RPM Orchestra is a Phoenix-based Proto-Industrial Americana act, best known locally for its ongoing silent movie/live film score series (incl. Tod Browning's The Unknown, D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms) screened/scored live at downtown's FilmBar theater. The orchestra's music also enjoys airplay on freeform radio stations, including Radio Panik (105.4FM, Brussels) and WFMU (91.1FM, NJ).
https://www.facebook.com/rpmorchestra
http://soundcloud.com/rpm-orchestra
The D&SPAIR Club
The D&SPAIR Club (dance & sonic performance art improvisation research) is an experimental movement and sound improvisation collage comprised of four interdisciplinary artists working in movement, sound art, and technology. The members bring individual interests into a space, push them around, and see what collides, what sticks, and what remains. TDC offers workshops and tours the west coast and southwest.Julie Cruse directs movement, with untrained and trained 'dancers'. This ensemble is a platform to troubleshoot the body in dimensions of sound, space, gravity, emotion, and body-y-body.Courtney Brown directs sound. She is a composer/performer interested in exploring the intersection between movement and music, the consequences of being an embodied performer with limitations, with a background in classical and avant-garde music as well as Argentine Tango. Brent Brimhall dances, bringing a movement vocabulary based in martial arts, yoga, and Argentine Tango. Julie Akerly is a dancer and innovative choreographer with experience in a multitude of dance disciplines and history.
Courtney Brown
Courtney Brown is a composer, performer, tango dancer, and software developer. She has long harbored aspirations of becoming an Edward Gorey heroine, but her attempts have thus far been foiled. In lieu of her unlikely but tragic demise, she makes strange dark music and fiddles with electronics. Her most current work is the recreation of the sounding apparatus of the hadrosaur Corythosaurus, which is hypothesized to use its hollow crest as a resonating chamber for its calls. Her work ranges from the composition of instrumental music to the creation of musical robots and novel interfaces. She has been featured in many festivals / conferences in the U.S. including the Chosen Vale Trumpet Seminar, SEAMUS, NYCEAMF, Dartmouth Festival of the New Musics, Vox Novus' 60X60, and she has toured her solo cabaret, Every Night I Lose Control, throughout the east coast including The Tank in NYC, the Red Room in Baltimore, and more. She founded and curated the performance series Sidewalk Tzara in Boston in 2008-9. She also founded and performed accordion, voice, guitar, and live electronics with the experimental groups Electrocab and The Woo Brown Duo. She has collaborated with many dancers an choreographers, including Nu Dance Theater, Insurgio Stage Project, and her current ensemble, The D&spair Club. She was an associate artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts, as well as the software developer for the audio engine of DJ Scratch Academy's Mix, software for amateur DJs and beat-matching. She is a graduate of Dartmouth’s Electro-Acoustic Master’s Program and holds a B.S. in Music (concentration in soprano voice) and Computer Science from Loyola University New Orleans. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Music composition with a concentration in Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University.
Alternative Tango Milonga
Selections from modern tango orchestras (eg. Orquesta El Arranque) , non-traditional music (eg., Yann Tiersen), sprinkled with Golden Age Era favorites like (eg. Gardel & Pugliese), nuevo tango (Piazzolla) and electro-tango (Gotan Project). Interactive video installation during part of the milonga. Short lesson for beginners in the back after the performances.