Bitterviper - Bitterviper

Bitterviper is the brand-new quartet of Nikos Veliotis (cello), Taku Unami (synthesizer), Sarah Hennies (percussion) and David Grubbs (guitar, piano) - four individuals who separately are responsible for some of the most striking and wildly idiosyncratic music of the past couple of decades, not to mention the duo collaborations between Grubbs and Unami (the albums ‘Comet Meta’ and ‘Failed Celestial Creatures’) and Veliotis and Grubbs (‘The Harmless Dust’).

Athens-based Nikos Veliotis set Bitterviper into motion with four overdubbed pieces of dense psychoacoustic marvels on the cello; Grubbs responded with characteristically subtle tracery on piano, guitar and lap steel; Unami weighed in electronically from Tokyo to mysteriously thicken both the plot and the low end; and Hennies applied her compositional gifts to structure the whole thing with an Occam’s Razor approach to percussion. But once you drop the needle on ‘Bitterviper’, its origin story becomes ancient history; you’re suddenly in the presence of an ensemble that sounds like no other and for whom there are no false steps. It’s all fair game when this is how you choose to play; ‘Bitterviper’ is a salvo of confidence and conviction, and this is only the beginning.

David Grubbs was a member of Gastr del Sol, Bastro and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, The Red Krayola and many others.

Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical and psychological issues, including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film and performance art.

Taku Unami’s work is influenced by science fiction, supernatural horror and weird fiction. He’s the composer of film scores for directors including Isao Okishima and Takeshi Furusawa, was half (with Toshiya Tsunoda) of the group Wovenland, is one-third of the group Hontatedori, and has collaborated with, among others, Annette Krebs, Radu Malfatti, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Jarrod Fowler and Graham Lambkin.

Nikos Veliotis founded Mohammad with ILIOS and Coti K. (renamed MMMD in 2015). The project has fifteen releases to date on Antifrost, PAN, Improved Sequence and Modal Analysis. In the 1990s he developed an experimental practice, exploring image and sound, mainly through the cello (which he destroyed during the notorious ‘Cello Powder’ intermedia performance in Glasgow in March 2009); he also performed in numerous groups, most notably CRANC (with Angharad and Rhodri Davies) and Looper (with Ingar Zach and Martin Küchen).

Tracklist:

BIRD OF PREY BEATEN BACK
PILLOWS PLUMPED FOR THE GUESTS
IN VIVO RECEPTOR
GRAVITY DOES ITS WORST