| Profile: Delicate Monster | |
Four legs and two voices: a most delicate monster! Shakespeare, The Tempest. Both Art Cohen (guitar) and Steve Bowman (synths) love to argue about what makes good music. They argue with each other and with anybody else who feels passionate about music. Through musical performances as Delicate Monster, they make their arguments in sound. Cohen and Bowman agree that music created in the flow of the moment is the ultimate experience - tempered by the paradox that structure and planning are necessary to keep the music real. They agree that music is about ideas, not covering other artists or showing off technology.
Delicate Monster leads the listener through the paradoxes of musical language, from the delicate (open modal harmonies, tuneful melodies, precious sounds) to the monstrous (dissonance, brute cacophony, noise). When Cohen and Bowman disagree it is a consequence of their divergent musical backgrounds. Art Cohen is rooted in psychedelic guitar, Berlin-school spacemusic, and American folk. He has been a fixture on the Philly music scene for 30 years - and known to many as one half of The Ministry of Inside Things (with Chuck van Zyl). Steve Bowman has a degree in Music from Harvard, where he first encountered the venerable Buchla modular synthesizer. Bowman draws inspiration from classical music and radical composers like Ives, Stockhausen, Bach, Palestrina, and Ligeti. Art pushes Steve to create music that is clear and simple, to groove on repetition for its own sake - while Steve pushes Art to surrender to his weird side and luxuriate in complexity and dissonance. Playing together off and on for 20 years, Cohen and Bowman merge their stylistic differences into a kinky musical language that is Delicate Monster. Audiences share in the musical adventure as Art Cohen and Steve Bowman reach for the ultimate agreement - the magical space where two prepared and practiced musicians connect in musical conversation. | |
Delicate Monster - live on STAR'S END 30 January 2011 | |
Related Links:
| |
| Artists |
