“TOTEM>’s modern partnership is perfect.” • “I guarantee you’ve never heard anything like the dense condensations Eisenbeil scrapes out of his strings -- not just creative, but exciting and musical.”
~ Greg Burke, Metal Jazz.com
“Beautiful sequences of shifting intersections. TOTEM> is one of the most musically integrated improvising units playing today and Solar Forge is an essential release.”
~ Stuart Broomer, Music Works 102; winter 2008
“Great art” • “An incredible listening experience” •
“Solar Forge scalds and sears with a white hot intensity.”
~ Budd Kopman, All About Jazz
“Solar Forge is an impressively intense guitar trio statement for the
first decade of the 21st century.”
~ Robert Iannapollo, Signal To Noise
“Something new” • “Modern” • “It's not pleasant to hear, but then again it's fun to listen to. The music is deeply emotional, but not always the emotions you would like. That's a strong achievement.”
~ Stefan Gijssels, freejazz-stef.blogspot.com
“Inhuman” • “Interesting contemporary artists”
~ David Grundy, Eartrip magazine
“Restored my faith in contemporary jazz.”
~ Brian Morton, Point Of Departure
“Wildly entertaining New York City based trio” • “Fast, furious and spiraling” •
“A continual sense of evolvement” • “Vivid imagery”
~ Glenn Astarita, EJAZZNEWS
“Very good” • “A Unique Nexus” • “Enjoyable”
~ Phil Freeman, The Wire
“Burns” • “A completely different way of perceiving music” • “Otherworldly listening experience” • “TOTEM> combines extended technique with advanced listening prowess to create textured sheets of sound. With moods ranging from thoughtful and pensive to blasphemous angst, Solar Forge can at times give the impression that the guys are dismantling their instruments with a set of needle-nose pliers and a ball peen hammer. If, however, you can focus on the musical interactions, there's a lot of beauty to be found right there in the middle of the molten chaos.”
~ Mark Saleski, Blogcritics.org
“A new sonic language” • “A clear and well articulated vision” • “The sonic envelope of this trio is actually infinite, as it moves in a vertical manner and surges inside its loose contours, horizontally.” • “Very impressive in its boldness, conviction and execution”
~ Eyal Hareuveni, All About Jazz
“A force of nature”
~ Vittorio LoConte, Music Boom(Italy)
“Gut punching whack jazz”
~ Pico, Blogritics.com
“Chaos with a strong sense of purpose”
~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide
“Audacious” • “Bold” • “The cutting edge of today's free improv avant garde”
~ Russ Musto,
“Vivid studio recording that kicks abstract ass”
~ Downtown Music Gallery, NYC
“Special and exciting” • “New Timbralism” • “A rare and wonderful achievement” •
“Ecstatic skittering grooves, accents shooting sparks into flammable phrases, Braxtonian parallelism, and all manner of original recipe joy juice spurting from the spigot.”
~ Michael Anton Parker, From the liner notes to SOLAR FORGE
”Remarkable” • "A distinctive voice. About as revolutionary as music can actually get."
~ The Wire
Bruce Eisenbeil is a composer, improviser, and guitar instrumentalist who has dedicated his life to the advancement of modern guitar techniques through the growth and evolution of modern improvised music. He has seven CD's released and has performed throughout the USA, Canada, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Brasil, and at many festivals. Eisenbeil has been living in New York City since 1995 and he has collaborated with many fine musicians including:
Cecil Taylor, David Murray, Milford Graves, Evan Parker, Ellery Eskelin, Andrew Cyrille, William Parker, Katsuyuki Itakura, Micheal Manring, Lukas Ligeti, Klaus Kugel, Shiro Onuma, Perry Robinson, Peter Evans, Rob Brown, Lou Grassi, Nate Wooley, Nasheet Waits and many others.
