Solo set from Jamal Moore
duos & trios with Marshall Trammell, Carlos Santistevan and Laura Ortman.
In Defense of Memory is, itself, an Interculturally-situated ecology of everyday relations-warriors plucking, striking, bowing and flowing self-defense in Creative Music vibrational continuum.
IDOM began in New Mexico as a performance-constellation in a confluence of principled, cultural activities set in an ecology of Indigenist trajectories of solidarity, historic resistance technologies and highly resonant sonic vibrations set in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
Truth be to told, the High Zero Festival was a fulcrum for us. Performing for audiences in Baltimore is a kind of home-ing in. We will use this time to develop materials for future residencies.
Members are:
Laura Ortman (NYC), violin and electronics
thedustdiveflash.bandcamp.com/album/smoke-rings-shimmers-endless-blur;
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ortman
Carlos Santistevan (Santa Fe), bass and electronics
Marshall Trammell/Music Research Strategies (homeless), percussion
www.musicresearchstrategies.info
Marshall Trammell – Marshall Trammell is an experimental archivist, percussionist, conductor, and composer. His aesthetics and activism are centered in social change interventions and generate new local and global ecologies that embrace improvisation as a collective, movement-building tool in the creation of post-capitalist imaginaries. Trammell’s work also uses political aesthetic theory, data creation, mapping, and collective music-and-artmaking in order to step out of the domain of traditional cultural institutions, relocating the act of co-production back in the community.
Trammell’s Music Research Strategies is a performing-political education platform for embodied social justice vernacular, organizational strategy, and alternative infrastructure development.
Trammell has collaborated with artists including Sharmi Basu, John Brennan, Raven Chacon, India Cooke, John Dietrich, Chris Cogburn, Marisa DeMarco, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Lisa E. Harris, Antoine Hunter, Eileen Kage, John Jang, Dohee Lee, Genny Lim, Robert McGill, Hafez Modirzadeh, Mogauwane Mahloele, Jamal Moore, David Murray, Pauline Oliveros, Laura Ortman, Akira Sakata, Carlos Santistevan, Jawwaad Taylor, Aaron Turner (SIGE), Saul Williams, Hong-Kai Wang, and Francis Wong.
He has been an artist in residence at Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri; Coppermas, Sechelt, Canada; EastSide Cultural Center, Oakland; The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin; Off Lomas, Albuquerque; Prelinger Library, San Francisco; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Rauschenberg Residency; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; and Western Front, Vancouver. He was an Intercultural Leadership Fellow (2018-19). He is affiliated with EastSide Arts Alliance and ProArts COMMONS and is a member of Solidarity Research Center.
Laura Ortman – A member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, Laura Ortman is a musician and composer who creates across multiple platforms, including albums, live performance, field recordings, and video works. As a soloist, Ortman performs on amplified and Apache violin, vocals, piano, electric guitar, and keyboard.
Ortman’s My Soul Remainer (2017)—which exists as a freestanding composition, solo album, and a video collaboration with director Nanobah Becker—combines elegiac violin melodies, orchestral samples, and the urgent pandemonium of amplified violin. In the video work, Ortman performs each of these musical voices within landscapes of the desert Southwest, plucking and stroking her violin by a rocky stream, in a forest clearing, or against distant mountains. The video iteration of My Soul Remainer was included in the Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2019), at which Ortman also presented a performance celebrating the summer solstice.
In 2008, Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-indigenous orchestral ensemble. She has also collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Okkyung Lee, and Jeffrey Gibson.
She has performed and presented work nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2021); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto, Canada (2017, 2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Canada (2017); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2009).
Ortman is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship (2022); a Jerome Foundation, Jerome at Camargo Residency (2020); the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, National Artist Fellowship (2016); and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (2014).
Carlos Santistevan – Carlos Santistevan is a musician, sounds engineer, and organizer. Since 2001 he has helped establish an oasis of creative music in the high desert southwest as the director of the High Mayhem Emerging Arts collective based out of Santa Fe, NM. Using upright bass and electronics he creates soundscapes and spontaneous compositions from the extremes of acoustic and electric music. Early influences of punk rock and free jazz have led him to develop a unique approach to music and improvisation. He has performed at The Stone, High Zero Festival, Ende Tymes Festival, The Outpost Performance Space, Hemlock Tavern, SITE Santa Fe, the Empty Bottle, Outsound Creative Music Festival, The Olympia Experimental Music Festival, High Mayhem Festival and more performing with such artists as: J.A. Dino Deane, Raven Chacon, Laura Ortman, Thollem McDonas, Tania Caroline Chen, Marshall Trammell, Chris Jonas, Tatsuya Nakatani and more. Carlos is a seasoned improviser and a member of diverse ensembles such as In Defense of Memory, iNK oN pAPER, The Uninvited Guest(s), The Late Severa Wires, Out of Context, Black Iron Trio, Taiji Pole and more.
