01/20 @ 8:30pm - The New Roaratoria: David Sutton w/ 2673 + Hikikomori

The New Roaratoria:  David Sutton

ISSUE Project Room is proud to announce this new program which provides emerging composers with technical training in the creation of new and site-specific work on our signature 15-channel speaker system designed by Stephan Moore.  The system generates immersive sonic environments, enabling electronic sounds to take on the characteristic intimacy of acoustic instruments, and liberating location as a musical dimension.   In 2010, this new series will feature:  David Sutton (Jan 20), Greg Kelley (Feb 26), Grouper (March 26) and Carlos Giffoni (April 10).
David Sutton hails from the outer desperation and dislocation of suburban New Jersey. A locale ridden with the same undeniable bleakness that clearly permeates, and stakes its claim as the foundational element of his highly ephemeral works. Sutton engages with these banal landscapes to hybridize a sound that seemingly displays a miasma of kaleidoscopic doom and one of purgatorial melancholia, both of which lurk behind every sprawling strip mall and disgruntled commuter. It is at the mercy of these suffocating landscapes of discontent and inward contemplation that he intertwines the beauty of solitary longing into a transcendental haze of “loner drone”. Creaking floorboards on Sunday evening, discarded memorandum, a vacancy at the highway motel, blood on a kitchen knife, and robbed innocence all conjure up and illuminate the domestic interiority that accompany such alienating surroundings. We begin to see through the laborious weaving of these self reflective elements, looking on as an incontestable purity begins to arise from the descending fog. In the very space of these actions Sutton takes note and effortlessly capitalizes.  The results yield nothing short of a mind melting stew, one where the mundane deposits of everyday life slowly morph into a phosphorescent glow of sonic reverberations.  Once the smoke clears, we are left chilled to the bone by the very haunting nature of Sutton’s enigmatic compositions.

David also moonlights as one half of the mumble-rock duo Car Commercials, one half of the hyper-consumeristic/Confucius inspired Gold,Milk and Honey, and sometimes puts out things under the moniker of Current Amnesia.

This program supported, in part, through generous funding from the Greenwall Foundation.

2673

Active since the end of the last century, 2673 has considered electronic sound utilizing analog synthesizer, various boutique electronics, and consumer guitar effects to create blissfully oppressive sound worlds that range from barely there zero ambiance to solid, powerful drones to speaker shredding wall of noise static. Dwelling on sounds that are both dissociative and tense, 2673 focuses the unhurried textural isolation and overflow of laminous electronics

Hikikomori

Hikikomori is an electro-acoustic duo from an apartment behind a pharmacy in Highland Park, New Jersey based on the tenets of anxiety, alienation, & the comforts of domestic bliss. Their music is hermetic and meditative, comprised of diaphanous chimes and cymbals that excite and dissolve into a distant horizon point. Halfzware shag tobacco cigarettes, organic brown rice, and the sound of “Seasons of Glass” slowly passing out from a window into the street below.