Shelley Hirsch & Aki Onda with Ursula Scherrer
Shelly Hirsch
Going as far back as her childhood, Hirsch relentlessly mines her life experiences, concocting brilliant collage-like reminiscences that are alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, disquieting and euphoric. Embracing archetypal personas —, she weaves their reinvented essences into the maze of associations conjured by her alchemical compositions. Investigating immediate consciousness, memory consciousness, and image-making consciousness, she becomes a producer of sonic images, recycling the discarded and the strange. Her remarkably unfettered access to the motherlode of automatism enhances her gift of spontaneous ingenuity.
anne lebaron from: “Surrealism in Postmodern Music
Aki Onda
Aki Onda is a self-taught electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in NewYork. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set to live guitar improvisation. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Shelley Hirsch.
The poetic quality of Ursula Scherrer‘s work reminds one of moving paintings, drawing the viewer into the images, leaving the viewer with their own stories. She transforms landscapes into serene, abstract portraits of rhythm, color and light, where the images have less to do with what we see then the feeling they leave behind.Scherrer is a Swiss video artist living in New York City. Her work has been shown in festivals, galleries and museums internationally. Scherrer has worked with the composers/musicians Shelley Hirsch, Michelle Nagai, Kato Hideki, Flo Kaufmann, Domenico Sciajno, Michael J. Schumacher, Monya Pletsch, among others, in the creation of video and sound installations, live performances and single-channel videos. Together with Katherine Liberovskaya, Scherrer organizes OptoSonic Tea, a series dedicated to the convergence of live visuals with live sounds.
http://www.ursulascherrer.com
The Dream of the Ants + Matt Bauder and Jason Ajemian + Amy Cimini and Katie Young Duos
The Dream of the Ants
Terrence McManus-classical guitar
Ellery Eskelin-saxophone
Gerry Hemingway-drums
The Dream of the Ants, a new chamber ensemble led by guitarist Terrence McManus, will performing a new multi-sectional, through-composed work entitled, The Machine. The piece is divided into seven overlapping sections, and is highly influenced by the work of Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti, and Bela Bartok.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, guitarist Terrence McManus grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut. He has performed with Bill Frisell, Tim Berne, Ellery Eskelin, Mark Helias, Gerry Hemingway, Herb Robertson, Anthony Cox, Kermit Driscoll, Gene Bertoncini, Russ Lossing, Marty Eurlick, and Michael Sarin, and has performed at Carnegie Hall, the New York Guitar Festival, Ellis Island, and the inaugural month at John Zorn’s The Stone. In November of 2004, Terrence was invited to perform in the first annual Minnesota Sur Seine jazz festival in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. An accomplished solo guitarist, Terrence performs his own compositions and arrangements, and has developed a unique style of improvisation, drawing on extended technique and prepared guitar. Terrence’s solo improvisations were featured in the New York City debut of the Fermin Cabal play Disappeared(Tejas Verdes). The play’s month long residency took place at the Richmond Shepard Theatre in September 2006. In 2006 Terrence formed Flattened Planet, a record label dedicated to the promotion of new, creative, and improvised music. In 2008 Terrence was featured in the book, State of the Axe: Guitar Master’s in Photographs and Words, by legendary photographer Ralph Gibson. The book, published on Yale University Press, was produced in conjunction with The Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston, TX, where the book’s images were on exhibition.
Matt Bauder
Matt Bauder is a saxophonist and composer who has studied with Ed Sarath, Anthony Braxton, Ron Kuivila and Alvin Lucier. In the past ten years he has been an active member of the new music scenes in Ann Arbor, Chicago, Berlin and New York, where he has performed with, among others, Braxton, Bill Dixon, Fred Anderson, Jeff Parker, Taylor Ho Bynum, The SEM Ensemble, Ken Vandermark and Phil Minton. He appears on recordings with Jason Ajemian (Locust Music), Rob Mazurek (Thrill Jockey), Neil Michael Hagerty (Drag City), His Name is Alive (4AD/TimeStereo), Saturday Looks Good to Me (Polyvinyl) and Bill Brovald (Tzadik). His recordings as a leader and co-leader on 482 Music, Clean Feed and Eye & Ear Records have received wide critical acclaim.
Matt Bauder will be performing with This Could be Anywhere (w/ Jason Ajemian) & Architeuthis Walks on Land (w/ Katherine Young, Amy Cimini).
From Bacteria to Boys
Mike Pride
Photo Credit: Peter Gannushkin / DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET
Mike Pride- drums, compositions
Darius Jones- alto sax
Peter Bitenc- doublebass
Alex Marcelo-piano.
Mike Pride’s FROM BACTERIA TO BOYS features some of the most startling and beautiful new voices in modern jazz and blurs the lines between rhythmic modern-jazz, chant works, RnB (R. Kelly, mainly) and 20th/21st century classical music, all with an intensity and center of focus any one familiar with Pride’s music has come to expect.
