Michael Foster with Strings

Ars Nova Workshop presents the saxophonist and composer Michael Foster, joined by a string ensemble at Solar Myth on Thursday, June 27.

Michael Foster is a New York-based saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist utilizing extensive preparations of his saxophone, augmenting it with amplification, objects, balloons, drum heads, vibrators, tapes, and samples as a method of subverting and queering the instrument’s history and traditional roles. He works in duos with Ben Bennett, Leila Bordreuil, Lydia Lunch, and Richard Kamerman as The New York Review of Cocksucking. Foster has collaborated with William Parker, Weasel Walter, Marina Rosenfeld, Nate Wooley, Sarah Hennies, and many others, and co-founded “Queer Trash”, a curatorial platform for LGBTQIA+ artists engaged in experimental performance practices. For this performance his sonic palette will be further expanded with the addition of a string ensemble, fusing the soloist-and-strings genre embodied by Charlie Parker with Strings with elements of spectralism, noise, reductionism, and collective improvisation to create a distinctly queer and feminist reading on the tradition and its associated repertoire.