FIREHOUSE PRESENTS! Aura Gaze and Reign of Ferns

Join us in the Firehouse Theatre at 2:30 p.m. for an afternoon of ambient, surrealist soundscapes from Brandon Blair of Aura Gaze; Andrew Weathers and Ryan J Raffa of Reign of Ferns, experimental sound artists.

Aura Gaza (Brandon Blair) Aura Gaze is an immersive, multisensorial sound project performed by musician, Brandon Blair. Blair, based in Lubbock, TX, creates ambient sound by generative looping electric and acoustic instruments, in both live and studio improvisations. Drawing upon Eastern mysticism and meditation, Aura Gaze seeks to transport and calm the listener through layers of hypnotic drones.

Reign of Ferns (Andrew Weathers and Ryan J Raffa) Andrew Weathers (1988) is a composer and improviser based in the Llano Estacado region of northwestern Texas. His work is equally concerned with the disjunction of duration and place, as well as improvisation’s prospect as a vessel of discovery and collective practice. His projects and performances span the idioms of field recording, prepared guitar, surrealist soundscape, and minimalist composition rooted in repetition and drone. Apart from his longtime commitment to collaboration alongside a wide swath of figures inhabiting the sonic underground, Weathers is founder and operator of Full Spectrum Records, which has continued to release the works of sundry sound artists and experimental musicians since its inception in 2008 in his home state of North Carolina. On top of frequent credits as a mixing and mastering engineer, he has also produced various projects for Other Minds Records and Rural Situationism.

Ryan J Raffa is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound and image. They explore personal geographies, collective memory, and transformation through improvisation. Ryan has exhibited work and performed live throughout the US and Asia, including CultureHub/La MaMa Galleria, Aronson Gallery, Temp Art Space, Mozilla, SIGGRAPH, ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition at High Museum, Critical Themes at SVA, Tobira Records, Art21, KEXP and NPR. Recent solo works include the albums 4 e and a (Group Tightener) and We Have Always Existed (Aural Canyon) as well as collaborative works with Nico Rosenberg, On Thin Air (Muzan Editions), and with Andrew Weathers as Reign of Ferns on Mirrored Hope (Aural Canyon). After touring as a musician for well over two decades and teaching creative technology and writing curriculum for the Art, Media and Technology Department at Parsons School of Design for 7 years, Ryan now resides with his family in Taipei, Taiwan.

https://linktr.ee/rjraffa

https://instagram.com/rjraffa

https://rjraffa.bandcamp.com/