“Mike Pride is the kind of musician that makes the current NYC underground so vital. He’s always challenging himself with new situations and breaking down barriers between different scenes, intermingling avant-rock, avant-jazz, free improv, and miscellaneous wackiness in a countless stream of projects.” – Michael Anton Parker, Downtown Music Gallery
“From Bacteria To Boys brings the noise with a funk/punk/modern Downtown sound, recalling John Lurie’s early work, weaving rhythms with head nodding beats. The thumping stops to reveal the multi-time mix of hypnotic sounds. Pride alternates between hard driving and his flair for minimal sounds and more open landscapes” – Mark Corroto, All About Jazz
“Drummer Mike Pride stokes the furnace with fire, while never stinting on finesse.” – Time Out NY
“I hereby declare this man one of my heroes from now on.” – Touching Extremes
www.myspace.com/snugglestencil(Mike’s music page)
Pamela Z
Pamela Z is a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing and sampling technology. Processing her live voice through “MAX MSP” software on a PowerBook, she creates solo works that combine operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, and sampled concrète sounds. These sounds are often triggered via custom MIDI controllers such as Ed Severinghaus’ BodySynth™ or Donald Swearingen’s Light SensePod, both of which allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in flexible black-box venues and proscenium halls. In addition to her performance work, she has a growing body of inter-media works including multi-channel sound and video installations– some solo, and some involving visual collaborators
Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including: Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center in New York; the Interlink Festival in Japan; Other Minds in San Francisco; and Pina Bausch Tanztheater’s 25 Jahre Fest in Wuppertal, Germany. She has composed, recorded and performed original scores for choreographers and for film/video artists, and has done vocal work for other composers (including Charles Amirkhanian, Vijay Iyer, and Henry Brant). Her large-scale, multi-media performance works, Parts of Speech, Gaijin and Voci, have been presented at venues including the Kitchen in New York, Theater Artaud and ODC Theater in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art Theatre in Chicago, as well as at theaters in Washington D.C. and Budapest Hungary. Her one-act opera Wunderkabinet (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) premiered in 2005 at The LAB Gallery in San Francisco, and was presented at REDCAT in Los Angeles and Open Ears Festival in Canada. Her new inter-media work The Pendulum is scheduled to have its San Francisco Premiere at the Royce Gallery in 2008. She has had audio works included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum in Cologne. Her site-specific, multi-channel sound works have been presented at the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs NY, the Dakar Biennale in Sénégal, and the Hellenic Museum in Chicago. Her work has also been presented at the San Jose Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio in New York, and La Biennale di Venezia in Italy.
Ms. Z has been commissioned to compose works for new music chamber ensembles: the Bang On A Can Allstars; Ethel, the California E.A.R. Unit; the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble; the Empyrean Ensemble, and the St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra. Since 1986, she has been producing “Z Programs”, an ongoing series of interdisciplinary events in which her own work has been featured along with that of other experimental artists in various genres. She has collaborated with a wide range of composer/performers, media artists, and choreographers including Miya Masaoka, Joan Jeanrenaud, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Momo Koga, Leigh Evans, and Jo Kreiter. She has participated in several Zakros New Music Theatre events (including their John Cage festivals), and has performed with The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Pamela is the recipient of numerous awards, including: the Guggenheim Fellowship, the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts; the Creative Capital Fund; the ASCAP Music Award; and the NEA and Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. For more information, please visit: www.pamelaz.com
Qbico U-Nite XIII w/ Arthur Doyle + Acid Birds + Muruga & Perry Robinson Duo w/ Special Guest Badal Roy + Direct Current
ISSUE Project Room and Qbico Records Present Qbico U-Nite XIII
5 sets
Arthur Doyle
Saxophonist/flutist/singer Arthur Doyle is hardly alone in his position as a marginal jazz figure. In an art form known for its many trials and tribulations (both artistic and financial), Doyle hasn’t made his situation any easier by attempting to carve a singular path along the music’s outskirts. The fact that he has done so, however, is what makes his music so unique. Performing in a style he calls “free jazz soul,” Doyle combines the liberated freedom flights of the avant-garde with the gritty, gut-wrenching emotion of gospel and R&B.
The second of five children, Arthur Doyle was born in Birmingham, AL, on June 26, 1944. He attended college at Tennessee State University where he quickly built a circle of contacts in the Nashville music scene, playing with Louis Smith (Horace Silver) and Walter Miller (Sun Ra). Following brief stints in Detroit, playing in a big band led by Charles Moore, and back home in Alabama with R&B outfit Johnny Jones & the King Casuals, Doyle left for New York at the age of 23.
Still essentially a bop player, Doyle quickly became acclimated to the more radical environment surrounding the city’s bustling loft scene. Shortly after his arrival, the saxophonist hooked up with drummer Milford Graves and began sitting in on dates with Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Declining a possible job with the latter outfit, Doyle instead joined a small combo led by Noah Howard, performing on the sessions that produced The Black Ark (1969).
Concerted efforts by jazz’s mainstream to stifle the practitioners of the “new thing” took their toll, however, and Doyle vanished from the scene from 1972-1974. He would not appear on an album again until 1976, ending a seven-year period of recorded silence with his blazing tenor work on Graves’ Babi Music. The following year, he led a quintet of his own in a performance at a New York loft dubbed the Brook. The results were documented on his landmark Alabama Feeling and released in a limited pressing of 1000 copies.
Amongst the crowd that night was an admiring guitarist named Rudolph Grey. The pair met that evening and soon devised plans for an outfit of their own. Debuting at Max’s Kansas City as the Blue Humans, they proceeded to play a series of New York dates with drummer Beaver Harris. Doyle abandoned the project shortly after, the increasingly bleak situation for free jazz players in the states convincing him to move to Paris in 1982.
Not long after his arrival, however, the saxophonist was arrested on false charges, spending the next five years in prison. Horn-less, Doyle wrote prolifically nonetheless, producing the first compositions for his songbook: a massive, 300-piece aural memoir. Once released, Doyle returned to New York where he recorded the new music, capturing his hollers, shouts, and singing (along with his flute and tenor work) in gritty fidelity on a boombox. These recordings subsequently appeared on the albums Plays and Sings from the Songbook (1992), Songwriter (1994), and Do the Breakdown (1997).
The 1990s saw Doyle performing with a number of different musicians from the jazz and improv schools including bassist Wilber Morris, drummers Rashid Bakr and Sunny Murray, and guitarists Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, and old spar Rudolph Grey. The first studio recordings since his 1969 date with Howard emerged as well: Dawn of a New Vibration (with Murray) and Prayer for Peace (with Jim Linton and Scott Rodziczak).
