Black Iris welcomes cellist Daniel Levin for a solo set in the Tiny Bar, September 18th.  Levin, touring in support of his upcoming album Living, has been developing his sonic vocabulary since the age of six when he began his training as a cellist. After graduating from the New England Conservatory Levin moved to New York and immersed himself in the jazz scene. His most recent work presents techniques that extend beyond the perimeters of jazz and new music by generating sound-scapes influenced by the ephemera encountered in everyday life. 

Richmond based sound-artists-experimenter David Moré will be opening the evening with his unique assemblages of objects + instruments that come together with orchestrated beauty and chaos.

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6-$10

Saturday, September 30, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

Rafael Toral: plays electronic music today as a jazz musician would play his instrument, applying jazz discipline and working practices to his abstract electronics. The result is truly evolutionary music, once described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers”. Melodic without notes, rhythmic without a beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free, it is riddled with interesting paradox.

Collaborations include Jim O’Rourke, Evan Parker, John Edwards, Joe Morris, Tatsuya Nakatani, Chris Corsano, Manuel Mota, David Toop, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, João Paulo Feliciano, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, C Spencer Yeh, Dean Roberts.  Since 2008 he directs the Space Collective, a slowly developing orchestral group.

David Dominique: is a composer, performer and music theorist living in Richmond, VA by way of Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, though not necessarily in that order. His compositional output includes contemporary chamber music, jazz, electroacoustic music, installation, rock and theater.

Much of his recent music has been written for a jazz octet, including Ritual, a collection of compositions for flute, violin, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto and bari sax, valve trombone, electric guitar, electronics, and rhythm section. The album was recorded in downtown LA with some of that city’s most accomplished improvisers and contemporary performers and has been widely-reviewed and praised. 

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Thursday, October 5, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

Jacob Wick: is a trumpet player and improviser. Originally from the suburbs of Chicago, Wick has lived in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Los Angeles, and has performed with a variety of improvisers and composers in a variety of contexts, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (US), the Moers Jazz Festival (DE), and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MX). He has performed with Toshimaru Nakamura, Bonnie Jones, Katherine Young, Andrew D'Angelo, Josh Roseman, and many others. He has released recordings on Prom Night Records (Brooklyn, NY), Peira (Chicago, IL), Diatribe (Dublin, IE), and Creative Sources (Lisbon, PT). He holds a BM from Purchase College, SUNY, and an MFA from the California College of the Arts.

In performance, Wick works to privilege the perspective, experience, and expressive capacities of ambient non-human actors—air ducts, airplanes, birds, cement—over his own experience as a white, cis, American male. This approach is indebted to a wild commitment to queer politics and years of cruising contemporary and 20th century art and/or life theories. Current projects include solo trumpet performance, listening and/or visualization exercises, and Dos/Tres Hongos, a duo or trio with Marc Riordan and Frank Rosaly.

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Saturday, October 21, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

Black Iris will be presenting a fresh collaboration between genre-evading guitarist Tashi Dorji and literary lyricist James Jackson Toth in the intimate setting of the Tiny Bar at Black Iris on October 21st.  This performance brings together Dorji and Toth's disparate styles to find commonalities informed by intimate experiences of life on the road as well as the stories and impulses that define the characters that populate the country surrounding it. 

Tashi Dorji: grew up in Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas. Residing in Asheville since 2000 and soaking up a vast array of music. Along the way, Dorji developed a playing style unbound by tradition, yet with a direct line to intuitive artistry. His recordings feature improvisations that spasmodically grow along tangential, surprising paths. All references break loose during a composition, as Dorji keys into his own inner world.

James Jackson Toth: Swans frontman and head of Young God Records Michael Gira stated, James Jackson Toth's “got that picaresque quality that Dylan had in his heyday, wherein the shambolic narrator undergoes various travails and epiphanies — harrowing, bleak and darkly comical — in the course of a narrative, then leaves you mystified, both smiling and sad.

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Thursday, October 26, 2017 | 7:30pm  10:30pm

(Voice and 16mm film projection)

The collaboration between Audrey Chen and Margaret Rorison works inside the intimate worlds of their maternal lines, as experienced through the myriad sounds of the human voice and 16mm film projection. Images and sounds captured in spaces brought together by their individual experiences of mother, daughter, granddaughter and how that affects their identities- and channels towards decision making, touch, habit, memory and language. 

Margaret Rorison: Margaret Rorison is a curator and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland. Her works often develop from explorations through rural and urban landscapes, combining language, sound and imagery to create installations, films and live 16mm projections. She is interested in the visceral nature of experience and the potentials of storytelling through the use of 16mm projection and sound, often sharing bills and collaborating with sound artists to explore new ways in which the image and machine can converse with sound and performance.

Audrey Chen: using the cello, voice and occasional analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of the homemade analog synthesizer, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language. Over the past decade, her predominant focus has been her solo work with the cello, voice and electronics, but she has more recently begun to shift back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument.

Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10 | Cash Bar

Dir. Hanns Walter Kornblum, Germany, 1925, 91 min., NR, Digital

In 1925, German director Hanns Walter Kornblum set out to create a film unlike any that had come before. His aim was a film that would serve as both a summation of all the astronomical knowledge available at the time and a dreamy investigation of what wonders might await humanity at the advent of space travel. With the help of 15 special effects technicians and nine cameramen, Kornblum's film is a technical marvel, one that revels in the beauty and mysteries of the universe, reminiscent of Carl Sagan's COSMOS more than 50 years later. Digital Restoration by Filmmuseum München.

About Coupler: Coupler is less a band than a creative organization.  Founded in 2011 by Lambchop veteran Ryan Norris, its core is Norris along with Rodrigo Avendaño and Rollum Haas though its membership has at points swelled to as many as eight.  At its root the project is an exercise in mutual cooperation of creative individuals and is an exploration of the intersections of man and machine, live and recorded, composed and improvised, stasis and flux.

November 16th | Doors 730pm | Show 8pm | $6 - $10