Ava Mendoza
bio
Ava Mendoza is a guitarist, electronic musician and composer who lives in Oakland, California. At age sixteen, while attending Interlochen Arts Academy and studying classical guitar, she was lucky enough to meet some socially ostracized kids who introduced her to free jazz. She was immediately drawn to the expressivity of the music, and became especially taken with the musics of Albert Ayler, Derek Bailey, Nels Cline, Sonny Sharrock, and John Zorn. Soon after, Ava happily abandoned the classical guitar and began improvising on electric guitar. Her first electric guitar was a Peavey Raptor, which is not a very good guitar at all.
Ava spent a year of college studying with too-little-known guitar monster Miroslav Tadic at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA. The following year, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to study with improvising guitarist Stefan Dill. During the course of her stay in Santa Fe, she became a part of the small but thriving improvised music community, performing and recording frequently with Stefan and many of the other innovative improvisers in the area, including J.A. Deane, Al Faaet, Kurt Heyl, Chris Jonas, Molly Sturges, Dave Wayne, Mark Weaver, and Ben Wright, as well as members of noise superband The Late Severa Wires (Yozo Suzuki, Shawn O'Neal, Carlos Santistevan, Mike Rowland). Playing with Kurt and Ben opened Ava to a more texture-oriented, diverse and fluid form of improvisation than the aggressive free jazz that she had focused on playing up until that time. While in Santa Fe Ava also performed in ensembles under the direction of Anthony Braxton and composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein, both of whom visited Santa Fe during her stay.
In the fall of 2002, Ava ran off to Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she is currently slugging away at her undergraduate degree. Her love for raw sound has led her further and further into the world of electronics, causing her to spend large amounts of time ignoring her guitar and making music using mixing board feedback, cassette players, analog synthesizers, contact mics, Max/MSP, and various homemade sounds and processing methods. For the last couple of years, she has developed an obsession with creating fixed media electronic compositions, while continuing to improvise and perform live. Her tape (fixed media) music draws from her background in and devotion to the immediacy and unpredictability of freely improvised music. Ava's tape pieces have been performed at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival of 2005 and 2006, and the Women's Electro-acoustic Listening Room of 2005, curated by Pamela Madsen.
Ava's guitar playing has been influenced by her study of digital and analog electronic music, and she has added an increasingly convoluted array of effects pedals and analog electronics to her set up. She is particularly interested in working with electronics that are very difficult to control or predict, such as mixing board feedback. Both in composition and improvisation, Ava enjoys trying to make the most disparate musical gestures somehow work together, and playing with mixing board feedback is perfect for this in that it often results in long series of disjointed musical gestures which force her to scramble to meld them into some kind of coherence.
At Mills, Ava has studied electronic music composition with John Bischoff and Maggi Payne. She has performed in ensembles under the direction of Fred Frith and composer/violinist Jon Rose. While living in the Bay Area, Ava has found a surplus of inspiring musicians to work regularly with, including Mary Clare Brzytwa, Travis Johns, Kurt Kotheimer, Kanoko Nishi, Noah Phillips, Aram Shelton, Moe! Staiano, Josh Smith, Theresa Wong, and Zachary Watkins.
Other people whom Ava has also enjoyed working with (she just doesn't get to do it as often) include John Dikeman, Liz Draper, Phillip Greenlief, Steini Gunnarson, Andrew Lafkas, Marcela Ormaza, and Colleen Zickler.
online:
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