(from allmusic.com Nathan Bush)
Acid Birds
Acid Birds is a trio composed of Andrew Barker, Charles Waters and Jaime Fennelly. Barker formed the trio ACID BIRDS in order to perform the composition of the same name. Along with saxophonist / clarinetist Charles Waters, and multi-instrumentalist Jaime Fennelly, the trio premiered in 2004 for the artist collective Free103point9, and their creative music event entitled Assembled: Free Jazz + Electronics. In November of 2007, Barker, Waters, and Fennelly convened for a second time to record ACID BIRDS with longtime collaborators Jeremy Wilms and Torbitt Schwartz on QBICO records (Italy).
Andrew Barker is a drummer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Barker has appeared on recordings with a wide range of artists such as bassist William Parker, saxophonists Rob Brown, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, and Charles Waters – with whom Barker founded the durable Gold Sparkle Band in 1994. Barker plays in a wide variety of musical settings, most recently writing and playing guitar for his new heavy metal band, Hallux.
Multi-instrumentalist & artist Jaime Fennelly maintains a practice of musical performance & composition which borders on near ritual praxis in its approach and conception. He is a founding member (along with Chris Forsyth and Fritz Welch) of the iconoclastic group Peeesseye, a transcontinental amalgam of minimalist rock, noise, folk, drone, psych, improv, sound poetry, and absurdity that has produced seven CDs, one 7-inch, over 145 concerts in Europe and the US, and untold blown minds since forming in 2002. Jaime is also a member of the elusive and rarely spotted quartet Phantom Limb & Bison, the intermittent pranksters Manpack Variant and the noise/akshuntist cover band peeinmyfacewithsurgery. His music has been released by Digitalis Records, QBICO, Archive Recordings, 8mm, Misanthropic Agenda, Chocolate Monk, Unframed Recordings, Utech, Deep Fried Tapes, Locust Music and Evolving Ear. Currently he is working on a series of photographs documenting his own slow unraveling whilst living on a remote island off the state of Washington.
Saxophonist Charles Waters lives in Brooklyn. He works with grids, particles, and alpha notational systems in the mystical realm of nuzion science. He still loves coffee!
Muruga & Perry Robinson Duo W/ Special Guest Badal Roy
Muruga
Muruga Booker was born Steven Bookvich in Detroit, Michigan on December 27, 1942. His father, Melvin Bookvich, was a shoemaker who played accordion. He has a wife, Shakti; a son, Aaron; and a daughter, Rani. Booker and his family moved back to the Detroit area from Oakland, California in 2000 and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Booker first played the accordion before taking up drums as a pre-teen. He studied drums under Misha Bischoff, a Russian music teacher. He first professionally played drums with “The Low Rocks” in Detroit as Steve Booker. Under that name he also achieved local recognition playing with the “Thunder Rocks” and Ted Lucas and The Spike Drivers, and was known for his long, driving drum solos. He shared the bill at venues like Detroit’s Eastown Theatre and Grande Ballroom with Ted Nugent (2/23/70), Traffic (6/5/70 & 6/6/70), Jack Bruce (2/13/70 & 2/14/70), and others.
At the first Woodstock Festival, where he played drums with Tim Hardin, he met Swami Satchidananda who gave him the name Muruga. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Booker lived in New York and played with David Peel on “King of Punk” and “Death to Disco,” then moved back to Detroit in 1980 where he connected with funk legend George Clinton and became an official P-Funk All-Star. His band at that time, Muruga and the Soda Jerks, had several albums produced by George Clinton.
In mid-1985 he moved to Oakland, California and formed the band Muruga UFM, which included Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist James Gurley. In 1990, after performing with Prem Das on the classic drum meditation album Journey of the Drum, he joined Merl Saunders and formed Merl Saunders and the Rainforest Band with Jerry Garcia.
In 2000 Booker formed the band Muruga and The Global Village Ceremonial Band, which released the CD One Global Village, featuring P-Funk vocalist Belita Woods and jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson. They played at several festivals including the Starwood Festival, Rhythm Fest 1 with Mickey Hart, and Rhythm Fest 2 with Airto Moreira. In 2002 his recording company Musart and the Association for Consciousness Exploration co-hosted the SpiritDrum Festival, a tribute to Babatunde Olatunji, also featuring Sikiru Adepoju, Badal Roy, Jeff Rosenbaum, Halim El-Dabh, Perry Robinson, and Jim Donovan of Rusted Root[1]. In 2004, with most of the same musicians as Muruga & GVCB, Muruga formed the band Free Funk (also featuring Trey Lewd, and Louie Kabbabie), which plays mostly in the Detroit area. He also plays with Mark Hershberger, and Richard Smith as the Global Village Trio. Booker continues to work with George Clinton and play with the P-Funk All Stars whenever they performed in California, and occasionally elsewhere.
Perry Robinson
Robinson grew up in New York City and attended the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts in the summer of 1959. His first record, Funk Dumpling (with Kenny Barron, Henry Grimes, and Paul Motian) was recorded in 1962. He also appeared with Grimes on The Call in 1965. Robinson served in a U.S. military band in the early 1960s. Since 1973 he has worked with Jeanne Lee and Gunter Hampel’s Galaxie Dream Band. He contributed to Dave Brubeck’ s Two Generations of Brubeck and played with Burton Greene’ s Dutch klezmer band Klezmokum. He has led his own groups in performances and on record, with albums on the Chiaroscuro, WestWind, and Timescraper labels. More recently, he worked with William Parker and Walter Perkins on Bob’s Pink Cadillac and several discs on the CIMP label.
