Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings have performed as a duo since 2005. Their music explores an unpredictable relationship with making sounds, achieved by elaborate preparation of acoustic soundboxes, such as drums or cello, and expanded via original electronic instruments, ranging from naked circuitboards to amplified kitchen objects. They focus on the metamusical potential of unstable sounds and silences, exploring austere combinations of sound and the otherworldly ripple effects that pulse through a silent space or alert ears.
Rawlings is active as an improviser and instrument builder, specializing in modifications of existing instruments, creating extensive cello preparations. He also continually develops an electronic instrument from extant exposed circuitry, producing, in effect, a modular analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface. This electronic instrument is paired with a flexible array of exposed speaker elements, chosen for their often unpredictable and idiosyncratic acoustic qualities.
Recordings
Excerpts from duo for Experimental Music Yearbook 2013. Incubator Arts Project, Brooklyn, NY, October 5, 2012.
Conway Library. Full Spectrum Records FS124, 2021.
Recorded at Marshall Field Library, Conway, MA, May 2018.
A resonant lighting-up of the robber-baron marble rotunda of an otherwise pedestrian community library, for an exceedingly long time.
Fairchild Chapel. Homophoni 049 (defunct), 2011.
Recorded at Oberlin College, February 26, 2010.
Thick snow blanketed both the piece and Northeast Ohio that evening.
Ithaca Recordings. The Watchful Ear Listen Series 03, 2009.
Recorded by Kevin Ernste at Cornell University, March 21, 2009. Mastered by Ernst Karel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 12, 2009.
We attempted to push at a wall in duration, a second wall in trying to re-record at night a long improvisation we played during the day, a third wall in taking away Vic’s right-hand instrument, and a fourth wall trying to release a download-only album with a physical format consisting of a link printed on vellum attached to a small pine board.
Ricardo Arias: New York - Bogota 2000-2010. Audition Records ar044, 2010.
Compilation of Arias's work, including trio performance with Feeney and Rawlings at the 2010 Floating Points Festival, Issue Project Room, curated by Stephan Moore and using his 15-speaker spatialization system.
In Six Parts. Sedimental sedcd050, 2007.
Reviews by Vital Weekly, Brian Olewnick (for the wonderful mid-2000s Bagatellen), and Brainwashed.
“This latest offering from two stalwarts of Boston’s so-called lowercase improv community is as dour and uncompromising – but ultimately as rewarding – as Robert Bresson or Samuel Beckett… But despite its refusal to make the slightest concession to the listener, the music draws you in and doesn’t let you go.”
Dan Warburton, The Wire, September 2007
Selected Performances
REDCAT, Disney Hall, Los Angeles, February 2020
OpenSound, Boston, MA, May 2018
159 Sutton St, Providence, RI, May 2018
Incubator Arts Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, New York, NY, October 2012
William Paterson University, October 2012
CarnivOINC Festival, Oberlin College, March 2012
University of California-Santa Barbara, October 2011
Songlines, Mills College, October 2011
The Stone, New York, NY, June 2011 (trio with Lou Cohen, computers)
No Idea Festival, Austin, TX, January 2011
Floating Points Festival, Issue Project Room, New York, NY, July 2010 (trio with Ricardo Arias, balloons)
Dartmouth College, May 2010
University of California-Berkeley, September 2009
The Metaphysics of Notation, graphic score by Mark Applebaum, Stanford University Art Museum, September 2009
University of California-Davis, September 2009
Hampshire College Creative Music Collective series, Northampton, MA, November 2005
Knitting Factory New York, June 2005
Kevin Ernste