LOS ANGELES - Cutting-edge visual art will meet innovatively experimental music on Tuesday June 24 when Los Angeles will be host to the first-ever American appearance of the multimedia London art rock group CIAM at KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic. The following night (June 25), CIAM will be performing publicly for the first time at Tangier in Los Feliz. The group seeks to be more than a band, but rather, in the words of founding member Jeff Shapiro, an "art and music movement."

CIAM's music alone has caused a stir with healthy airplay on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic hosted by famed DJ Nic Harcourt. The band has already made a visual impact on the music world with the YouTube video for debut album Anonymous' lead track, "Here I Am," which bore the distinction of being the most viewed video of the day in the UK and Japan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzXCk28Mbs

The group is constantly adding videos online - films whose visuals serve to highlight the songs by creating a symbiotic relationship with the music, such as "Life (Part 2)," available at

YouTube - Ciam - Life (Part 2)

The next video to be posted is "The Call."
Inspired by predecessors such as the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel - acts who refused to limit their creative outlets to one medium of expression - and with nods to more modern contemporaries such as Radiohead, the band has synthesized a performance combining music from their distinctively haunting debut, Anonymous, due this summer, with visual stimuli provided by top designers, film-makers, architects, and artists.

Included in the CIAM experience will be the work of Olga Gomez Fernandez, an Associate Architect at one of London's groundbreaking architectural firms, Squire & Partners, renown for her visual effects and motion graphic presentations. Also on display will be the work of award-winning photographer Jillian Lochner, an artist who has gained international reputation for her work in fashion and advertising. Other artists and designers involved in the presentation include Stephen McGraths (artist, architect at Squire & Partners), Brigitta Lenz (Foreign Office Architects, painter), Omri Taub (film director), Dragan Stiglic (3D visual artist), and Ron Zohar (animator).

CIAM is the five-piece brainchild of vocalist/guitarist Jeff Shapiro and viola/violinist Hadar Goldman, rounded out by Shapiro's former Astrohound bandmate, drummer Chris Hall, programmer/sound architect/guitarist Farrell Lennon and bassist Mark Ferguson.

Pronounced "See-Am" or "Si-am," the band takes their name from the notorious Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (International Congress of Modern Architecture), a series of conferences instituted in 1928 by a collective of European architects in an attempt to redesign, restructure and rebuild Modern Europe, and continues to operate on a principle that parallels their namesake's as they strive to restructure the architecture of modern music; as Shapiro observes, "Just picking up a guitar and writing a few chords is not enough anymore." In their striving to become more a movement than a band, the group incorporates film, animation, visuals, design, architecture, and other art forms into their own work. This ambition will be realized at this debut performance, which is sure to transcend the format of a simple rock concert into something more akin to a performance art happening.

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