From 1975 until 1977, Robinson was member of a band called Clarinet Contrast, featuring German clarinet players Theo Jörgensmann and Bernd Konrad. He has recorded with Lou Grassi as a member of his PoBand since the late Nineties, and with Lou Grassi, Wayne Lopes and Luke Faust in ‘The Jug Jam’, an improvisational jug band. He plays in a free jazz and world music trio along with tabla player Badal Roy and bassist Ed Schuller, with whom he recorded the CD Raga Roni. He has played with Dave Brubeck and Muruga Booker in the MBR jazz trio, and has also played with Booker in the Global Village Ceremonial Band, and has played with them at the Starwood Festival, SpiritDrum Festival, and RhythmFest with Sikiru Adepoju, Halim El-Dabh, Jeff Rosenbaum and Badal Roy[1]. Robinson also played an integral part in the formation of ‘Cosmic Legends’ an improvisational music/performance group led by composer/pianist Sylvie Degiez which included musicians Rashied Ali, Wayne Lopes, Hayes Greenfield, and Michael Hashim among others. In 2005 he was featured on his cousin Jeffrey Lewis’ album “City and Eastern Songs” on Rough Trade Records, produced by Kramer. His most recent release was OrthoFunkOlogy in 2008 with the band Free Funk, also featuring Muruga Booker, Badal Roy, and Shakti.
Badal Roy
Amerendra ‘Badal’ Roy Choudhury arrived in New York in 1968 with a pair of tablas and eight dollars in his pocket. In three days he took a busboy job and then waiting positions in various Indian restaurants. Soon, instead of waiting on customers he was entrancing them with his drumming. Badal’s passionate style of playing is free-flowing and always from the heart, and when Miles Davis heard him play, the superstar warmed to him and spread the word. Soon he received his big break: an invitation to record with John McLaughlin and Miles successively.
Direct Current
“Direct Current” is a new band featuring Daniel Carter, Dave Nuss, and Atiba Kwabena-Wilson. Kwabena is a musician (flute, djembe, vox) whose roots with Carter go back to the 70s and 80s nyc free jazz scene. His focus currently is on poetry and storytelling in the African folkloric tradition, as well as his band “Befo’ Quartet”, performing every Sunday at the St. Nich’s Pub. Daniel Carter is a ubiquitous presence on the nyc scene who presumably needs no introduction, only to say that his energy and musicality are unsurpassed. Nuss is a member of the No-Neck Blues Band who made several records with Carter in the mid 90′s, and is currently recording a theatrical score with Kwabena. “Direct Current” is the result of these three channelers providing an unmediated experience of new tradition.
No Neck Blues Band + Invisible Conga People
For the past 15 years, the Harlem-based No-Neck Blues Band have ignored any logical illusion or obvious contradiction in exacting their own true monumental sound: an avant-garde of cemeteries, of almost complete blindness. Though their attempt to blur the edges between the prize of obviousness and the reality of ignorance has found them labeled remote by a few, you can read the past as you wish. It can either go down as an assault of backbreaking lifetimes or a mere flutter of sunstrokes. In due course, they have proven themselves to be continuous, rife with meandrous fog and vision, the purveyors of a snaky cohesion. From the band: “Improvisation, over time, yields access to substratum vistas of altogether unseen colouration. This is characteristic of a place in which our music occurs. It may be heard simultaneously here on earth, it may be heard now in the future in surround-sound, DVD audio, via light pipe, etc. But due to its place of origin, it reaches us here without translation, solely as echoes sounding from an immaterial world. Not unlike the radio dish tuned into Space, hoping to catch some intergalactic communique, we’ve assumed responsibility for broadcasting the atmosphere surrounding the other intelligences combined among us.”
Invisible Conga People
New Yorkers Eric Tsai and Justin Simon use synthesizers, pedals and drum machines to create a psychedelic slow pulse boogie. their first 12″ came out last year on NYC label Italians Do It Better.
Share
what is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday in New York City at the Issue Project Room (through December), from 8 to Midnight.
open jams and walk-in sets
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join.
8pm, free - - – 1/25/09 featured guest set (starting around 9 p.m.):
The Future Memory Project
by
Rui Costa and Maile Colbert (Portugal, US)
A house speaks for us through image and sound
A house is filled with empty rooms
And time past
And promised future
A room in a house
Coated with memory like fine dust
Dust settles into the grain
The grain creaks into the present
Calling out it’s past memory
Creaks and calls are captured
For the present’s translation
A house speaks for us through image and sound
Rui Costa is a sound artist from Lisbon, Portugal. He has been publicly presenting his work since 1997. He is a founding member of Binaural - http://www.binauralmedia.org , an arts collective dedicated to the promotion of sound and media arts in a rural context. Binaural runs an artist residency space in Nodar, a small village in the north of Portugal.
He has presented his work in many venues and festivals across Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and the United States and has closely collaborated with such artists as Maile Colbert, Manuela Barile, Iñaki Ríos, Paulo Raposo, Pablo Rega, André Gonçalves and Carlos Santos.
In 2008 Rui has been exhibiting an intermedia performance/installation entitled “La Scatola”, which he co-created with the Italian performer Manuela Barile. This project has received a major grant from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture and has been presented in several contemporary art museums (MUSAC and Centro Huarte in Spain), municipal theaters (Guarda and Barcelos, in Portugal) and sound art festivals (EME in Portugal and Hurta Cordel in Spain). As part of this project, Rui and Manuela have been giving a workshop entitled “The Amplified Expression of the Body”, in which they engage the participants in using sound as a means of characterizing and expanding the identity of a performer’s body and of the surrounding space.
Maile Colbert is a filmmaker, video, and sound artist recently relocated from Los Angeles, US to Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently working for the art organization Binaural. http://www.binauralmedia.org/
She holds a BFA in The Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, and a MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts.
She has had multiple screenings, exhibits, and shows, including The New York Film Festival, LACE Gallery, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, The Portland International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, the Störung Festival in Barcelona, the Teatra Municipal in Guarda, the Observitori Festival in Valencia, and has performed and screened widely in Japan, Europe, Mexico, and the States.
8pm, free
http://issueprojectroom.org/
http://share.dj
Share
what is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday in New York City at the Issue Project Room (through December), from 8 to Midnight.
open jams and walk-in sets
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join.
8pm, free
Share
what is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday in New York City at the Issue Project Room (through December), from 8 to Midnight.
open jams and walk-in sets
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join.