Some festivals where Eisenbeil has performed include:
2008 New Languages Festival(NYC),
2007 Edgefest (Ann Arbor, Michigan), 2006 Montreal Jazz Festival,
2006 Silent Art Festival(Bochum, Germany), 2005 Silent Art Festival(Cologne, Germany), 2001 Vision Festival, 1998 CMJ Music Conference, 1997 Texaco New York Jazz Festival, 1997 Buffalo Interprov Festival, 1997 Philadelphia Mellon Jazz Festival, 1997 Trenton Avant-garde Festival
1997 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, 1997 CMJ Music Conference
1996 Philadelphia PSFS-Mellon Jazz Festival
Eisenbeil's work has been featured with cover story’s in All About Jazz (west coast - November 2007) and CADENCE. He has been interviewed in AVANT(England). The readers and writers of Cadence Jazz Magazine voted his third CD, OPIUM, one of the top 10 new jazz releases of 2002.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY:
BRUCE EISENBEIL SEXTET - INNER CONSTELLATION (Nemu 007)
EISENBEIL / KUGEL PROJECT - CARNIVAL SKIN (Nemu 003)
BRUCE EISENBEIL QUARTET - OPIUM (CIMP 241)
BRUCE EISENBEIL'S CROSSCURRENT TRIO - MURAL (CIMP 194)
BRUCE EISENBEIL TRIO - NINE WINGS (CIMP 144)
STEPHEN FLINN TRIO - KEEP THE METER RUNNING (Nine Winds 0246)
STEVE SWELL'S PARTICLE DATA GROUP (Cadence 1139)
STATE OF THE UNION 2001 - Compiled by Elliott Sharp
TOM BLANCARTE--Tom Blancarte is a bassist, improvisor and composer living and working in New York City. He has performed his music across North America, Europe and Japan. His primary focus is on improvisational music and finding new roles for the bass in a variety of musical contexts. He is an active performer in a variety of ensembles in the New York area, his most active groups being the hyperactive duo Sparks with trumpeter Peter Evans, Dave Smith's Who Put The Bad Mouth On Me, and the Peter Evans Quartet.
Originally from Austin, Texas, he began playing electric bass as a teenager, falling in love with rock and metal music. He quickly found himself performing in many rock and blues bands in Austin, and soon after heard jazz and the upright bass, which is his primary instrument today. He received a Jazz Studies degree from the University of North Texas, where he studied with Jeff Bradetich and Lynn Seaton.
ANDREW DRURY--drummer/composer, mostly in free improvisation and jazz, sometimes in and around pop, klezmer, new music, performance art, street performance. He has toured in homeless shelters throughout Indiana, jammed with inmates in maximum security prisons in Connecticut, made a giant pachinko-like instrument with circular sawblades and marbles and played it with 10,000 people at the Seattle Children's Museum, performed and led workshops on Isla Ometepe, Nicaragua, and for six months in 2000 was artist-in-residence with the Oneida Nation on their reservation in Wisconsin. He has drummed on plastic buckets, screamed, and made faces with kids of all ages in over 700 workshops across the U.S., including five year olds with autism, 'at risk' teens throughout New York City, twenty something graduate students at the Columbia University School of Social Work, as well as 30 something to 70 something public school music teachers. A former student of Ed Blackwell, he can be heard on about 20 CDs and has worked in Europe and North America with artists such as Laura Andel, Dean Bowman, Taylor Ho Bynum, Sebastien Cirotteau, Michel Doneda, Mark Dresser, Marty Ehrlich, Peter Evans, Ken Filiano, Jason Kao Hwang, Jihae, Mazen Kerbaj, Eyvind Kang, Briggan Krauss, Adam Lane, Jessica Lurie, Wade Matthews, Myra Melford, Reuben Radding, Jane Rigler, Christine and Sharif Sehnaoui, Chris Speed, Nate Wooley, Jack Wright, Danijel Zezelj, and others.
DIATRIBES+JOAO PEDRO VIEGA+PAULO CURADO Travessia dos Respigadores freejazz/electroacoustic improv album on TEST TUBE netlabel music under CC by-nc-nd, copy & share it, thanks
thank you sooo much for allowing us to add you as a friend! i've been enjoying your SOLAR FORGE cd for a while now and would love to hear more cd's of TOTEM in the future!
Bruce- Thanks for the positivity. I'm working on pieces that feature trombone and violin and have a great trombone player, Dan Blacksberg, interested in playing the couple of compositions of which I gave him rough approximations. Very exciting. I'd like to see you, maybe get a lesson, this summer - will you be around?
Thanks for the comment, Bruce. More tracks on the way. I'm going to try to make it Thursday. The track on this profile is awesome! Looking forward to seeing you.
Online!
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