Alejandro Acierto: “This wild tongue” “all that remains” & New Work, with Roger Green: Performance, March 22, 2014
Counterpath hosted Alejandro T. Acierto and Roger Green on Saturday, March 22, at 7 p.m.
Roger Green lives in Denver working as a musician and professor. He is a former guitarist for The Czars with whom he helped produce Goodbye and The Ugly People vs. The Beautiful People (Bella Union). His 2011 album, Harder to Tell, recevied 4 stars in Uncut Magazine. In addition to his own albums, he has produced and played guitar albums for Denver songwriters Joe Sampson (Kill Our Friends) and Esmé Patterson (All Princes, I). Often collaborating across mediums, he has been comissioned to write compositions for typwriters, soundtracks to novels, and music for visual artist Nick Cave’s dance Heard, perormed in Civic Center park last summer. His guitar work also appears on Porlolo’s Meadows and rumpeter Ron Miles’s Blossom. He has recently collaborated with Colorado writers such as Anne Waldman, Eleni Sikelianos, Laird Hunt, and Selah Saterstrom, as well as punk photographer, Richard Peterson. He will be at the Walnut Room on May 8th with Patrick Park and Porlolo to celebrate this release.
Alejandro Acierto will perform three pieces: “This wild tongue,” “all that remains,” and a new work. These works consider the voice as a central subject for thinking about the body, presence, and its significations. Surrounding ideas about language, communication, and presence, these pieces are both musical and performative. This wild tongue considers the phenomena of aphasia to push the voice to incomprehensible points of frustration. In all that remains, Acierto draws from vocal exhaustion and the breath as a central point of departure, while a new work will focus on how the phone (as a somewhat extinct technology) has shifted in its social use to be part of a series of (mis)communications.
Alejandro T. Acierto is a musician and interdisciplinary artist whose innovative work in contemporary music, performance art, and art installation has led Time-Out New York to call him a “maverick.” He employs a multi-media aesthetic integrating music, sound, performance, and installation that explores notions of fluid identities and the slippages of cultural definitions. His musical works have been performed by International Contemporary Ensemble, thingNY, Loadbang in New York, and Vox Humana in Montreal. He had his first solo exhibition at Untitled Gallery at Marwen in Chicago and has exhibited installations and performance works at the Arts in Bushwick SITEFEST in Brooklyn, as part of the New Voices In Live Performance show at the Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival (BIPAF), and at the Color Field Festival in Madison. His work has also been exhibited in group shows in LA, San Fransisco, New York, and Detroit. His performance works have been published in Emergency Index, an annual publication of performance art and in Trifecta Publishing’s premiere art box publication. Acierto has attended residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Banff Centre in Canada, and High Concept Laboratories in Chicago.
An avid performer of contemporary classical music, he is also a founding member of Ensemble Dal Niente with whom he was awarded the Kranichsteiner Music Prize for Interpretation at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. He can be heard on Carrier, Albany, Avant Media, and Parlour Tapes+ Records, and recently released a solo album of works for voice and contrabass clarinet on Prom Night Records. Acierto holds a Masters’ degree in Contemporary Performance from Manhattan School of Music and received Bachelors’ degrees in clarinet performance and composition from DePaul University. He currently works and resides in Chicago where he is completing his MFA in New Media Arts at University of Illinois at Chicago.
(Photo by Colleen Keihm)