Wednesday October 23 * 7pm * $15-25

BEAM SPLITTER + Mil Phinton (US/UK/NO)

Two duos intersect, forming this trio of hyperextended close miked mouthful and breath driven antics for double voice and trombone. They have separately toured the globe extensively, each carving out a unique approach to music making. As a trio or in extended projects, they have performed together in the UK, US, Portugal, Ukraine, Germany, Argentina and Brazil.

BEAM SPLITTER is a duo for amplified voice, trombone & analog electronics. They have been touring globally since 2015, playing over two hundred concerts in a wide variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog,which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed. They join together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone, while utilizing analog electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play. The duo’s latest album "SPLIT JAW" was released on Nat Baldwin's Tripticks Tapes in 2023. This bite size format packs an entire universe of their crafted sputter, breath and glitch inside its forty-five minute magnetic tape loop. The album is one third introspective Berlin studio production and the rest, live from a splintering concert given at Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, their last concert of 2022 where audience and the duo alike giving it their all center of room, split open like hollow bones head to clavicle, muscles twitching and air spewing, breaking ground and mending it with alien hums.

BEAM SPLITTER have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colon, Buenos
Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency. Since 2020, they have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY, an ongoing concert series and collaborative artistic project, where they have invited a diverse array of artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, they are seeking to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication in sonic language and music. In the past two seasons, they have worked and recorded with: Mo’ong Pribadi, Hyunhye Seo, Elaine Mitchener, Mariam Rezaei, Pat Thomas & Orphy Robinson (Black top), Carla Boregas, Mauricio Takara, Mieko Suzuki, Pak Yan Lau, Eivind Lønning & Espen Reinersten (Streifenjunko), Hugo Esquinca and Yara Mekawei.

"Always inventive, often deeply emotive, this is a beautiful duo."
— Chris Abrahams (The Necks) for Subradar


“BEAM SPLITTER is highly improvised, extremely crafted and held in an iron will for
experimentation.”
— Jean Louis Fernandez, La Nacion (AR)


"Slow in motion, yet quick in phrasing, BEAM SPLITTER swings precariously from trapeze bars,
spinning wingless above the ground, taunting Mother Earth to claim gravity’s fugitives."
— Todd Gruel, A closer listen (US)


"For each of us, breath is a highly personal signature at the audible edge of sound; to magnify it,
as BEAM SPLITTER does, is to make oneself available in a particularly bold way. And the work
on Rough Tongue is nothing if not bold.”
— Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News (US)

Mil Phinton comes from Torquay in the UK. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s- then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s. For most of the last forty years, Mil has been working as an improvising singer in groups, orchestras and situations, in various locations worldwide. Some composers have written pieces that especially employ his extended vocal techniques and improvisations. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher and ongoing duos with all the above. He also sings with many other musicians including Audrey Chen, with whom in the last fifteen years, he has performed worldwide. Since the eighties, his Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries. More recently, Mil has ongoing Duos with Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Guylaine Cosseron, Hugh Medcalfe and Szilard Mezei.

Janel Leppin is a pillar of Washington, D.C.’s creative music and jazz community for over 20 years, as a cellist, composer, arranger, bassist and singer. She’s contributed as a string arranger and cello player to albums on Sub Pop, Dischord, Tzadik, Touch, Editions Mego, Sacred Bones. She has worked with Kyp Malone, Eyvind Kang, Oren Ambarchi, Anthony Pirog, Beauty Pill, Laughing Man and Marissa Nadler. Leppin records art-pop under her name and under the Mellow Diamond moniker and in longtime duo Janel and Anthony. Leppin’s jazz-centric vision on the majestic, abrasive Ensemble Volcanic Ash on Cuneiform Records, affirms her place as a boundless musician who constantly leaves the listener intrigued. It’s a puzzle in which jazz, chamber music, contemporary classical, and punk seamlessly coalesce with bracing results.

"An Absolute Virtuoso - 4 Stars" - Downbeat Magazine

"Leppin is a rarity..ahhh-vant garde at its finest." - Capital Bop