($10-$15 Tickets + DICE fees | 8:30pm Show) Space Travelers Union Presents: Cecyl Ruehlen
Cecyl Ruehlen (b.1984) is an intermedia artist, performer, educator and curator. While they have led a relatively nomadic life across the US, Ruehlen lives in the Sonoran Desert, morphing iterative actions, collaborative projects, objects and varying recording processes into topological contortions with an array of chimeric instruments and mercurial sound forms. Their forensic mode of composing is guided by deep listening and meteoric super-impositions that distort, abstract, decompose and explode internal and salvaged materials, shaping a practice that is as much drifting through temporary obsessions as it is devotional.
Ruehlen’s prolific and collaborative life has placed them at the nexus of underground and experimental scenes in the western United States in recent years, pouring forth countless albums, performance ventures, shifting monikers, and cultural alliances, largely through operating of a label and DIY spaces, teaching, and touring sporadically since the late ’00s.
This quartet performance, accompanied by Ryan Wheless (saxophone + FX), Kenji Ono Lancaster (drums), and Colin McIlrath (bass), features Ruehlen’s latest construct — the cosmic füga — an imagined zither of flight, inspired by ancient vibrations while simultaneously grappling with contemporary sound worlds and electro-acoustic formations. Fü-ga comes from Latin, meaning to escape, or to activate rapid motion (fugitive | a fugue state). This entirely wooden, two-tiered, double bridged, thirteen string, stereo electrified, horizontal object explodes with the energy and complexity of a chamber group as well as the quiet flicker of a single insect singing at the edge of twilight on a late summer’s eve.
This performance is presented as part of the ongoing Space Travelers Union Presents residency at the Century Room.
Space Travelers Union is a creative-musician collective formed in the Arizona desert through the meeting of composition, improvisation, and electronic signal. Operating with a rotating cast drawn from the American Southwest, the project has reached international audiences through BBC6, Radio France’s FIP, JazzFM, and Gilles Peterson’s WorldwideFM, with additional recognition from Bandcamp’s “New and Notable” and YouTube Music’s Jazz Hotlist.
