Wilfrido Terrazas + Ronnie Yates, Eli Klausner
an evening of improvisation with sound, poetry, and hand-built instruments
Saturday February 21st
doors at 7:30pm | performance at 8:00pm
$15 general tickets | FREE student tickets with ID
Improviser Wilfrido Terrazas and poet Ronnie Yates met for the first time in 2011, during an artistic residency in Florida, where they worked with the legendary Roscoe Mitchell. They have collaborated in various ways ever since, but this is their first live collaboration, exploring the liminal terrain where language becomes sound and sound becomes narrative. Terrazas’s music, deeply shaped by the poetry scene of Mexico City, intersects with Yates’s verse, which has been equally influenced by Houston’s experimental music community. Together, they create an adventurous dialogue of words and sound, improvising across traditions and geographies in real time.
Eli Klausner has always fostered a close connection between his improvisational compositional practices, seeking to constantly renew his relationship with everyday materials, objects and gestures. He will be playing a new set up he has developed of strings and wires of different materials, stretched across a frame, activated by spinning dc motors.
Wilfrido Terrazas
Wilfrido Terrazas is a flutist, improviser, composer, and educator based in San Diego, originally from Ensenada, Mexico. His work explores the edges of notation, improvisation, and collective creativity. He has premiered over 400 works, composed more than 80, and recorded 60+ albums released internationally. Wilfrido has appeared at leading festivals and venues across 22 countries, he is a core member of Liminar and Generación Espontánea, two of Mexico City’s leading experimental music collectives, and co-organizes the Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada. Since 2017, he has been a professor of music at the University of California San Diego.
Ronnie Yates
Ronnie Yates is a Houston-based writer, musician, and performer. His poems, fiction, and art writing have been published in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Bomblog, Verse Daily, Glasstire, and elsewhere. He performs with the Nameless Sound Ensemble (Houston, TX), the improvised music group New Factories (guitar) and the improv rock band Snowflake (text, poetry). His most recent work includes a recording and performance for The Suzanne Langille Songbook (Artist Space, NYC).
Eli Klausner
Eli Klausner is a Los Angeles based composer and improviser who works through symbols, fantasy and surrealism to make solo and chamber works, often for multimedia performance. In performance, he synthesizes diverse practices, from baroque counterpoint to free improvisation on both traditional and hand-built instruments. He is one-half of the duo deathflavorkiss and co-founder/Executive Director of Oracle Egg, an artist-run incubator in downtown LA. Eli also specializes in documenting live performance for the experimental music and art scene.