Volume is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.

Multi-instrumentalist Shelley Burgon is best known for her improvisational work using harp and laptop. Burgon's work utilizes the acoustic harp as the primary sound source for her computer music, implementing the computer as an extension of her harp in a way similar to that of traditional extended harp techniques. She is a member of the chamber group Ne(x)tworks, the bands Stars Like Fleas and Family Dynamics. She is a notable interpreter of avant-garde music and has performed her music and the music of her contemporaries for series such as the the MATA Festival, Issue Project Room's Floating Points Festival, Darmstadt Series and The Whitney Museum's Christian Marclay Festival. In May 2009 she was honored to premiere a new piece for the Merce Cunningham Hudson Valley Project at the Dia:Beacon. She can be heard as a collaborator and guest on many labels including Hometapes, Skirl, Tzadik and Ipecac and currently performs solo under the moniker Rowan.

Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez's work is focused on short solo electro-acoustic sound pieces. Her instrument is a collection of new and broken needles that she calls "pencils of sound" and a selection of records which provide the palette. Many of her live sound installations have focused on the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art. She has been awarded an Emerging Artist Grant by the Jerome Foundation through New York's Roulette Intermedium in 2008, and the Van Lier Fellowship in 2009. She has toured internationally, sharing the stage with Pauline Oliveros, Thurston Moore, Alan Licht, Phil Niblock, and Otomo Yoshihide to name just a few. She has performed in venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum in Bordeaux, France; the Akademies der Kunste in both Vienna and Berlin; and Sonoteca in Lima, Peru. She was an artist in residence in 2008 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the DIA:Beacon Museum and recently performed for Christian Marclay and the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC as part of Christian Marclay: FESTIVAL.

Stephan Moore is a composer, improvisor, audio artist, sound designer and curator based in Brooklyn and Providence. As an improviser and musician, he founded the electronic duo Evidence with Scott Smallwood, the improvising quartet Volume with Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, and Suzanne Thorpe, and has performed internationally with Christian Wolff, John Paul Jones, Pauline Oliveros, William Winant, David Behrman, Alex Waterman, John King, Keith Rowe, Takehisa Kosugi, Michael Haleta, MV Carbon, Andrea Parkins, Zach Layton, Troy Pohl, Michael Dauphinais, Curtis Bahn, David Linton, Mikel Rouse, Newton Armstrong, Seth Cluett, Ikue Mori, Kenta Nagai, Larry Polansky, Timothy Place, Seongah Shin, Jesse Stiles, and Joan La Barbara, among others. An avid collaborator, he has created new work with choreographers Yanira Castro, Helene Lesterlin, and Julian Barnett, live video pioneers Bill Etra and Benton-C Bainbridge, performance artist Kyle DeCamp, and the avant-theater company The Nerve Tank. From 2004 to 2010, he performed over 250 concerts with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, serving as their sound engineer and music coordinator, and as a touring musician.

Suzanne Thorpe is a performer, composer, educator and arts-activist who strives for breakthroughs in understanding via sound. She composes site-specific works that employ psycho-acoustic phenomena, aural harmonics and tuned filtering systems that have been presented at Issue Project Room (NYC), Judson Church (NYC), Diapason (NYC), Megapolis Festival (Baltimore), Activating the Medium Festival (San Francisco) and more. As an electro-acoustic improviser she has performed with Chris Brown, Pauline Oliveros, Gino Robair, Zeena Parkins, Ulrich Krieger, Zbigniew Karkosky, Anti-Matter, Michael Schumacher, Bonnie Jones, Philip White, Annette Krebs and others at venues such as The Stone (NYC), No Idea Festival (Austin, TX), Pyramid Atlantic Center for the Arts (Silver Spring, MD), L'envers (Montreal, Canada), White Box (NYC), LMAK (NYC), 21 Grand (Oakland, CA), The Luggage Store (San Francisco, CA), Greenwich House Music School (NYC), Roulette, and Albany Sonic Arts Collective (Albany, NY) to name a few. She is a founding member of critically acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she composed, performed, recorded, produced and toured from 1989 through 1998, earning numerous critical accolades and a gold record for 1998's Deserters' Songs. She has appeared on over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, and Tape Drift, and can be heard on J Mascis' upcoming solo record Several Shades of Why.

All photographic images on this website were created by Shimpei Takeda. These images and others are available in high resolution for press purposes. To obtain these images, or to discuss bookings, please contact stephan [at] oddnoise [dot] com.