Lamplight AVL Presents: Drum Major Instinct x Kramer

Lamplight AVL invites you to Drop of Sun studios for a behind the scenes peak at a recording by Drum Major Instinct with special guest Kramer. A limited number of guests will sit quietly in the live room, on the mezzanine, or in the control room as Adam McDaniel tracks the band live for attendees to witness.

Lamplight AVL is an arts nonprofit based in Asheville, NC that provides space, time, and resources for artists to create work they share with our community. Lamplight AVL builds on our region’s rich legacy of supporting inventive, original art that bends genres, pushes boundaries, and moves the cultural conversation forward.

Drum Major Instinct is an experimental music duo from Asheville, North Carolina. Jeff Arnal plays (mostly) percussion and Curt Cloninger plays (mostly) modular synthesizer. The Wire describes Jeff's drumming as a "highly original concept" having "a balletic sense of time and imaginative deployment of colour;" and Byron Coley says Curt's modular synthesis "moves like blocks of radioactive adobe being shifted around by architects in space suits." But, of course, nothing is ever that straightforward. The resultant music is about waves of energy, patterns within patterns (within patterns), sounds from the natural world, and running the voodoo down.
Joining them for this exclusive, invitation-only live recording is the legendary Kramer.
As the founder of Shimmy-Disc, Kramer has been a key figure in the underground music scene, producing groundbreaking albums at his Noise New York and Noise New Jersey studios during the 1980s and '90s. His production work includes collaborations with iconic artists like Daniel Johnston, Galaxie 500, Half Japanese, Pussy Galore, Urge Overkill, Will Oldham, and LOW. Now living and working in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Kramer brings his polymathic artistry to this rare performance.
For more on Shimmy-Disc: shimmy-disc.com
More on DMI: https://lab404.com/dmi/index.html

Jeff Arnal is a percussionist and the Executive Director of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC. He has been active as an artist, curator, and community organizer since the 1990s. In 2002, he co-founded Improvised and Otherwise, an interdisciplinary festival for emerging artists in Brooklyn, NY. He has performed in a wide variety of concerts and festivals, including a series of duo concerts with Charles Gayle in 2002, a trio concert at the Vision Festival with John Dierker and Gordon Beeferman in 2008, and his percussion duo with Michael Evans, performed live on WFMU radio and at the Issue Project Room in 2009. His collaborations with choreographers have been produced at PS 122, Joyce SoHo, Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, The Chocolate Factory, and Judson Church. Arnal's music can be heard on a number of independent record labels, including Transit and Quadrologues with Seth Misterka, Reuben Radding, and Nate Wooley on Clean Feed, and Astral Chronology with John Dierker on Mahakala Music. In 2023, he toured and recorded in Germany and Lithuania with pianist Dietrich Eichmann. Arnal studied music with composer Stuart Saunders Smith and visionary artist Milford Graves and holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Maryland and an MFA in Music from Bennington College.

Listen to Jeff's 2021 radio interview with Mike Watt (Minutemen/Firehose) on the Watt from Pedro show.

Curt Cloninger is an artist, musician, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art uses an array of media combinations to undermine language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition and performance venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (Asheville), and the internet. Curt has been published on a range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, and network culture. His fifth and most recent book is entitled, Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art (Punctum Books, 2021). His essays have been published in Performance Research, Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, Textshop Experiments, and on ABC World News.

Curt's art, music, and writing may be accessed at lab404.com, playdamage.org, and deepyoung.org.

Host or Publisher Drop of Sun Studios