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Kyle Bruckmann

Oboist and composer/performer KYLE BRUCKMANN's creative work extends from a traditional Western classical foundation into genre-bending gray areas encompassing free jazz, electronic music and post-punk rock. He has worked with the San Francisco Symphony and most of the Bay Area’s regional orchestras while remaining active within an international community of improvisers and sound artists, appearing on more the 60 recordings - including nine full albums as soloist or bandleader.

His ensemble affiliations include the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Splinter Reeds, Quinteto Latino, Eco Ensemble, the Stockton Symphony, and acclaimed new music collective sfSound. From 1996-2003, he was a fixture in Chicago's thriving underground music scene, with frequent collaborators including Jason Ajemian, Jim Baker, Jeb Bishop, Olivia Block, Guillermo Gregorio, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Robbie Hunsinger, Bob Marsh, Weasel Walter, and Michael Zerang. Long-term projects include Wrack (winner of a 2012 Chamber Music America New Jazz Works award), the electro-acoustic duo EKG, and the avant-punk monstrosity Lozenge.

Bruckmann earned undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Rice University in Houston, studying oboe with Robert Atherholt, serving as music director of campus radio station KTRU, and achieving academic distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Masters degree in 1996 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he studied oboe performance with Harry Sargous and contemporary improvisation with Ed Sarath.

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Album Review

Kyle Bruckmann's Degradient: Dear Everyone

Read "Dear Everyone" reviewed by Giuseppe Segala


Diceva Luciano Berio nel 1974, a proposito della ricerca di “analogie specifiche" tra linguaggio verbale e musica, che “proprio questo tipo di ricerca è un altro modo di vivere una delle condizioni più reali e permanenti della musica, che è quella di rincorrere senza sosta un'utopia di linguaggio," per “scoprire nuove e provvisorie relazioni tra suono e significato," per “insegnarci a vedere il mondo come insieme di processi che interagiscono." Compositore, solista di oboe e corno inglese, Kyle ...

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Album Review

Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack: …Awaits Silent Tristero’s Empire

Read "…Awaits Silent Tristero’s Empire" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro


Quarantatre anni, un po' chicagoano e un po' californiano, Kyle Bruckmann conferma in questo suo nuovo lavoro quanto sia per lui irrinunciabile tenere il piede in più scarpe. A suo tempo intruppato come fisarmonicista e tastierista in una “sgangherata rock band" (la definizione non è nostra) come i Lozenge, Bruckmann se n'è poi venuto fuori -fra le altre cose -con questo lussureggiante combo allargato, Wrack, in cui i vari input che convivono nella sua vulcanica inventiva trovano un'ideale valvola di ...

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Album Review

Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack: ...Awaits Silent Tristero's Empire

Read "...Awaits Silent Tristero's Empire" reviewed by Troy Collins


...Awaits Silent Tristero's Empire is an epic four-part suite based on the fictitious songs found scattered throughout celebrated author Thomas Pynchon's early novels V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. Oboist Kyle Bruckmann conceived this post-modern “musical phantasmagoria" as the first long-form composition written for Wrack, his experimental chamber jazz ensemble, employing an expanded version of the long-standing unit to realize the project's pan-stylistic scope.A former Chicago resident, Bruckmann relocated to San Francisco after the turn ...

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Album Review

Kyle Bruckmann: On Procedural Grounds

Read "On Procedural Grounds" reviewed by Troy Collins


One of the most common methodologies embraced by the current generation of creative improvising musicians is polystylism--a seamlessly ingrained aesthetic sensibility that transcends the stylized post-modern dilettantism of earlier generations. Bay Area-based oboist Kyle Bruckmann has demonstrated the depth and breadth of this all-inclusive approach in myriad ways, from his art-damaged punk band Lozenge and genre-defying chamber group Wrack to electro-acoustic solo recitals. Accompanied by a handful of colleagues from San Francisco, as well as former associates from his Chicago ...

