tonight at the goethe-institut in boston!



Non-Event presents RENE HELL BLEVIN BLECTUM HOWARD STELZER
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02116
Doors: 7:30pm | Music: 8pm
Door (cash only!): $15 general admission/$10 members & students
Advance: $12 general admission/$8 members & students

RENE HELL is the synthesizer-based project of Jeff Witscher, a visual artist, avid chess player, and music obsessive, who has explored a variety of underground styles since his teens. His aesthetic choices, expressed over dozens of recordings released under many pseudonyms, have anticipated the shifts in U.S. experimental music spanning the last decade. Most recently, he received acclaim for synth albums Porcelain Opera and The Terminal Symphony (Type), a 2012 split release with Oneohtrix Point Never, and his newest recording, Vanilla Call Option (PAN). Witscher’s practice is peripatetic —- encompassing roving styles, changing monikers and wide-ranging influences. Travel is central to Vanilla Call Option, with its digital palette constructed on the move between airports, performance spaces, and public libraries, to evoke the musique concrète of Bernard Parmegiani and the computer music of Charles Dodge. He is currently based in Western Massachusetts.

BLEVIN BLECTUM (born Bevin Kelley) = polyphasic avitronic wordless sonic worldbuilding, sound vision costume object spectacle. Blevin is perhaps most infamously known as one half of the recently reformed and reunited groundbreaking digital duo Blectum From Blechdom (with Kevin Blechdom / Kristin Erickson), recipients of the 2001 Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Musics for their album "The Messy Jesse Fiesta". In 2013 she co-founded the electroacoustic-radioplayers The Traveling Bubble Ensemble with fellow sci-fi enthusiast and sibling Kelley Polar (Michael Kelley). Left to her own devices, Blevin produces turbulent electronics with a more oblique slant on the basic BFB sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, clanking, creaking grooves and anti-grooves as a coal-powered spacecraft from some poststeampunked parallel universe potentiality, puffing and straining as it struggles to reach escape velocity, conjured and bounced to the breaking/boiling point, generally fucked-with samples of everything from hand-slapped rain-drenched leaves in celestial courtship gardens and antique broken Beatnik banks to classic, utterly dancefloored, floridly dangerous disembodied-dismembered half-remembered vocals. She can be heard in radio plays, electronic toys, theater spaces, film/television scores, advertisements, clubs, concert halls, headphones, and galleries. She has releases on labels including Aagoo, Estuary Ltd., Tigerbeat6, DeluxeRecs, Praemedia, Vague Terrain, and Phthalo.

HOWARD STELZER has been composing music out of cassette tapes since 1997. He ran the Intransitive Recordings label until 2012. When he's not hunched over dusty tape machines, Stelzer teaches middle school math and science in Lowell, MA. He has recent releases on Phage Tapes, Obsolete Units, Dokuro, Copy For Your Records, Banned Productions, and Noise Below. A forthcoming album, The Case Against CD is due out shortly on Monotype.

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Boston Cultural Council, a local agency which is funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, administrated by the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism, and Special Events.
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