8pm, free
Paranoid Critical Revolution + Bob Warner, Dave Dismukes, Emily Kramer Trio
Paranoid Critical Revolution
Intense, frantic, NYC-based THE PARANOID CRITICAL REVOLUTION self-released their debut CD “Death of the Cool” just in time to play All Tomorrow’s Parties, A Nightmare Before Christmas curated by Portishead in Minehead, England in December 2007. They’ve been described by IMPOSE magazine as “Seething with treble, technically formidable, and crashingly dissonant, THE PARANOID CRITICAL REVOLUTION was another of those acts that create far more of a racket than would seem possible for a two piece.” Guitarist Reg Bloor and drummer Libby Fab met in 2005 and have been playing on the NYC club scene since the summer of 2006. They also curated the “Creating A Diversion” film festival in 2007.
In addition, Reg Bloor has been playing with Glenn Branca (to whom she is married) since 2000. She played in Branca’s Symphony No. 12, their rock band Branca/Bloor, in his trio, eventually becoming Concertmaster for his Symphony No. 13. In the late 90′s she was a founding member of the Boston-based band TWITCHER, who released the self-produced CD “Leg of Lamb of God” in 1999.
Libby Fab became part of the Glenn Branca crew in 2006 as technical director, rehearsal drummer and assistant engineer for Symphony No. 13. She has worked on Branca’s shows in New Jersey, Belgium, Dublin, London, Rome and Seattle. Prior to joining PCR, Libby studied electro-acoustic music and music composition at Trinity College Dublin, where she completed an M.Phil in Music and Media Technology.
Bob Warner, Dave Dismukes, Emily Kramer Trio
Authentic music of offshore banks, folk lullabies of Agartha coming in late at night through the waves of fictional foreign radio stations, drawing from drone, dub, and traditional forms of Eastern music Bob Warner/ Dave Dismukes/ Emily Kramer create a murky minimalism with their ears towards Henry Flynt’s Back Porch Hilly Billy Blues. Members of the trio, Emily Kramer (Violin), Robert Warner (Oud), Dave Dismukes (Bass), have played in a variety of different bands including Burnversion, The Oaks and In Mountains In Stars.
Emily Kramer has played violin since elementary school orchestra. After playing with Robert Warner and Barry Stone (In Mountains In Stars) she went on to collaborate with Krystal Selbee in “Fishing Lake”, Brendan Colthurst in “Picture Deal” and Eugene Jho in “Beastly”. Her solo project is entitled “A Valiant Life, A Revel Cause”. This is her first show with trio.
Dave Dismukes started playing bass as a teenager.Since then he has played in the bands ” Beautiful”,”Jai Alai”,”The Oaks”,”Finial”,”The Potato Eaters”,”Passing Bells”.He is Originally from New Orleans and is now based in Brooklyn.
Bob Warner teaches High School in Queens. He has played in Burnversion, The Oaks, In Mountains In Stars, Passing Bells. He is also active in composing soundtracks for Films. He is originally from Detroit and has lived in New Orleans through the 90′s.
White Light + Cursillistas + Visitations
Visitations
Visitations is a Portland, Maine-based group of free-form psych-folk purveyers whose sound is not entirely dissimilar to what Father Yod and Yo Ho Wha 13 might sound like were they extant today. Eschewing self-promotion, their web presence is virtually nonexistent; the principal driving force behind the group — a gentleman known only as Brendan — doesn’t even have an email address.
Cursillistas
Cursillistas was the name Matthew Lajoie gave to a lo-fi folk recording project in 2005. Four years and nearly a dozen releases later, Cursillistas has grown from its original solo voice and focus to an all-encompassing collaboration between Lajoie and several rotating musicians in New England. Cursillistas uses simple fingerpicked guitars, electric slide, banjo, tribal drums and layered voices to create music anywhere in the range between strictly improvisational, esoteric experiments and folk-and-country-inspired outsider pop songs. The past year has seen them share the stage with such acts as MV & EE, Natural Snow Buildings, Castanets, Kemialliset Ystavat, and Lau Nau. Their first widely-available CD–Wasp Stings the Last Bitter Flavor–was released in 2008 by Digitalis Industries, with an upcoming 12″LP / CD to be co-released by Time-Lag Records and L’animaux Tryst in March 2009.
White Light
White Light is the pop-ambience of Ian Paige with lots of help from the L’Animaux Tryst family up in Portland, Maine. The latest release is a split 7″ with Barry Burst and a new LP is out soon, both on L’ATFR.
Lavalier
Lavalier is a collective of artists who use the music of co-founders Steve Milton and Dave Horowitz as a catalyst for live artistic exploration. This group reflects a young generation of artists who are influenced by what are considered both high and low artistic practices and who see no delineation between the two. The group’s main goal is to expose and present the amazing but often esoteric contemporary artistic practices in a new context and fresh environment. The music is often labeled “indie-experimental rock;” the song structures are heavily influenced by standard indie-rock practices as well as contemporary classical/avant-garde aesthetics. In a live environment, these songs are explored via various methods of musical improvisation and interpretation. One method of live interpretation and improvisation is spatialization, a practice endemic to “electro-acoustic” or acusmatic performances. During the performance, audio signals produced by different instruments on stage are captured in real-time using a custom-designed computer interface, and played back over a ring of loudspeakers installed around the audience area. In conjunction with the live musical performances, real time animation and film manipulation is projected onto a screen in front of and behind the musicians. Elements will be created using customized processes and interfaces, which will be disseminated via projectors into the environment.
Steve Milton – Vocals and Various Inst.
Dave Horowtiz – Guitars
Terence Caulkins – DSP and Percussion
Melati Malay – Guitars and Vocals
Yasmin Reshamwala – Keyboards and Vocals
John Sutton – Bass
Josh Horowitz – Visuals
Eban Byrne – Visuals
Tom Carter + Steve Gunn + Chris Forsyth
Tom Carter
Tom Carter is a guitar player best known for his work with acclaimed psych-drone iconoclasts Charalambides. Since 2000, however, he has become increasingly active as not only a solo artist but as a collaborator. He has performed with improvising musicians as diverse as Thurston Moore, Jandek, Tetuzi Akiyama, Matt Valentine, and many others, as well as being a key member in groups like Badgerlore (with Ben Chasny of 6 Organs of Admittance), Friday Group, Mudsuckers (with Robert Horton and the Yellow Swans), and Zaika (with Marcia Bassett of the Double Leopards and Hototogisu).
