Mario Diaz de Leon “MIRRORGATE” (Emerging Artist Commission) FREE
An evening featuring the world premiere of “Vesper Sol”, a new multi-channel electronic work by Mario Diaz de Leon, and a performance by MIRRORGATE, the duo of Diaz de Leon and Doron Sadja.
MIRRORGATE is a duo of Mario Diaz de Leon (guitar) and Doron Sadja (synth, electronic drums). After 4 years collaborating in the improvised new age + noise collective Symbol, the two founded MIRRORGATE in 2009. Initially an improvisational duo of acoustic percussion, flutes, and electronics, they have since morphed into a multimedia project playing structured songs, blending doom metal, post rock, goth, and ambient music in combination with an immersive atmosphere of projectors, lights, fog, and mirrors. Tonight’s performance will feature material from their upcoming debut full-length.
Mario Diaz de Leon (b. 1979 in St. Paul, MN) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. Praised by the New York Times for their “hallucinatory intensity”, his works for classical instruments and electronics have been performed internationally by ensembles such as ICE, Talea, iO Quartet, and Romania’s Hyperion Ensemble. He has performed, toured and recorded in many bands as a guitarist, and currently plays guitar in Mirrorgate, and is the vocalist and songwriter for Desert of Colors. His discography includes 3 releases on the Shinkoyo label, and a critically acclaimed CD of his chamber music on John Zorn’s Tzadik label (“Best of 2009″ – Time Out New York, Chicago Reader). He is a member of the Shinkoyo collective, founded in 2002, and has collaborated extensively with Shinkoyo members Severiano Martinez, Zeljko McMullen, and Doron Sadja. His collaborations with video artist Jay King have been exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the US and Spain. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in composition at Columbia University.
Doron Sadja is a New York based, Los Angeles bred sound artist working in spacialized sound and light composition and performance. Sadja co-founded Shinkoyo records and collective, as well as the Paris London West Nile performance space. He currently performs solo, with MIRRORGATE, and in various configurations of the Shinkoyo Collection. Doron has released work on 12k, Shinkoyo, and Atak Records and is currently getting his MFA in sound at Bard College.
www.myspace.com/mariodiazdeleon
www.myspace.com/themirrorgate
this concert is made possible through generous support from the Greenwall Foundation
Wally Shoup with Nate Wooley, Reuben Radding, Andrew Drury + Breakway
Wally Shoup
Wally Shoup plays unfettered, emotion-laden alto saxophone and has been involved in freely improvised music since the mid-70′s. His playing combines the grit of free jazz and blues with an ear toward lyrical abstraction, all at the service of creating coherent music in the moment. His early work in Colorado is documented on Scree-Run Waltz (1981), one of the first independently produced LP’s of American free-improvisation. From 1981 to 1985, he worked with the Trans Museq Duo – Davey Williams and La Donna Smith – in Birmingham, Alabama and wrote reviews and articles for The Improvisor magazine while there. Since 1985, he has been a central member of the Seattle improvised music. He has led many notable improvising Seattle groups and has been involved in organizing the Seattle Improvised Music Festival since 1987. His work is documented on numerous labels, among them:
Leo Records (London) have released four of his CD’s
Strange-Attractors (Portland) have released two documents of his work with guitarist Nels Cline -Immolation/Immersion (w/Nels Cline and Chris Corsano) in 2005 and Suite: Bittersweet (w/Nels Cline and Greg Campbell) in 2006
Clean Feed, (Portugal) released The Levitation Shuffle in 2007.
Tyffus (Finland) released Blank Check (w/Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano) in 2006
He has worked with a wide array of musicians, including Thurston Moore, Nels Cline, Evan Parker, Davey Williams, La Donna Smith, Jack Wright, Paul Hession, Dylan Van der Schyff, Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano, Reuben Radding, Toshi Makihara, Brent Arnold, Jeph Jerman and many others. His current Seattle projects include the Spider Trio (w/Jeffrey Taylor and Dave Abramson) and the Wally Shoup Quartet (w/Gust Burns, Bob Rees and Paul Kikuchi) Wally was named one of Seattle’s 50 Most Influential Musicians by Seattle Metropolitan Magazine in 2009. Additionally, he is a painter (represented by Vital 5 Productions) and writer, having published numerous articles about art, music & aesthetics.
