Owen Gardner premieres Where Is My Hand in Space?—a new suite of pieces for microtonal electric guitar and fixed media.

Here, he continues his project of defamiliarizing traditional musical grammar. Owen treats sound equally as matter and as an articulation of time, while perception is a means to soften the boundaries between performer, audience, and their environment.

Owen Gardner (b.1985, Annapolis, Md.) is a Berlin-based composer, performer, and improviser. His work is guided by the generative tension between experimental and traditional approaches, in solo and ensemble settings, primarily as a guitarist in the leaderless quartet Horse Lords. In addition to his own music, Gardner has performed works by Catherine Lamb, Jackson Mac Low, and Julius Eastman, and has worked with Matmos, Dan Deacon, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, and Future Islands. He also sings early American choral music with Sacred Harp Berlin, studies the theory and instrumental technique of Mauritanian classical music with Sidi ould Ahmed Zeidan, and has programmed and promoted experimental music for many years, both as a member of Baltimore’s High Zero collective and at Berlin’s KM28.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation