Bob Ostertag

Event information

Bob Ostertag has been at the cutting edge of new music for two decades. His creative and unorthodox work with digital sampling and recording has established him as an influential pioneer in these media. He has created a string of major multi-media works, combining sound, image, and live performance. He designs his own sophisticated performance software and instruments. His compositions for the Kronos Quartet, his own Say No More ensemble, and others, have been recognized as major modern works. His frequent use of political themes compliment his many years of political activism. Twenty CDs of his compositions have been released, and he has appeared at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe.

Born in Albuquerque in 1957, Bob Ostertag dropped out of the Oberlin Conservatory after two years, and has eschewed working within the confines of academic music ever since. Instead, he has worked with a radically diverse range of collaborators: avant garders John Zorn and Fred Frith, heavy metal star Mike Patton, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, jazz great Anthony Braxton, dyke punk rocker Lynn Breedlove, drag diva Justin Bond, film maker Pierre Hébert, and more. Ostertag settled in New York City in 1978 and immersed himself in the emerging "downtown" music scene of the period. He left music at the end of the 1970s to work in Central America, and became an expert on the region. His writings have been published in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and he has lectured on the topic at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Rutgers, and many other universities. In 1988 he relocated to San Francisco and resumed his musical activity.

"Bob Ostertag's improvisations on various non-keyboard synthesizers are about as far removed from the electronic music clichés of the past as can be imagined." - The New York Times


"By almost any measure, electronic music composer/improviser Bob Ostertag is an extreme radical. His raw material is the world. He digs his trowel into the wet cement of everyday life, where nothing is really permanently set, anyway, and plasters it in impressionistic smears and pointillistic dabs across the walls of our perception. His strategies range somewhere between those of John Cage, academic computer musicians, brutally expressive free improvisers, and Che Guevara.

With entrance into Ostertag's world comes a severe attitude adjustment. You have to curb your brain, dump your 'common sense' judgments, and peel away the calluses that have built up over the vulnerable core of your senses. Listening becomes cultural time travel at warp speed. Time, however, jumps off its linear tracks. You have to accept both the simultaneity of your feelings and your hapless inability to control them. Scary stuff.

Listening to Ostertag can be like looking at an aged oak. It's as if the same force that turns gnarly bark, twisted trunk, and random crooked branch patterns into a perfect, beautiful tree is transforming these coarse and ostensibly unrelated sounds into music. The 'music-ness' of Ostertag's work is no less than the 'tree-ness' of the oak; we're just not trained to hear it." - San Francisco Bay Guardian