately a kind of environment.

FEATURING LIVE AUDIO TAG TEAMS:
David Linton and Charles Cohen
O.Blaat and Sawako
Zach Layton and Bruce Tovsky
David Last and Nicholas Sauzer
Bubblyfish and Glomag
Honeychild and DJ Olive the Audio Janitor

REAL TIME VIDEO MIX
Luke Dubois
CHiKA
Lu(x)z
SEEj
Adam Kendall
Peter Shapiro
c.h.i.a.k.i 

Mon 18 September - with Ignivomous presents the AV Geeks
"School-a-delic", LoVid and the Found Footage Festival.
The Found Footage Festival is a one-of-a-kind event that
compiles over an hour's worth of footage from videotapes
that were found at garage sales and thrift stores, and in
warehouses and trash bins throughout the country.
Curators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher host each screening
in-person and provide their unique observations and
commentary on these found video obscurities. From the
curiously-produced industrial training video to the
forsaken home movie donated to Goodwill, the Found
Footage Festival resurrects these forgotten treasures and
serves them up in a lively 90-minute celebration of all things
found.

AV Geeks: "School-a-delic" School films that aren't about
hallucinogenic drugs, but were certainly influenced by them.
Films include: *200, Toes Tell, Toothache of a Clown, Fantasy
of Feet, Malakapalakadoo Skip Two, Replay, The Eyes Have..
Or Do They? *and more!Skip Elsheimer, 39, spends most of
time and money collecting, archiving and presenting old
16mm educational films. What started as a hobby more than
ten years, the collection has grown to over 18,000 films
gathered from school auctions, thrift stores, closets and
dumpsters. Skip purchased an old boarding house with eight
bedrooms - five of which are filled with films. He presents
monthly themed film shows in his home base of Raleigh, NC
and Durham, NC - shows like "Anatomy of a Brat!" -
a collection of films showing early brat development and how
to prevent it; or "Televised Teen Traumas" - a showcase of
ABC Afterschool Specials. Recently, he's taken his shows
on the road to Boston's Coolidge Cinema, New York's
Anthology Film Archives and New York's American Museum
of the Moving Image, where he did an eight show
retrospective. Films from his archive have been released on
several DVDs - "Social Engineering 101", "Sex and Drugs",
"On the Job" and "Driver's Ed".

Mon 25 September - with S.E.M. Ensemble
9PM START FOR THIS SHOW ONLY
"S.E.M. Ensemble: flexibility, freedom from preconceptions,
and fearlessly intrepid." – Elliott Sharp

The S.E.M. Ensemble is dedicated to the performance and
advancement of new music with a focus on works that can
best be described as post-Cagean. Since 1970, S.E.M. has
collaborated with such composers as Earle Brown, John
Cage, Alvin Lucier, Morton Feldman, Leroy Jenkins, Pauline
Oliveros, Jackson Mac Low, Phill Niblock, David Tudor, and
Christian Wolff.

"Petr Kotik is fond of programming older music alongside the
bracingly new, finding shortcuts and back alleys that link the
antediluvian with the anti-establishment."
- The New York Times, March 2005