Text Landscapes is a new project by poet/composer Tanner Menard and ambient artist/label owner Andrew Weathers.
Following Menard's recent release 'Deepest Indigo' on Weather's label Full Spectrum Records the artists decided to pursue a new and unusual collaboration. Text Landscapes seamlessly weaves Menard's poetry and Weather's ambient music in a surrealist drone of image and sonority. Combining the ambient folk style of Weather's guitar drones with Menard's poetry, the work is a medium for abstract Indigenous story telling.
Playing on themes of twenty first century indigeneity, queer spirituality, and transcending generational trauma, the work is both subversive and healing. In an increasingly hostile and unpredictable world the Text Landscapes creates a space for addressing contemporary issues in a dreamlike setting where complex paradoxes are resolved in a whisper. This work is the medicine of sonority and a poetic landscape for healing our shared ancestral trauma.
About Tanner Menard:
Tanner Menard is a poet and composer whose current work reflects his mixed Indigenous and Acadian ancestry. His ancestry includes descendants of the Acadian settlers as well as multiple indigenous lineages such as Atakapa/Ishak and Mi'kmaq as well as other tribes that he has yet to concretely identify. His current foray into the world of performance art and literature reflect his desire to tell the story of his DNA in a multidimensional, hybrid/indigenous/Metis twenty first century language.
As a composer, Menard has been published and anthologized in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan on labels and net labels such as Full Spectrum Records, Rural Colours, Tokyo Droning, Install, Slow Flow Rec, H.L.M., Archaic Horizon, Kafua Records and Milieu Music. He has collaborated with artists the world over and was known for his Remix of Robert Rich’s sleep concert concept. Additionally, his contemporary classical music has been performed and recorded internationally in venues such as Symphony Hall in Chicago at Universities such as Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, Auburn University, the University of Wisconsin Whitewater and California State University Stanislaus. Menard served as visiting artists at Arizona State University and California State University Stanislaus and has shared stages with composers such as John Corigliano, Michael Daugherty and Daniel Bernard Roumain. Menard's poetry will be featured in an upcoming print publication in Red Ink Magazine.
About Andrew Weathers:
Andrew Weathers (b.1988) is a young American composer and improviser originally from Chapel Hill, NC currently based in Littlefield, TX. His music exists in a space between improvisation and composition—equally influenced by the 20th century American minimalists and underground noise. He has a BM in Music Composition from the University of North Carolina—Greensboro, and an MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College.
Andrew performs rigorously in a variety of contexts, both composed and improvised. In addition to solo performances, he heads up the Andrew Weathers Ensemble and the Real Life Rock and Roll Band. He also performs and records regularly with Tethers, Parties, Talk More, and Common Eider, King Eider. In the past, he has performed with Kurvan Choir, Northern Valentine, Tatsuya Nakatani, Laurent Estoppey, and Hal McGee, among others. In addition to his busy performing schedule, Weathers helps run Full Spectrum Records and works as a freelance mixing and mastering engineer.
Andrew Weathers and Tanner Menard will perform at the New Orleans Jazz Museum on Tuesday, June 6 at 7pm. Tickets are $10.50, available at the door (cash) or online.