Breakway
“…in the trio Breakway, Paul Giallorenzo focuses on purely improvised abstraction, processing his piano with contact mikes and electronics or abandoning it entirely in favor of an analog synth. The music on Get Down (Friends and Relatives) is sometimes hectic, sometimes slow and considered, but even the most spacious passages consist largely of tense, frenetic gestures. Drummer Marc Riordan scrabbles and scrapes at his kit, creating a blur of cymbal patter, stuttering beats, and texture-based racket. Giallorenzo and electronicist Brian Labycz create swells and bursts of processed tones—snaking, skittering lines, supernovas of white noise, bulbous bloops and high-frequency bleeps—that not only blend and contrast thoughtfully with each other but also dance atop Riordan’s playing with clear logic and easy grace…” – Chicago Reader
Sam Ashley + Robert Van Heuman and Jeff Carey (SKIF++)
Sam Ashley has devoted his life to the development of an experimental, non-religious mysticism, one rooted in a “find out for yourself” attitude, an attitude he advocates in direct opposition to so many traditions. He has been an avant-garde witch-doctor for more than 40 years.
For well over 30 years Sam has used this mysticism in the creation of music and art. His pieces are usually about luck, hallucination and coincidence. They can range from symbolic representations of shamanic phenomena to direct presentations of magic events, devices or objects. One might say that Sam’s sound works are about finding ways to amplify imaginary sounds. Much of Sam’s performed work features the use of authentic spirit possession, a phenomenon Sam has been working with for three decades. Almost all of Sam’s work relates to trance in some way.
Sam Ashley offers simple windows onto things that occur in-between the “real world” and something else.
A PROPOSAL FOR THE ELIMINATION OF SCIENCE
A musical “psychic reading”
I’m occasionally using a new instrument these days, one that I invented in 2005. It’s an electro-mechanical oscillator built using only speakers, batteries and some wire.
I’m always trying out different ideas for simple devices that I can use in genuine fortune telling, the way tea leaves, crystal balls and so many other things are used. If a device is sensitive, unstable and for the most part beyond human control, then it can serve that purpose. Divination (the authentic kind, not fake fortune telling) depends on there being a “screen”, metaphorically speaking, onto which one’s awareness can be projected, in order to objectify/amplify that subtle knowing of everything that does exist: the information is all always there; one problem is that one doesn’t recognize it because it’s as if one is immersed in it (a hard thing to explain, but if you’ve tried divination perhaps you’ll agree with my description). Another problem is of course that usually one is too busy to pay attention. This piece won’t solve that problem, but it can address the other one.
In a performance of A Proposal for the Elimination of Science the way the instrument works is this: if one connects a battery to wires then touches the electrical contacts of a speaker with the wires the speaker pops. So I had the idea that if I were to position the wires such that they might touch the cone of the speaker, and use thin wires, each pop would move the wires and each movement would pop the speaker again ad infinitum: an electro-mechanical oscillator. By experimenting with wire length, thickness and the like I can get the device to produce sounds that are not at all pure tones.
The instrument creates sound that is not very “musical”, even in the sense of “noise music”, mostly because it can contain abrupt starts and stops and other mentally jarring things, but I like it because it has a strictly shamanic emphasis. The sound tends to be unexpected, which is after all the idea. I also think that it’s beautiful, though some will disagree.
