Performance stills and videos

The WYE Center, Berlin 2013

Art Or Sound, Prada Foundation, Venice 6/14

Furnished Sound, The Firehouse Space, 4/14

Dayton Art Institute 2008

'Insects and Anxious Objects' at The Kitchen 1996

Socrates Sculpture Park 1994

On The Boards, Seattle 1985

Bumbershoot Festival, Seattle 1984

Experimental Intermedia, NYC 1993

The Art Gym, Marylhurst University, Ore, 1986

'Hybrid Antics', On The Boards, Seattle, 1985

Bumbershoot Festival, Seattle 1984

'Positions", Littman Gallery, Portland, w. Jerilyn Tabor, 1984

Washington Park Bandshell, Portland 1983

"Hybrid Antics", Roger's Cable Video, 1983

NW Artists Workshop, Portland 1982

"Hybrid History", P.C.V.A., Portland, 1981

Performance Information:

Ken Butler’s Voices of Anxious Objects

The artist-musician performs mesmerizing world textures and driving melodic grooves with passion and purpose on an amazing arsenal of amplified hybrid string instruments made from household objects and tools. Duchampian Dada meets Hybrid Hindu Hendrix as function and form collide in an environment of hyperactive hardware.

Butler blends Indian, Mid-Eastern, Flamenco, and Roma modes with jazz, rock, funk, and blues, all held together by an open, edgy "downtown" improv aesthetic. Virtually indescribable and unclassifiable, Butler mixes high and low technology and audio-visual antics to create an ancient/future music that forms a provoking cultural portrait of human / machine adaptation and transformation and spiritual transcendence.

Assemblages of hammers, hockey sticks, tennis rackets, golf clubs, and brooms become (when amplified) violin, guitar, and cello-like instruments with multiple playing surfaces and a diverse range of percussive (and assorted odd) sounds as well as those produced by the strings. A performance may also include interactive hybrid audio-visual keyboards powered by motorized strummers which control lights, slide animation, motion, and video projections.

Hybrid Instruments Reel 2006 ..... (short segments)