Trauermusik is a term used in German classical music from the 18th/19th century to the present. It translates, “funeral music” or “mourning music.”

This 3-day event is curated by Shoghig Halajian and Alex Black of eighteen-thirty, and HumanEar’s Jason Grier. We are excited to once again make possible a memorable event on the eighteen-thirty rooftop.

*SATURDAY, AUGUST 1ST - LONGING*
“The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.”

- Friedrich Nietzshce
Geneva Jacuzzi
Softboiled Eggies
Sister Mantos*
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SATURDAY, AUGUST 15TH - EXCESS*
“The ambiguity of this human life is really that of mad laughter and of sobbing tears. It comes from the difficulty of harmonizing reason’s calculations with these tears… with this horrible laugh… In the violence
of the overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy.”
- Georges Bataille

*Indian Jewelry
John Webster Johns
Julia Holter
Im Kino*
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SATURDAY, AUGUST 29TH - CONTENTMENT*
“I have found a definition of the beautiful. It is something intense and sad, something a bit vague… a contradictory impression of an ardor… and a desire for life together with a bitterness which flows back upon them as if from a sense of deprivation and hopelessness. I do not pretend that joy cannot associate with Beauty, but I will maintain that joy is one of her most vulgar adornments, while Melancholy may be called her illustrious spouse, so much so that I can scarcely conceive a type of beauty which has nothing to do with sorrow.”
- Charles Baudelaire

*William Basinski
Mark So
Jason Grier
Installation by Lucky Dragons*

About the Performers:

*ARIEL PINK*is considered the most original and controversial voice in new pop music. Throughout the first decade of the 2000’s, he baffled and enthralled fans and critics in equal numbers, amassing just enough fame and glory to somehow pull off the role of retiring sage well before the mid-career mark.

*GENEVA JACUZZI*, like many of her kindred spirits in LA’s “avant-pop” scene, obsessively renders a fantastical world of sound in an absurdly compressed medium: cassette tape. Where she stands apart is in the emotional depth, sonic inventiveness and sheer personality evinced in every second of her live performances.

*SOFTBOILED EGGIES’* Janet Kim and Ben White founded and led what might well turn out to be one of the most influential art spaces in millenneal Los Angeles. Over the course of it’s 3 years, their Tiny Creatures gallery de-balkanized a fragmented landscape. They accomplished the same in music with their effortless combination of lullaby, post-punk, and bubblegum.

*SISTER MANTOS* is an active and hyper-active proponent of underground experimental dance music. His high energy performances and fractured beats often belie his thorough grounding in installation, sculpture and performance art, and in LA’s ever-resplendent queer counterculture.

*INDIAN JEWELRY* are legendary performers and songwriters whose intense live performances straddle the divide between droning vision music and seizure-inducing stage show.

*JOHN WEBSTER JOHNS* is a remarkable and rare example of the uncompromising artist. His work traverses emotional songwriting and classical orchestration, precision and chaos, dissonance and consonance in a way that only truly visionary art can: by retaining what satisfies the purpose, and discarding the rest.

*JULIA HOLTER*, composer, songwriter, polymath and student of medieval psychology, is largely responsible for creating HumanEar. As comfortable composing delicately scored ensemble pieces as she is pop anthems, she possesses a graceful understanding of the unities underpinning orchestration and emotion in music.

*IM KINO* are two classically trained musicians who graduated from the Los Angeles County School of the Arts. As life-long friends, they collaborate on stage to combine classical composition with pop sensibility.

*WILLIAM BASINSKI* is an internationally acclaimed performer and composer in experimental electronic sound. His haunting, long-duration soundscapes portray decay, nostalgia and rejuvenation with a daring economy of means.

*MARK SO* is by far one of the most prolific and remarkable composers working in the experimental tradition traced back to John Cage and Erik Satie. His gorgeously simple scores marry extremes of silence and duration with the poetic and narrative power representative of a truly accomplished art.

*JASON GRIER*, composer, computer programmer, polymath and theorist, is largely responsible for creating HumanEar. He has been the central, nearly silent, figure behind a number of developments in LA independent music culture. His music, like all his projects, employs an odd mix of technology, logic and fascination with human will.

*LUCKY DRAGONS* are about the birthing of new and temporary creatures–equal-power situations in which audience members cooperate amongst themselves, building up fragile networks held together by such light
things as skin contact, unfamiliar language, temporary logic, the spirit of celebration, and things that work but you don’t know why.