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Interview

Kyle Bruckmann: Purposeful Discontent

Read "Kyle Bruckmann: Purposeful Discontent" reviewed by James Taylor


When I spoke with oboist Kyle Bruckmann earlier this month, he was in the midst of a recording session with experimental metal act Oxbow (Hydrahead Records). Yeah... haven't heard of them, huh? Punknews.org called Oxbow's 2006 release Love That's Last “free-form psychedelia and an “infusion of jazz, rock and noise. So it should come as no surprise then that the eclectic Bruckmann would be recording oboe overdubs for Oxbow's latest record. Bruckmann's budding career as a creative ...

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Album Review

Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack: Intents & Purposes

Read "Intents & Purposes" reviewed by Nic Jones


Peter Hammill once described working with Van Der Graaf Generator as “serious fun," and anyone familiar with that band's music will have an idea also of the ambiguity of his description. VDGG specialised in a strain of the gothic as set down in literary terms by Edgar Allan Poe, and for all the idiomatic differences between their dark progressive rock and what's on offer here, there is an aesthetic of anxiety which bridges the divide between two disparate concerns.

On ...

396
Album Review

Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack: Intents & Purposes

Read "Intents & Purposes" reviewed by Troy Collins


Following oboist Kyle Bruckmann's self-titled 2003 Toucan Records debut, Intents & Purposes finds his Wrack ensemble exploring a similar program of experimental chamber jazz. Bruckmann effortlessly occupies the space between jazz and classical music, generating movements of somber reflection one minute, turbulent intensity the next. From Morton Feldman-esque minimalism to Charles Ives-like bluster, Wrack has few equals.

Bruckmann concentrates on oboe, but he also dabbles in English horn and suona. Since two of the group's original members were ...

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Interview

Oboist Kyle Bruckmann Interviewed at AAJ

Oboist Kyle Bruckmann Interviewed at AAJ

Source: All About Jazz

Anyone who has heard intrepid oboist Kyle Bruckmann would not be surprised to hear he recently recorded some tracks with experimental metal act Oxbow. Nor that, in order to make a living he works as an orchestral musician.

Anyone who hasn't heard his own records (including his latest, Intents and Purposes) and is of an adventurous disposition is missing out on an artist who is taking his instrument to truly new and wonderful places.

AAJ contributor James Taylor spoke with ...

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Recording

New CD From Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack Coming in October on 482 Music

New CD From Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack Coming in October on 482 Music

Source: Improvised Communications

On October 31st, 482 Music will release Intents & Purposes (482-1050), the new CD from Kyle Bruckmann's Wrack, featuring Bruckmann (oboe, English horn and suona), Jen Clare Paulson (viola), Jason Stein (bass clarinet), Anton Hatwich (bass) and Tim Daisy (percussion). Intents & Purposes documents Bruckmann's first visit to the Chicago scene since leaving for the Bay Area in 2003, as well as Wrack's chamber-group- meets-creative-improvisation sound, which bridges the gap between modern classical music and Chicago's experimental jazz scene.

“As ...

“. . . an artist who is taking his instrument to truly new and wonderful places.” (All About Jazz)

“. . . Bruckmann is an excellent composer, striking the right balance between form and freedom, setting up abundant opportunities for his mates to express themselves.” (Jason Bivins, Signal to Noise)

“. . . Bruckmann has played oboe, English horn, and/or electronics in a wide variety of contexts . . . but it’s still possible to find a single sentence to describe his entire body of his work: he makes creative use of the tension between seemingly irreconcilable musical elements.” (Bill Meyer, Chicago Reader)

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Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Dear Everyone

Not Two Records
2018

buy

...Awaits Silent...

Singlespeed Music
2014

buy

…Awaits Silent...

Singlespeed Music
2014

buy

On Procedural Grounds

New World Records
2012

buy

Wane

482 Music
2006

buy

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