SKIF++
The electronic audio-visual trio SKIF++ is a collaboration of Jeff Carey (laptop SuperCollider), Robert van Heumen (laptop LiSa) and Bas van Koolwijk (laptop Max/MSP/Jitter). Sound gets processed into video and back, ranging from sonic bursts to melodic melancholy, using joysticks and selfmade controllers to keep it all in line (most of the time). Every SKIF++ performance is improvised, but based on structures that give each set its distinct character. This time SKIF++ will play as a duo, where Van Koolwijk is represented by an interactive Jitter patch. The SKIF++ video is generated live with a digital application that was inspired by the workings of the 1972 Rutt/Etra scan. processor The Rutt/Etra scan processor was essentially an analog computer which allowed for electronic real-time manipulation of the deflection signals that generate the television raster. The SKIF++ digital application uses audio signals for input and scans the incoming data to produce its characteristic graphics, delivering a very tight connection between the three players. The SKIF++ audio is generated by SuperCollider3 and LiSa X – SC3 delivers highly complex synthesized audio blocks while LiSa takes care of magnifying sampled material into territories unknown – all in a highly responsive environment. While the interaction from audio to video is digital, the counterpart is the musical response of the players to the green thing projected on the screen.
Jeff Carey
http://www.radiantslab.com/87central
Electronic music composer Jeff Carey, based in the US and in the Netherlands, has been working with experimental, improvised and composed electronic, electro-acoustic, and acousmatic music since the early 90′s. Originally from the suburbs of Washington DC, he has performed a handful of hardcore bands and has played electronic music or presented pieces and installations in the US and Europe at festivals and venues such as Boralis (NO), Gaudeamus Music Week (NL), Chelsea Museum of Art (US), Transmediale (DE), NuMusic(NO), Sonic Acts (NL), Ekko Festival (NO), Cave 12 (CH), DNK-Amsterdam (NL), Trondhiem Matchmaking (NO), MOCADC (US), The Network (BE), and Placard (UK). Having studied Audio Technology at American University (1994), and computer music composition at the Instituut voor Sonologie in the Koningklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag (2002), his work has evolved from an interest in no-input- mixer and field recordings to include a focus on non-standard synthesis, algorithmic composition and digital instrumentalism. Apart from purely acousmatic and electro-acoustic composition, he is focused on performative aspects of computer music and improvisation. He has played in the groups 87 Central, Office- R(6), SKIF++, USA/USB, N-Ensemble, and collaborated or performed with Francis Marie Uitti, Gert-Jan Prins, Cor Fuhler, Oren Ambarchi, Tobias Delius, Jaap Blonk and the numerous members of the N- Collective to name a famous few. Recent compositions include the acousmatic pieces ‘Blueshift’, ‘Music for Broken Flute and Stolen Computer’, and ‘Point Source 01′ for Double Bass and computer. Carey builds custom electronic instruments for musicians (most notably, MoHa!) and teaches courses in the synthesis programming language SuperCollider 3, recently at new media/arts institutions including NoTAM, BEK, TEKS (NO), STEIM (NL), and ITP (US). He is one of many founding members of the N-Collective, a pan- European music collective, and works to promote and present N-Events in the Americas.
Robert van Heumen
Robert van Heumen works with electronic means to create soundworlds. As a musician Van Heumen uses STEIM’s live sampling software LiSa and real-time audio-synthesis software SuperCollider, controlled by various physical devices. His soundworlds are a mixture of digital crackles, heavy distortion, melancholic melodies, environmental sounds, voices and sounds from kitchen appliances, some of the time smashed beyond repair. Live sampled source sounds are gesturally manipulated and reworked within open ended narratives, exploring cycles of repetition beyond episodic improvisation. Recent fixed-media works include the compositions Stranger and Fury, which are performed in multichannel and semi-improvised environments. Fury was presented at ICMC08, and Stranger premiered as a diffused work at Culturelab in Newcastle (UK) and was performed live at the Sound and Music Computing Conference in Porto in 2009. Both compositions are available on Creative Sources Recordings. In the fall of 2008 Van Heumen constructed the radioplay No Man’s Land, commissioned by the CEM studio at WORM in Rotterdam, NL. Van Heumen is performing regularly with the audio-visual trio SKIF++ (with Jeff Carey & Bas van Koolwijk), Shackle (working with electro-flutist Anne LaBerge on restriction), ABATTOIR (with cellist/vocalist Audrey Chen) and Whistle Pig Saloon (with guitarist John Ferguson deconstructing the guitar). He has shared the stage with dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit), Michel Waisvisz, Richard Barrett, Sakata Akira, Nicolas Collins, Oguz Buyukberber, Luc Houtkamp, Guy Harries, Tom Tlalim, Nicolas Field, Morten J. Olsen, Daniel Schorno, Roddy Schrock, Nate Wooley a.o. Van Heumen is Managing Director of the STEIM foundation in Amsterdam, curator of the Local Stop concert series and member of STEIM’s Artistic Committee. In a previous life mathematician, trumpet player and software programmer. He still reads L.E.J. Brouwer.