Carter’s solo work covers a lot of territory, but latter-day sightings show him to be concentrating on looped guitar drones of immensely stacked beauty, with heaps of psychedelic melodic content missing from the repertoires of many noise and drone bands. His most recent solo releases are a pair of releases on Important Records, Shots at Infinity 1 & 2.
Steve Gunn
Steve Gunn plies his trade in the Northeast, calling Brooklyn home. He’s best know for the major role he plays in the group GHQ. Over the course of numerous excellent releases, it became clear that Gunn was a real force in experimental music. Once his solo music started being unearthed, there was no turning back. Steve will be performing a mix of improvisational blues based guitar works.
Chris Forsyth
Chris Forsyth’s music eludes easy categorization. He is a founding member (along with Jaime Fennelly and Fritz Welch) of the iconoclastic group Peeesseye, a transcontinental amalgam of minimalist rock, noise, folk, drone, psych, improv, sound poetry, and absurdity that has produced seven CDs, one 7-inch, over 145 concerts in Europe and the US, and untold blown minds since forming in 2002. He also performs solo on both electric and acoustic 6- and 12-string guitars, leads the free rock trio Soft History with drummer Ryan Sawyer and bassist Peter Kerlin, and is a member of the elusive and rarely spotted experimental group Phantom Limb & Bison. Other notable collaborators have included reductionist/blues guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, Bay Area composer/performer Ernesto Diaz-Infante, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and RoseAnne Spradlin, plus others too numerous too mention. His first solo CD Live Journal at the Mice Machine VIP Dance Floor was recently released on the Incunabulum label. He is the caretaker of Evolving Ear and lives in Brooklyn, NY, USA.
D. Charles Speer + Corndawg
D. Charles Speer
Singer-guitarist Dave Shuford possesses a deep, woodsy baritone and the confident intonation of a master storyteller. In a world populated by meh-rate bar bands, Shuford and his crack quartet are our best saloon band: listen to After Hours, Shuford’s second album as D. Charles Speer but his first with the Helix, and you’ll have trouble not thinking of dusty roads, big skies and rye whiskey served in bottles marked xx. What makes the group’s getting-by-in-hard-times boogie rock so commanding is that many of the players also perform with veteran experimental combos: Shuford and bassist Jason Meagher—who’s responsible for the production, polished but not slick—are from No Neck Blues Band and Coach Fingers, while guitarist Marc Orleans is in Sunburned Hand of the Man. So when these freewheeling bandits hit full gallop—Hans Chew’s rollicking piano is key—you’ll notice psychedelic fires backlighting the songs. And you won’t think this is anybody’s side project. That power notwithstanding, Shuford’s authoritative singing is the main attraction. On “Guns in the Hills” he describes just one of many situations coming off the rails: “Storm is rising, sky goes black now… And you feel it in the air?/?The fabric’s startin’ to tear.” Here and throughout After Hours, Shuford’s untroubled tone proves he’s intimate with some kind of truth, but savors the winding path that leads to it. —Mike Wolf
Corndawg
Montana born freak with dead on southern style who runs marathons, airbrushes t-shirts with pink panther & taz drawings, does medical experiments for cash, and knits sweater covers for his guitars. One of those great guys that every touring undergound band has met or played on a bill with & always has a loose & epic tale to spin about rollerblading from NYC to Baltimore, driving a race car, drinking grapefruit juice with Rick James, or some other such thing.
Myspace.com/thecorndawg
www.PissOnFord.org
Jonathan Kane’s February + Monotract
February
Jonathan Kane is a Downtown NYC legend — as co-founder of the no-wave behemoth Swans, and the rhythmic thunder behind the massed-guitar armies of Rhys Chatham and the rock excursions of La Monte Young and one of the hardest-hitting drummers on the planet.
“Wedding the brutal severity of Delta country boogie and Seventies German pulse rock – all dead-ahead motion and mounting detail…Epic.”
Rolling Stone
“Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. Interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock, he has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic”
New York Times
“Intensely propulsive motorik blues, its muscularity and greased relentlessness is never less than exhilarating”
Uncut
Monotract
Monotract blends trad to avant hardcore dynamics with electronic textures and far-out spatial distortions, resulting in a compelling marriage of worlds more accessible than the patronage of Load Records, home of Lightning Bolt and Yellow Swans, might suggest. One of the keys to the [Trueno Oscuro's] success lies in the application of dubwise treatments to the Q: Are We Not Men? Devo clamour of “The Ballad of Lechon” becomes a mind-shatteringly percussive assault, thanks to the liberal application of echo, most notably in its devastating final moments. This is by no means a new conceit- reverb has long been appropriated by cannier noisemakers, from Sonic Youth to Wolf Eyes- but [they] appear to have near-as-damnit perfected this particular art. Of course, it helps that in Roger Rimada the trio have a spectacularly talented drummer capable of balancing idiosyncracy with accuracy in a manner that wouldn’t shame Keith Moon. Other tracks indicate a possible way out of the crowded noise ghetto, applying the abject-electro filth favoured by the aforementioned Wolf Eyes and their ilk to solid song structures, surprisingly without diminishing either. “Red Tide” is a particularly effective example, an unholy collision of synthesized throb, metallic clang and compulsive martial rhythm that epitomises the album’s excellence. (The Wire)
Sportsman Paradise + Honne Wells
Sportsman’s Paradise
Sportsman’s Paradise is a large-ensemble project currently consisting of Kate Bell, Sommer Browning, Rob Fellman, Pete Fonda, Colin O’Con, Val Opielski, and Mathias Sias. Our stated purpose is to create music that merges minimalist practice (Rhys Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine) with the current freakout scene (Sunburned Hand of the Man, Yellow Swans, Vibracathedral Orchestra) to generate bliss-outs and psychedelic mayhem through controlled compositional techniques. At the Issue Project Room, SP will perform their Tibetan-bells-and-six-guitars half-hour piece XEAEX and debut a shorter composition for six guitars as well.
