by Mike Telin
When composer/pianist Jerome Begin was in need of a pianist for a dance project he was working on, the Cleveland native was faced with a conundrum. “Being a pianist, I have never hired a pianist,” he said during a Zoom call.
After speaking to a number of acquaintances asking for recommendations, he decided to contact David Friend. “Jerome sent along some of the pieces and we set a time to meet at Juilliard where he teaches,” Friend recalled during that zoom conversation. “We played through some of the music and immediately everything felt great. And it’s continued to be a really good partnership.”
On Thursday, March 10 at the Bop Stop, David and Jerome will perform Post, a 50-minute set of pieces for solo piano with live processing that explore a different way of creating an uncanny valley-esque reality where human, acoustic and electronic- processed elements interact and overlap in hard-to-define, disorienting ways. The event, presented by No Exit, is free. [Read more…]
The third iteration of No Exit’s fall program took the ensemble to an intimate venue — the gallery of Heights Arts on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, where space is at such a premium that percussionist Luke Rinderknecht’s big marimba was nearly marooned offstage, and a few dozen audience members added up to a packed crowd.
By unofficial consensus, it’s best when virtual concerts wrap up in under an hour. The new music ensemble No Exit took that idea to another level on Friday, August 27 with a pre-recorded video of less than half that length.
Composer and flutist Hong-Da Chin has carved out a unique career. His music is influenced by folk music from his native Malaysia as well as Chinese and Indian cultures. A specialist in contemporary music, he is equally at home on modern and traditional Chinese flutes.
Although great strides have been made in audio technology, latency issues (lag in time due to internet connection) still prevent musicians from seamlessly passing musical lines from multiple locations in real-time. In their most recent collaboration, “New Sound Worlds,” Cleveland-based No Exit and St. Paul-based Zeitgeist bring life to a new work by Scott Miller during which members of both ensembles perform from their homes and studios. The concert is available on-demand 
The new music ensemble No Exit continues its longstanding collaboration with Zeitgeist, their counterparts from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, with “New Sound Worlds,” a free 
New music concerts can run the risk of sinking under the weight of their own self-importance, especially when “world premieres” are involved. Happily, while No Exit takes itself seriously, it goes about its business with a redemptive playfulness, as demonstrated in several of the entries in the hour-long concert that debuted on the ensemble’s YouTube channel on January 29.