Re: Percussions – an evening of experimental and improvised approaches to the drum.
Recent collaborative works will be premiered and followed by a group improvisation.
Participants include:
Christine Bard is a drummer/percussionist/composer in the NYC area. Bard moved to NYC to record for Enja records with Nana Simopoulos and Hamid Drake. Soon after, she met Dean Drummond and Jim Pugliese and discovered the Downtown Scene of NYC, where she began work with composers such as Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins and John Zorn and in ensembles with Jim Pepper, Ron Horton, Marc Feldman, Otomo Yoshehide, Makigami Koichi, Dougie Bowne… x many… Other ensembles include NewBand, The Harry Partch Ensemble, the Downtown Ensemble, the Microtonal Ensemble, the Bang On A Can Allstars (for Norman Yamada’s ‘Year One’) and Ensemble Dissonanzen.
With the goal of hearing percussion as melody and harmony, Bard and Pugliese co-founded EasSide Percussion. Michael Evans made it a trio which has explored sound and composition with an intensity that exposes the ‘neural workings’ of sound itself.
With gracious support from Meet the Composer, her compositions for dance have appeared at “Celebrate Brooklyn”, The Kitchen and abroad.
Current Projects include “The Bridge” with Roy Campbell and Hilliard Greene and Jim Pugliese’s “Big Easy”.
Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/percussionist/multi-instrumentalist/composer whose work investigates the collision of sound and theatrics, combining ordered systems with intuitive choices of sound making using found objects, homemade instruments, and various digital and analog electronics. He has worked with a wide variety of artists nationally and internationally. http://www.michaelevanssounds.com
Grady Gerbracht‘s cross disciplinary work focuses on the ordering systems of everyday life. His projects employ art, architecture, experimental improvised music, sound and social dynamics to render these systems temporarily visible. As a percussion focused multi-instrumentalist, Gerbracht performs in and organizes events and festivals for varioius venues in New York, Vermont and beyond. With collaborator John Loggia, he composes sound tracks for films and regularly perfoms with, among others, Anarcho Art Lab, a loosely structured collective of interdisciplinary performers presenting monthly themed events at The Living Theater. Gerbracht founded Re: Percussions in an effort to provide a place where drum and percussion based artists can meet, discuss ideas, collaborate, rehearse and record. Re: Percussions presents the works of associated artists to an invested audience at venues that support their cause of advancing experimental approaches to percussion and exploring the outer limits of what drumming is.
