performance: Eris 136199 (Nick Didkovsky, Han-earl Park and Catherine Sikora) at The Brecht Forum, New York

Eris 136199 plays on the crossroads of noise, melody, rhythm, space, density, contrast, synchronicity, asymmetry, serendipity and contradiction. Eris 136199 is the noisy, unruly complexity of composer, computer artist and guitarist Nick Didkovsky, the corporeal, cyborg virtuosity of constructor and guitarist Han-earl Park, and the no-nonsense melodic logic of composer and saxophonist Catherine Sikora.

A composer who enjoys blurry boundaries, Nick Didkovsky founded the avant-rock big band Doctor Nerve, and is a member of Swim This with Gerry Hemingway and Michael Lytle. He is a pioneer of small-systems computer music, and has composed music for ensemble including Bang On A Can All-Stars and the California EAR Unit.

Described by Brian Morton as “a musical philosopher… a delightful shape-shifter”, Han-earl Park is drawn to real-time cyborg configurations in which artifacts and bodies collide. He has performed with some of the finest practitioners of improvised music, is part of Mathilde 253 with Charles Hayward and Ian Smith, and Numbers with Richard Barrett.

Catherine Sikora is “a free-blowing player’s player with a spectacular harmonic imagination and an evolved understanding of the tonal palette of the saxophone” (Chris Elliot, Seacoast Online). She has a long-standing duo project with Eric Mingus, and performs as part of ensembles led by Elliott Sharp, François Grillot and Matt Lavelle.

Together, Didkovsky, Park and Sikora forges an improvisative space where melody can be melody, noise can be noise, meter can be meter, metal becomes metal, bluegrass turns to bluegrass, jazz transforms into jazz, all there, all necessary without imploding under idiomatic pressures.