heavy Denim, in collaboration with Improv_SA and Salon Mijangos, is proud to present a music and video performance by Giuseppe Ielasi, Micheala Grill, and Potter-Belmar Labs.

Giuseppe Ielasi (Milan, Italy) worked for many years in improvised music circles, collaborating with important musicians throughout the world, such as Dean Roberts, Taku Sugimoto, Phill Niblock, Oren Ambarchi (of Sunn O)))), and Brandon LaBelle. More recently, Ielasi has shifted his focus to site-specific solo performances, using guitars as primary sound sources by integrating microphones and multi-channel speaker systems in order to create complex networks for sound diffusion in relation to space. He has released solo albums on a number of record labels, including Erstwhile, Hapna, and Sedimental.

Ielasi’s “guitar playing is generous and rich even at its most minimal, yet he harbours great tension within phrases and chords, harnessing a sound that is as tense and mutable as it is melancholy and gorgeous” - Paris Transatlantic

Michaela Grill (Vienna, Austria) deconstructs footage of urban (and sometimes natural) environments to create beautiful, minimalist abstractions. Her video work has been featured at festivals including Cannes, New York Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and many others. She has installed her videos in many galleries throughout Europe and the United States, and regularly collaborates with musicians such as John Butcher, Toshimaru Nakamura, Martin Siewert, and others, creating visuals that “follow the logic of the acoustic blueprint to create new forms of hearing through the processing of the found sounds” (Christa Benzer).

When Leslie Raymond and Jason Jay Stevens perform together as Potter-Belmar Labs, they are conductors of cinema, live-mixing audio and video, weaving sampled media and original work, cut-up and stitched back together on the fly. It’s been called the storytelling of the future. Mark Wojahn, of City Club Cinema in Minneapolis says that PBL “blows away your expectations of new media.” They have performed and screened their video and sound work at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Milwaukee Underground Film Fest, the Sydney Film Festival, and numerous galleries across the United States, as well as in Australia and the Netherlands.