John Loggia has played the drums in several bands over the years including Wronco, St. Ballantine School Orchestra and Fudge Factory Inc. who released an album in 1993 and had a song featured in the film “Timecop”. John then began to focus on experimental improvisations with saxophonist/drummer Pablo Narvaez self-producing their CD “Past Time”. John began his career in the visual arts working as an artist’s assistant to Dan Flavin and other artists through the DIA Art Foundation. He painted a 27fot mural “DayGlo Rubens” at the Mudd Club in 1981. John worked as a set decorator on films by Scott and Beth B, Tobe Hooper, Ken Kwapis, and Larry Cohen and was production designer on “Parting Glances” directed by Bill Sherwood (with Steve Buscemi) and Howard Zucker’s “Chief Zabu”. John directed the film “Live Free and Die” (1996 Fox/Lorber). From 1997-2007 John was associate project director of the Cuba Project at the World Policy Institute making documentary videos of international leaders speaking about U.S. Cuba policy and helping coordinate the project’s National Summit on Cuba conferences. Since 2007 he has been leading open improvisation sessions at the Vermont Jazz Center. Most recently, John has been recording and performing with Grady Gerbracht. Their band “Ideosynchronic” has performed along with other musicians and performers at the AnarchoArtLab, a monthly experimental multi-media project at the Living Theater in New York and created the soundtrack to John Menick’s documentary “Paris Syndrome”.
Jim Pugliese is a drummer, percussionist, composer and international recording artist on over eighty CD’s of experimental, Jazz and Rock music. Jim’s performing experience is diverse. As a freelance percussionist he is in much demand and has performed with The New York Philharmonic Horizon Series (guest artist), New York City Ballet, and soloist or performer on numerous new music and jazz festivals in Europe, Japan and the USA, including Warsaw Autumn, Huddersfield and The Nicolsdorf, Salfeldon, and Tampere Jazz Festivals. He has toured and recorded with John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Bobby Previte, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Zeena Parkins, The Philip Glass Ensemble, John Cage and continues to lead his own groups. His latest CD “Live At Issue Project Room NYC” won best new release of 2008 in “All About Jazz New York”.
Ryan Sawyer aka Lone Wolf (b. 1976) grew up in San Antonio Texas where he played drums in various punk rock bands. At The Drive-In was one that ended up becoming very influential throughout the late 90′s. After 21 years in Texas he decided to move to New York and pursue the tutelage of a formal teacher who could show him a broader understanding of music making on the drumset. These teachers included Bobby Previte, Susie Ibarra, Hamid Drake, and Thurman Barker. During this time, Sawyer was gigging around the New York free jazz and noise scene in legendary places such as Tonic, The Cooler, and The Knitting Factory. He was also frustrated with the relegations “avant-garde” clubs put on peoples expectations of the concert-going experience.
As a result of this frustration he actively pursued taking this music to underground parties and rock clubs in hopes of shaking things up for audiences and himself. This in turn led to actively looking for a populous based project that still had all the elements of improvisation and the power found in great jazz. In 2005 Lone Wolf appeared playing solo gigs.
Ryan has played and recorded with hundreds of improvisors and bands while maintaining his own groups (Tall Firs, Glass Rock, Stars Like Fleas) throughout the years. Here is a list of a few; Charles Gayle, Thurston Moore, Jandek, TV on the Radio, Celebration, Scarlett Johansson, and Rhys Chatham. Ryan also led and co-wrote the new york chapter of The Boredoms’ 88 boadrum, a piece that incorporated 88 drummers playing an 88 minute piece of music co-written by Ryan Sawyer and Gang Gang Dance.
Residency Unlimited + Matt Mottel
ISSUE Project Room is proud to announce a new partnership with Residency Unlimited in conjunction with our Artist In Residence program.
“Residency Unlimited fosters artist residency initiatives by partnering with local and international arts organizations. Our collaborative strategy offers artists enhanced residency opportunities across multiple platforms, and provides organizations with innovative ways to reach out to new audiences.”
Matt Mottel is currently ISSUE Project Room’s artist-in-residence, which is partnering with Residency Unlimited to expand the scope of the residency program.
Matt Mottel’s visage should be familiar to anyone who’s been going to shows in NYC in the past ten years. He’s been hanging around NYC clubs since he was like 16, and dropping electric mind bombs with his synthesizer in those clubs nearly as long with folks like Awesome Color, Akron/Family, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear), Kenny Wollesen, Chris Corsano, Ras Moshe, Cooper-Moore, Sean Meehan, and his new band Shadow Maps.
