Kyle Motl: Transmogrifications – Solo Contrabass

At the heart of my solo music is an ongoing interest in exploring the limits of the contrabass. In solo improvisation, I am free to plumb the instrument’s wealth of sonorities, pushing sound to its breaking point and revealing the extremities of technique, timbre, and dynamic envelope. Solo performance also presents a platform for the artifacts of other musical endeavors as varied as free bop, contemporary concert music, and noise, to become refracted, transformed, and recontextualized.
In this concert, I present music from my recent recording, Transmogrifications, alongside a new work, Hydra Nightingale, by Caroline Louise Miller, and more TBA. Harsh noise, polyphonic timbres and scintillating melodicism weave together on a voyage traversing the scope of the contrabass.
BIO:
Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser. Active in a variety of ensembles and settings, his work crosses the boundaries between idioms as wide as free jazz, contemporary concert music, and extreme metal. Current interests include extended harmonic techniques for solo bass improvisation, electroacoustic performance with live electronics and improvising software, modular compositional schemes, recursive and generative structuring, and exploration of complex sonic spectra.
Kyle is a member of the Peter Kuhn Trio, and has been performing in quartet and trio with Abbey Rader since 2011. He maintains regular duo projects with T.J. Borden, Adam Tinkle, and Drew Ceccato. The Kyle Motl Trio, featuring Kjell Nordeson and Tobin Chodos is a collaborative platform for new compositions weaving complex structures together with free improvisation. Kyle has performed alongside artists including Anthony Davis, Kidd Jordan, Mary Halvorson, Roscoe Mitchell, Mark Dresser, and Wadada Leo Smith, among others.
Motl is a doctoral candidate at UC San Diego, where he studies bass with Mark Dresser.