Press
September 2007: Press Release - Freestyle Jazz
Dee Pop presents: THE Freestyle CrEAtiVe MUSIC SERIES Every SUNDAY at Jimmy's 43
Restaurant
43 East 7th Street NYC
(between 2nd and 3rd Ave)
212-982-3006
September • Curated by Kevin Norton
Text by Kevin Norton
Sept 2 - The Roxy Coss Trio and Josh Lopes' Tell the Audient Void - I met both these young
composer-players during my work at William Paterson University (in the Jazz Studies program)
... Roxy has a great tone on both tenor and soprano and her trio features the great, emerging
Shawn Baltazor on drums (who also contributes compositions to the group). Josh Lopes is a
consistently strong and interesting composer that has put a real band together - more than a
group of ad-hoc, free-lancing musicians, these guys have been working diligently on their
collective sound for a few years now
- from composer Ted Hearne's blog, which you can read here.
May 6, 2008 1:56pm dither on sunday night i went to see Dither at The Stone - it was one of the best
shows i’ve seen in a while. they’re an electric guitar quartet made up of four players with very different
backgrounds - Taylor Levine, Simon Kafka, James Moore and Josh Lopes. they played a set that really
grabbed me, almost without interruption, from start to finish. it was a totally unpretentious show; they never
claimed to be anything other than an electric guitar quartet, and i think because they weren’t trying to fit
some sort of stylistic frame, they were able to concentrate solely on discovering new sound worlds. which,
for me, they totally did. dither played two pieces by nick didkovsky (of Dr. Nerve), and then played an
extremely luscious, chilled-out piece by the extremely luscious, chilled-out simon kafka, followed by a hard-
edged and colorful rhythmic jam by josh lopes, who i don’t really know personally but whom i may might as
well assume is hard-edged and colorful. they also played selections from a piece by fred frith, “vectors”
by jascha narveson, and a piece with many indeterminate elements by Seth Rosanoff. they played a piece
called “colloquy of the birds” by matthew welch, with the composer accompanying them on bagpipes, and
guitarrist mark stewart and percussionist david cossin joined the group for a finale on stewart’s “speedy
feety.” each piece seemed to present a different musical challenge, but the quartet rocked it effortlessly
each time. most impressive. not only did dither explore a huge variety of sounds and colors, but they
managed the palette extremely well. the uniformity of color in kafka’s piece created an intriguing but
homogenous bed of sound that was contrasted nicely by lopes’ piece, which had each guitar playing very
different timbral worlds from one another. while it’s possible for the group to sound like (as taylor put it)
one “superguitar,” they are far more flexible than being able to achieve just that. narveson’s piece used a
very effective array of pitch-bends, and rosanoff’s piece had some perplexing moments when i could have
sworn i was listening to a hammond B-3 organ. there was a depth of rhythmic approach to their playing as
well. didkovsky’s music played off the implied metric structures of a master grid, while rosanoff’s piece
played with small rhythmic cells in a mobile model, so that the relationships between each player seemed
far from fixed, but engaging nonetheless. it was an inspiring show, and i think dither is a good example of
music being able to successfuly transcend genre classifications. if you’ve made it this far reading, i (duh)
think you should check them out: www.myspace.com/ditherquartet
I don't get too much of this, but every once in a while, somebody goes out of their way to
say something nice about my music in a public venue. So thanks to them, and to anybody
else who has ever said anything nice about anybody to anybody else.
-from Steve Smith's in the June 20th edition of the NY Times, which you can read in its entirety here
The New York quartet Dither, on the other hand, focuses almost exclusively on sounds produced by
electric guitars — clean, plucked lines, strummed chords, grungy feedback, resonating overtones, even
the static buzz of amps and loose plugs — on its debut CD, “Dither,” issued by the California label
Henceforth (108; CD). The most conventional playing comes in “Pantagruel,” a jazzy tangle composed by
Joshua Lopes, a quartet member. Lainie Fefferman’s “Tongue of Thorns” reclaims a primal Minimalism
from art-rock bands like the Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth; “Vectors,” by Jascha Narveson, turns
Dither into a live-wire gamelan. In “Cross Sections,” the longest and most fascinating work on the disc,
Lisa R. Coons painstakingly dissects the instrument, rendering muscular arpeggios, livid feedback,
ominous rumbles and radiant drones. Erik K M Clark’s “exPAT,” in which the four players are prevented
from hearing one another playing, is an agreeably noisy experiment most likely better encountered live.
- Excerpted from Sounds Heard: Dither—Dither By Molly Sheridan Published: June 8, 2010. Read the
whole thing here
Dither's own Joshua Lopes penned Pantagruel, and whether or not the piece was in any way influenced
by Rabelais's literary creation, there's an inventive, comic-book style boldness of color in how Lopes
throws down that makes this work a striking production. In performance, the exactness of the ensemble
playing and the clear-cut layers in the sonic material impress with their clock-like precision.