Tim Russell, Kenneth Tarek Sabbar, Thomas Wincek

media release: Auricle, the experimental sound and music series at Arts + Literature Laboratory, presents a multi-performer Synth Night to celebrate all of the possibilities of the synthesizer on Friday, December 8 at 7:00pm.

We're living in a golden age of music synthesis so let's indulge in some of the best synth-performance to be had in the local area. Third artist to be named soon.

Tim Russell lives at the confluence of the aural and the visual. He currently serves as Music Director for the University of Wisconsin’s Dance Department. In 2019, Tim was selected as one of the Cowles Visiting Artists at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, a first for a Musician in the field of Dance. He has a vast catalogue of works specifically for choreography, most of which exist live, in collaboration with movement. His commitment to the nowness in performance led him to co-create/curate, along with choreographer Maria Gillespie, Hyperlocal MKE, a Music and Dance improvisation series that exists to this day in Milwaukee. His current curatorial project: Common Sage Arts, promotes multidisciplinary artists through carefully curated performances. Along with Tim’s long time collaboration with the Gerald Casel Dance Company, his audio shares the stage with a vast array of choreographic artists bringing Tim and his music across the world from Dock 11 in Berlin to YBCA in San Francisco. He holds an MFA in Music Improvisation from Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied improvisation, electronic music and composition with the likes of Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell and Zeena Parkins. www.avoidancepolicy.com Kenneth Tarek Sabbar is a Moroccan-American audio/visual artist born in Kenosha, WI. His body of works covers of range of approaches—looping analog tape, techno constructed through modular synthesis, live-coding generative ambience, or granular resynthesis of recorded acoustic instruments. Though disparate in his process over the years, the through-line is a careful construction of detailed textures—a “loud softness” that can be both confrontational but also demanding of a closer listen or look.

Thomas Wincek operates in a number of disparate projects, usually behind a keyboard with any number of synthesizers and effects alongside him. As a member of indie projects Field Report and Volcano Choir—both of which boast several standout Wisconsin musicians—Wincek might contribute a melodic keyboard line, often adding electronic textures and sonic intricacies that push these projects beyond songwriting and musicianship. Under the moniker Emotional Joystick, Wincek has recorded a catalogue of breakbeat-centered electronic music—an erratic, unhinged take on EBM. But on his latest self-titled release, The Desert Of The Real Itself, Wincek stretches his compositional plane into two thirty-minute sides, centering Korg Wavestations, sequencers, and vocal processors reminiscent of kosmische minimalism mixed in with '80s synth programming. - Emili Earhart