Nayantara Bhattacharya of Antumbrae Intermedia Events + Installations will be presenting an exciting group of musicians for the Blanton Museum’s  Beat the Rush series in conjunction with Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s currently on display starting at 5:30pm on Thursday, April 21st, 2016. The event is free. This month’s Beat The Rush edition features a set of performers whose work is activated by 90s musical aesthetics, culture, and geopolitics. 

The 1990s was a transgressive decade for music worldwide. It marked a dividing line between Top 100 mainstream production styles and revolutionary experimentation with a proliferation of sounds and technology.

The height of experimentation with new media was no more apparent than in electronic dance music or techno music; a subcultural movement started in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Detroit, Michigan. The phenomenon moved swiftly between clubs in North America, Europe, Asia and beyond. In early techno, the creative use of drum machines, synthesizers, and digital audio workstations was implemented by DJs. Their musical influences included African American music, Chicago house, funk, electro, electric jazz, electronic music from bands like Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra and Afrofuturism. The movement became an expression of life in late capitalist society, the struggle against socioeconomic conditions and political tensions. Techno music spilled into alternative subgenres over the decade and practices such as turntablism, IDM (intelligent dance music) and glitch aesthetics evolved. 
The artists featured in Beat The Rush have been invited to offer broad insights into techno, translating work into contemporary sound and new media art practices. Each set will be followed by an interview. 

Kyle Evans and Lucas Dimick explores narrative approaches to experimental electronic music and real-time video performance through animation, noise, and glitch aesthetics. Evans’ extensive background in experimental electronic music and new media art practice fuses with Dimick’s distinct animation and story telling method resulting in an expressive live performance employing original animated projections, lighting design, textural sound and voice-over narration. Through this aesthetic, the duo explores concepts ranging from modern Western militarization to planned obsolescence and technological waste.

Dylan John Cameron was born in Austin, Texas in 1985 and owned his first pair of turntables at the age of 13. Barely skinning his teeth as a DJ in the rave scene of the late 90’s, he channels the unfulfillable desires of the post-millennium into an amalgamation of heavily-modulated sounds drawing from the unexpected and convincing of the inconceivable.

Adam Pacione (1971, Detroit, Mi) is a composer and photographer living in Hurst, Texas. His work is mainly concerned with melancholic sounds within sounds, multiple layers of synthetic and natural sources built up on top of each other creating drones and at times auditory pareidolia. His instrument of choice is a Eurorack modular synthesizer, a form

Blanton Museum of Art: The University of Texas at Austin

200 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Austin, TX 78701
Thursday 21st April 2016
5.30pm- 6:30pm
FREE