Catherine Sikora and Brian Chase with Brian Mooney

Catherine Sikora and Brian Chase with Brian Mooney

Sunday, 7 April 2019, 8.00pm

Note Productions present
CATHERINE SIKORA AND BRIAN CHASE
with Brian Mooney
(Dublin gig only)

Irish Tour

Wed 3rd April: The Spirit Store, Dundalk. 8pm €12 www.spiritstore.ie/bios/catherine_sikora_brian_chase_biog.html

Thurs 4th April: Sonic Lab, Queens Uni, Belfast. 1.00pm free www.qub.ac.uk/sarc/events/4AprilCatherineSikoraBrianChase.html

Thurs 4th April: The Sofa Sessions at The Hole in the Wall, Kilkenny. 8:30pm free https://www.facebook.com/sofasessionskilkenny/

Fri 5th April: Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh. 8pm. €12 www.siriusartscentre.ie/music/catherine-sikora-brian-chase

Sat 6th April: Visual Carlow. 8pm €12/ €10 www.visualcarlow.ie/events/info/catherine-sikora-and-brian-chase-untitled-after

The Fumbally Stables, Dublin 8
Sunday 7th April
8pm
Tickets: 18 a/v from www.tickets.ie

Following on from their superb performance last year as part of the Spectrum festival, Note are very happy to present the powerful duo of Irish saxophonist Catherine Sikora and acclaimed American drummer Brian Chase (best known as a member of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) with their Irish tour of their new album untitled: after (Chaikin Records).

This is a pairing of two distinguished voices working at the forefront of modern experimental music. Collectively they have performed with luminaries such as John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Anthony Coleman, and Eric Mingus, among more.

The duo of CATHERINE SIKORA (Eric Mingus, Elliott Sharp) and BRIAN CHASE (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, John Zorn) steps forth with music merging the lyrical and the abstract, the spontaneous and the composed, and the expressive with the restrained. For their debut album, untitled: after, Catherine and Brian turned to the epic poem Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation) for inspiration. The classic text’s themes of fearlessness, battle, and courage proved to be analogous to current life experience, and were channelled into compositions as a basis for improvisation. Think John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space meets epic poetry as depicted in an adaptation for film.

Saxophonist, improviser and composer Catherine Sikora was born and raised in West Cork, Ireland. Self-taught to begin with, she moved to New York City to study and play with great improvisers. Sikora works in a broad range of settings, from highly complex composed music, to folk songs, to free improvisation. Her regular collaborations include those with Eric Mingus, Enrique Haneine, Brian Chase, Han-earl Park, Stanley Zappa, Christopher Culpo and Ross Hammond, as well as actively pursuing solo performance. In the past few years, she has toured in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. As an international artist, Sikora was a featured soloist in Eric Mingus’ radical reimagining of Tommy by the Who presented at Australia’s Adelaide Festival in 2015, and was artist-in
residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris for the fall of 2014 working on a project inspired by stories from her female ancestors. Catherine’s first solo album ‘Jersey’ was released on Relative Pitch Records in July 2016

Brian Chase is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. His diverse range of work includes that with Grammy nominated rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the community of the New York experimental music scene, and his solo project Drums & Drones. Performances have taken him across the world to the Sydney Opera House (with Karen O’s Stop the Virgens and Nick Zinner’s 41 Strings), UK’s Reading and Leeds Festivals (with Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Toronto’s X Avant Festival (with Drums and Drones), and throughout NYC to such notable venues as The Stone, Pioneer Works, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In June of 2018, Brian launched his own record label, Chaikin Records. The first release was a triple album and 144 page book celebrating the first ten years of Drums and Drones. Artist residencies have been held at John Zorn’s venue The Stone in NYC and at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California. For the fall of 2017, Brian was a visiting professor at Bennington University.

Visit www.chaikinrecords.com for more info.

Praise for Catherine Sikora and Brian Chase’s untitled: after-

” These noble musicians have performed courageous deeds on this fantastic album. To them we should submit and yield tribute.” DownBeat Magazine

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Published by Journal of Music on 31 March 2019

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