Laura Candland and Christian Asplund perform at City Art
Channel: Salt Lake City Art
Date: 29/09/2012

Utah-based poet and singer, Lara Candland and composer-performer Christian
Asplund have evolved a unique style of performance involving an ethereal and
lush mix of speech, singing, live sampling, looping, layering, drones, and
electronics. They will draw from poems in Candland's recently published Alburnum
of the Green and Living Tree and her recently completed chapbook about surgery
Physic at the Table.

Lara Candland's book Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree was just released
from BlazeVox.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, The Colorado
Review, Barrow Street, Greatcoat, Fine Madness, The Quarterly and other
journals.  Her pamphlet, Tongue Child was published by the University of South
Carolina's Palanquin/TDM series.  She has been a finalist in The Motherwell,
Hudson, and St. Lawrence book awards.  She has also been the recipient of an AWP
Intro Award,  She is a founder and the librettist for Seattle Experimental
Opera, and a finalist in the Genesis Prizes.  Her opera, Sunset with Pink
Pastoral with husband and composer Christian Asplund, was performed by Almeida
Opera in London's Sadler's Wells Theatre.  Candland has taught poetry, college
writing, food writing and fiction writing at various colleges and universities
around the country as an itinerant grad student/follower of a grad student, and
is currently exploring the intersection between written down works and live
improv with electronic sampling.


Christian Asplund is a Canadian-American composer-performer based in Utah where
he is Composer-in-Residence at Brigham Young University. He has degrees from
University of Washington, Mills College, and Brigham Young University where his
teachers have included Stuart Dempster, John Rahn, Joel-Francois Durand, Alvin
Curran, Chris Brown, Thea Musgrave, and Meyer Kupferman. He cofounded Seattle
Experimental Opera which has produced seven of his operas. He has performed with
such musicians as Christian Wolff, Eyvind Kang, Larry Polansky, Daniel Good,
Francois Houle, Michael Bisio, Robert Reigle, Gino Robair, and Phil Gelb in a
variety of venues and recordings in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His scores are
published by Frog Peak Music. Asplund is also an active scholar and has
published articles and chapters on music theory and critical theory.