StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Sarah Hennies, Merche Blasco to perform at the Contemporary Art Museum

Today, let's take a look at some videos featuring music by Sarah Hennies and Merche Blasco, two composer-performers who will be doing separate sets on a shared bill presented by New Music Circle on Friday, February 28 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Hennies, who's currently a visiting professor of music at Bard College in upstate new York, is a percussionist and composer of concert music for soloists and small ensembles, and also is active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance.

She has presented her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist, has created commissioned works for various performers and ensembles, and has received a number of grants a fellowships supporting her projects.

Blasco, who's based in New York City, is "an interdisciplinary artist and composer engineering participatory performances through electroacoustic intervention and instrument building."

She's done performances and installations at museums, concert venues, and festivals throughout the United States and Europe, and her work has been featured in major publications including the New York Times, Wired, and more.

Although the specific pieces they will perform here in St. Louis are not available online in video form, you can at least get a feel for the sound and scope of both composers' work from what's there, starting with the first video up above, which documents part of Sarah Hennies' set from a show in January, 2018 at The Cherry Artspace in Ithaca, NY.

After the jump, you can see an excerpt from another live performance by Hennies in April 2017 as part of the Ende Tymes VII Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation at a venue called Silent Barn in NYC. That's followed by a clip of her performance of a piece called "Falsetto" from October 2016 at the Sacred Root Kava Lounge in Ithaca.

Next up are three videos featuring Blasco, the first recorded in May, 2018 at Spectrum in Brooklyn, NY.

That's followed by an excerpt from her performance from May 2017 at Creative Tech Week in NYC. The final video shows Blasco's set from a show in June 2015 at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.

For more about Sarah Hennies, read her 2017 interview on the National Sawdust website, and her 2018 chat with TomTomMag.com. For more about Merch Blasco, check out her profile page on New Music USA, and watch the video of her talk in October 2018 at the interdisciplinary creative space Brooklyn Research.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...