Honne Wells
Honne Wells hails from America’s Bible Belt South. It is there that he has been mining below the “underground” music scene for the past four years. After settling in Baltimore, Wells, originally billed as the solo act “Honey Waller,” brought to the Mason Dixon line a deep southern depression era repose.
For Honne Wells, the destitution of Baltimore paralleled the desperation of a pre-war America. Wells’ developed his style of over-driven, primitive amplification and performance using pre-war methodologies spit through electrical processes. Although initially a solo act, Wells’ teamed up with Texas based percussionist, Bobby Weiss in further experiments in noise composition. It was also working with percussionist Benji Derdeyn, with a project entitled, ” Henri Lee”, that a standardized structure emerged from his previous emotive-noise based performances.
In 2006, Wells left the city of Baltimore for New York. He began experimenting with techniques in recording; primarily with orthophonics and wax cylinder technologies. Today, Honne Wells continues his studies in orthophonic recording and audio documentation. He has given more than a dozen musical demonstrations articulating a focus on acoustic sound. Wells releases his recordings for study and preservation with the local group Yell-O-Faith Archive that deal predominantly with his work, and act as distributor for Wells’ recordings.
Honne Wells currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Helena Espvall & Zaimph Duo + These Wonderful Evils
Helena Espvall & Marcia Bassett Duo
Under the Zaimph veil, Bassett predominately uses guitar and vocals to create sounds that shimmer in a dark metallic buzz of sonic noise and drone, before a swift shift into blissed out ragas or crippling, brutal, white-hot noise. The organic improvised elements of Bassett’s work leave traces of eerie ghost voices and deep-space echoes that recall the electrified ritual of nomadic Japanese avant-gardists Taj Mahal Travellers — but more immediately sound like a magnification of her contributions to Double Leopards and Hototogisu, generating towers of electricity that move from malevolent arcs of anti-gravity and spumes of throttled single notes into deep wormholes that do violence to feeble notions of time and space.
These Wonderful Evils
Taking their name from The Shakers’ 1967 Swedish psych classic, These Wonderful Evils are largely the product of guitarist Zak Boerger and draw equally on the traditions of garage psych and proto-punk and slightly more erudite folk and minimalist approaches to sound-as-song, prizing intuition above all else as an organizing tool. Their debut album, ‘Regine Flory’ is a sideways attempt at that hoary chestnut “the anti-war record,” and in a 2008 review, The Wire magazine said, “there’s a lonesome edge to the music that would situate it outside of any particular historical tradition and closer to the mystery school of regional private press obscurities. The acoustic tracks skirt the fringes of American primitive without particularly sounding like anyone else, but it’s the elegiac fuzz settings that really make the album stand out.” Boerger is currently working with Scottish singer Chris Connelly, and the second These Wonderful Evils album will be available in spring 2009.
MATA Interval – Dither Electric Guitar Quartet
Brooklyn, NY – On January 21st at Issue Project Room, MATA presents a gloriously loud and eclectic program featuring Dither, a versatile electric guitar quartet and a rising force in New York. Curated by guitarists James Moore and Taylor Levine, MATA will showcase six exciting new works by young composers for electric guitars in duos, quartets, and finally a 10-piece hearing-deprived electric guitar orchestra!
James Moore and Taylor Levine are accomplished guitarists and chamber musicians who actively perform new and experimental music in New York. The two share a common approach to the guitar as a unique electro-acoustic instrument with extensive capabilities for electronic manipulation, a rich history of improvisation, wide ranges of timbre and style, and endless popular and cultural roots. Forming Dither in 2007, they have found an outlet to explore some of their favorite guitar music, and to work with composers to create an exciting new repertoire.
As Curators for MATA 2.3, James and Taylor will present an entire show of new electric guitar works, many of which are world premieres, including pieces by Eric km Clark, Lisa R. Coons, Bryce Dessner, Florent Ghys, Joshua Lopes, Paula Matthusen, and Wil Smith. These works represent a wide variety of approaches: from clean pop textures to heavily processed noise, from tight rhythmic unity to cacophonous sound mass. What unifies them all is that they utilize and wholeheartedly embrace the beautiful and engulfing sound of electric guitars.
Closing the show will be an exciting large ensemble piece by Eric km Clark, Canadian experimental composer and violinist for the California EAR Unit. The curious and captivating feature of this piece is Eric’s compositional technique of “Hearing Deprivation.” In this practice, the performers are deprived of hearing through the use of earplugs and cup-headphones, which playback white noise at a high volume. This makes it nearly impossible for an individual player to effectively coordinate with the ensemble or to judge his or her own sound. As the performers attempt to play their parts accurately, new soundscapes emerge ranging from hypnotizing hermetic canons, to driving sections of controlled chaos, to beautiful pointillistic textures. Though it may be a frightening idea, hearing deprivation proves to be a highly effective musical tool, and a powerful dramatic gesture.
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Dither Audio Samples:
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Dither is a quartet of electric guitarists who play an energetic mix of composed music and improvisation, all orchestrated through a galaxy of stomp boxes and effects. Guitarists Simon Kafka, Taylor Levine, Josh Lopes, and James Moore combined forces in 2007 with varied backgrounds in jazz, classical, and popular music. Since their debut concert at John Zorn’s experimental music venue The Stone, the group has been gaining recognition as both an eclectic improvising group and a skilled chamber ensemble.
