Charmaine Lee / John Wiese (solo sets)

Charmaine Lee

Charmaine Lee is a New York-based vocalist. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, id m theft able, C. Spencer Yeh, and Ikue Mori, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. She has performed at ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, the Stone, and MoMA PS1, and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies, Huddersfield Contemporary, and Ende Tymes. She has been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). In 2019, she was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Charmaine is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Sound American.

John Wiese

John Wiese is an artist and composer who worked for many years in Los Angeles, CA, and now is based in Cleveland, OH. He is a native of St. Louis, where as a young teenager he began experiments with home-recording on a cassette 4-track. He has since solidified his name as a prolific performer and recording artist, with expertise in composition, texture, and sonic experimentation. Wiese says he doesn’t really think of himself as a musician in the traditional sense, and instead of writing purely notated music he works with manipulating, cutting and arranging sounds electronically. The end product is more like a meticulous collage, built upon dense, nuanced sounds ranging from the minimal to the frenetic.

His collaborators include Evan Parker, Aaron Dilloway, members of LAFMS (LA Free Music Society), and Merzbow, amongst many many others.