Marshall Trammell / Tashi Dorji / Aaron Turner

January 28, 2022 The Lab, San Francisco Oakland-based, CA, Marshall Trammell is a composer, archivist, sound installation designer, percussionist and self-styled Music Research Strategist. development. He performs with In Defense of Memory, with Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) & Carlos Santistevan (mestizo), White People Killed Them with Raven Chacon (Navajo) & John Dietrich (white), and with Aaron Turner (white) & Tashi Dorji (Bhutan). Known for past projects such as Mutual Aid Project, Black Spirituals, has worked with David Murray, Pauline Oliveros, India Cooke, Roscoe Mitchell, Joe MacPhee, Saul Williams, Lisa E. Harris, Genny LIm, Francis Wong, John Jang, Susan Alcorn, Daniel Carter, Ada Pinkston, Luke Stewart, Jamal Moore, Kade Twist, Bruce Ackely, Thurston Moore and others. Productions include the commissioned premiere of “The Moon Is Down: The Status Quo Is My Enemy” for the Borealis Festival (Bergen, Norway) in March 2022, “Eleven Postures: for Burn the Temples/Break Up Bells” (Borealis premiere:film), directed by Matt Volla, and “Eleven Postures’’ (audio) produced by Jacob Felix Huele on SIGE Records (Seattle). Guitarist Tashi Dorji grew up in Bhutan, South Asia, and in 2000 moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to attend college. Shortly afterwards he fell in with a community of anarchist punks, and while the music he plays has changed since then, his use of it to express anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist sentiment has not. Dorji had not been improvising for very long before he made his first cassette in 2009. Following the release of a self-titled debut LP via Ben Chasny’s Hermit Hut imprint, he began touring the USA and Europe, often playing blazing electric music quite a bit louder than his early acoustic experiments. Dorji’s most enduring associations to date have been with the percussionists Thom Nguyen (in the duo Manas) and Tyler Damon, and saxophonists Dave Rempis (who joins Damon and Dorji in the trio Kuzu) and Mette Rasmussen. Aaron Turner is a musician and artist based in Vashon, WA, publicly active since 1995. He is most widely recognized for his role as a founding member of the metal bands SUMAC and Isis, snd has also participated in projects such as House of Low Culture, Pharaoh Overlord, Old Man Gloom, and Mamiffer. Active primarily as a guitarist, he has maintained an abiding interest in tethering conscious content to subverted uses of the instrument. His output has been informed by lifetime involvement with underground metal/punk, often materializing in highly abstracted forms utilizing improvisation and longform composition. He has collaborated with artists such as Tashi Dorji, Masami Akita, Caspar Brötzmann, Keiji Haino, Daniel Menche, Marshall Trammell, Stephen O’Malley, Kevin Martin/The Bug, Heather Leigh and many others. Turner is the founder/art director of Hydra Head Records, and more recently the co-founder SIGE Records with partner Faith Coloccia. Current projects include ongoing work with the bands SUMAC, Mamiffer and Old Man Gloom, as well as solo performances/recordings, and collaborations with Jon Mueller and Jussi Lehtisalo of Circle. An album of solo guitar material will be released by Trost records in 2022.