Dither frequently performs original compositions, arrangements, new commissions, and the works of Fred Frith and Nick Didkovsky. Their performances have brought them to a number of venues including Roulette, Princeton University, the Extensible Electric Guitar Festival at Clark University, and most recently to the Fringe Theater in Hong Kong, where they premiered Samson Young’s multimedia theater piece “Hong Kong Explodes!” Upcoming shows include a showcase of orginal works for the Flea Theater’s “Music with a View” series.
James Moore is a versatile guitarist with many musical personalities. Performing on a wide variety of acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, and home-made instruments, James combines the sensitivity and lyricism from his classical training with a healthy dose of improvisation, theatrics, and experimentation. His chamber performances have brought him to concert halls and experimental music venues across the country, including shows with Bang on a Can, Other Minds, Princeton University, The Electronic Music Foundation, Anti-Social Music, the Merkin Hall Ear Department Series, and The Kitchen. As a soloist, he has been heard at the Chelsea Art museum playing music for amplified banjo and just-intonation steel string guitar, at Northwestern University performing on prepared classical guitar, and with the Astoria Symphony premiering a concerto for the Greek bouzouki. James also performs with several unconventional groups, including William Brittelle’s pop-art-concept ensemble Mohair Time Warp, and Jacob Cooper’s slowed-down pop-tragedy Timberbrit. James’s own projects include the new folk-noise group Oliphant and the mischievous rock band Passenger Fish. In addition to collaborating with gifted musicians and composers from his own generation, James has worked with many of today’s leading artists, including David Lang, Steve Reich, Ingram Marshall, and Meredith Monk. James grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, received degrees in guitar performance from The University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Yale School of Music. He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Amolvacy + Circuit des yeux
AMOLVACY
Aaaron Moore (of Volcano the Bear)
Dave Nuss (of No-Neck Blues Band)
“From the Mouth of the Iceman” is a performance about coming out of a period of such preoccupation and repression that it is difficult to reconstruct what has happened and to articulate the urgent ideas that are locked within you. As if thawing out, or coming out of an anesthetic state; it stings and you feel groggy but you want to say something with your mouth still numb or full of bloodied cotton. It is time to look elsewhere, to allow new ideas to come forward, to find focus and to recover from the shock and disillusionment of the last eight years.
www.myspace.com/amolvacy
Circuit des Yeux
Haley Fohr
(from Indiana)
www.myspace.com/circuitdesyeux
Tony Conrad, Genesis P.Orridge, Morrison Edley, Marie Losier, Sebastien S.D Santamaria, Bradley Eros
Tony Conrad & Genesis P-Orridge
Two special evenings of collaboration 1/10 @ 9pm & 1/11 @ 4pm
Photo Credit: Marie Losier
TONY CONRAD AND GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE
TO PERFORM TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME
The meeting of two legends in experimentation and sound: the meeting of two fabulous violins:
Tony Conrad and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.
Guest musician: Edward Morrisey, PTV3.
Guest visual artists: Bradley Eros and Sebastien S. Santamaria.
Tony Conrad and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge will meet for the first time and perform on two consecutive days in improvisatory concerts centered on their mutual love for violin. The shows will take place at ISSUE Project Room on January 10 at 9 p.m. and January 11 at 4 p.m. The event will be recorded for an album release and filmed by Marie Losier for her upcoming feature documentary on P-Orridge.
The idea to unite the two influential musicians was conceived at the screening of “Marie Losier’s Film Portraits” at the French Institute Alliance Française in September of 2008. Upon watching Losier’s documentary, “Tony Conrad DreaMinimalist,” P-Orridge confessed that violin, which figured prominently in the film, was her favorite instrument and that hearing Conrad’s personal story made her cherish it even more. “I initially wanted to create a scene for the film on Genesis in which she and Tony would just play the violin together,” says Losier. “But very quickly this idea developed into a strong desire to see the two musicians I love perform live for an audience. Even though their paths have not crossed up until this point, it only felt natural to me that they should.”
Tony Conrad started playing violin in his teenage years, but the first experiences with the instrument were largely negative. At the urging of a symphony musician Ronald Knudsen, Conrad concentrated on playing the violin slowly and in tune. “If I were really careful, it might take me a long time just to get my violin really in tune,” writes Conrad in “Four Violins,” an essay accompanying the CD box set “Tony Conrad. Early Minimalism Volume One.” “And anything that I could play slow I could play fast; the secret of playing well was playing more slowly.” Soon Conrad was looking for more polyphonic music to play on the instrument. A chance discovery of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Bibers’s “Mystery Sonatas” with their inventive constructions around timbre as opposed to melody had a transformative effect. “For the first time, my violin sounded truly wonderful. It rang, and sang, and spoke in a rich soulful voice – the timbre of the instrument… My body merged with the body of the violin; our resonances melted together in rich dark colors, harsh bright headlights. Slower; slower.”
Violin has been one of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s primary instruments since the days of Throbbing Gristle. Preferring the electric variety, she has carried it through a myriad of projects including Psychic TV and Thee Majesty. P-Orridge’s approach to music is as equally cerebral as it is emotional and physical. In the words ofThe New York Times critic Ben Ratliff, “Any record or performance involving Genesis P-Orridge has been about ideas as much as about music, and the ideas were generally about how to slip free from the normative impositions of life, the binary one-thing-or-the-otherness of art, manners, sex or anything else.”
Losier discovered a striking resemblance between Conrad and P-Orridge while working on film portraits of the two artists. “I realize now how close Tony and Genesis are in technique and spirit, how much they share in their experimentation with sound, noise, voice, handmade musical instruments, and in their particular love for violin,” says Losier. “The ISSUE Project Room concerts will be a meeting of two fabulous violins.”
For more info please visit:
http://issueprojectroom.org/
http://marielosier.net/
This Saturday, March 17, St. Ann's Church will host the second installation of String Theories, the joint partnership between ISSUE Project Room and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn that provides artists with an opportunity to premiere new expe...