Biomusic: Branden Joseph with David Dunn & Bruce McClure
DARMSTADT INSTITUTE PRESENTS:
Branden Joseph presents a talk regarding “biomusic and the end of representation” with performances by filmmaker Bruce McClure and composer David Dunn.
Bruce McClure
Producing a totally sensory experience, McClure’s projector performances are informed by the way the brain reacts to light and sound. Using an array of modified 16mm projectors, film loops, and guitar pedals, his work challenges cinematic conventions. Film loops patterned with patches of emulsion on a translucent base are combined with an optical soundtrack to create a physically intense adventure. His performances have amazed audiences at the Whitney Biennial and the Rotterdam Film Festival, and have garnered him the 2008 Alpert Award in the Arts.
VENTROLIQUENT AGITATOR (2010)
Four projector performance with each projector modified using variable transformers introduced into the lamp circuits and fitted with identical metal plates rotated 90 degrees and inserted in the film shoe assembly. Each machine is threaded with loops of patterned emulsions consisting of one frame base to five frames of emulsion. Sound originates from the emulsion pattern as optical sound signal and is processed by guitar effects pedals – metal distortion, delays and equalizers.
BRING IN THE LIGHT PUPPETS! Jointed figures that shadow the screen still another time but uniquely patterned as zona pellucida, penumbra and umbra making an inscrutable plasma in their elastic envelope. Customarily, projector mechanisms precondition the conjunction of light and shadow while film trims and ornaments it. Outfitted in this manner projection navigates by a nuance of filmic trim tabs that target expectancy. This performance, however, occasions turbulence by salient agitators that intercede and emancipate the projector and its incandescence from servitude to film’s foreground scenics. Liberal, the agitators are tolerant and work vestiges of film’s hegemony restructuring them on the screen by their metallic intervention into a four square sectorial gestalt, Sound on film, admitted in 1927, is preserved and the constancy of the projector’s unseen binary is celebrated on the photoelectric cell. This miniature theater contains the conditioned reflexes delayed in the wings but patiently awaited but the earmarked assembly poised for ossicular applause. These ventroliquent agitators, mechanical agents, are like arctic explorers amid treacherous regions where one entirely looses the directing compass since at the pole the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.
Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is the author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press 2003), Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (ed. Christopher Eamon; Northwestern University Press/Steidl, 2005) and, most recently, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008). His writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, as well as in such catalogues as CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (2002), X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (2003), andRobert Rauschenberg: Combines (2005). He is also a founding editor of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics, published quarterly by MIT Press since 2000.
“This talk will discuss the emergence and development of the notion and practice of ‘biomusic’ in the late-1960s and 1970s. At stake was an epistemological shift in the notion of advanced musical practice—from ‘experimental music’ to what composer Manford L. Eaton termed ‘experiential music’—as it was understood to address and impact the intellect and physiology of the listener. At stake was the larger conception of music as a distinct art form, which was understood to cede before an implicitly audiovisual feedback loop that engaged with the »real« of the body as against the ‘imaginary’ of (audiovisual) representation and the ‘symbolic’ domain of the musical score. Ultimately, the notion of biomusic proposed a new vision of the listening subject in line with cybernetic and proto-cybernetic models developing within the post-World War II era.”
David Dunn (b.1953, San Diego) is a composer who primarily engages in site-specific interactions or research-oriented activities. Much of his current work is focused upon the development of listening strategies and technologies for environmental sound monitoring in both aesthetic and scientific contexts. Dunn is internationally known for his articulation of frameworks that combine the arts and sciences towards practical environmental activism and problem solving. From 1970 to 1974, he was an assistant to the American composer Harry Partch and remained active as a performer in the Partch ensemble for over a decade. Other mentors included composers Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros, in addition to Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski. He has been the recipient of over 35 grants and fellowships
for both artistic and scientific research, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Langlois Foundation, McCune Foundation, Meet the Composer, Ford Foundation, Delle Foundation, Tides Foundation, New Mexico Arts Division, and the US embassies to Argentina and Kyoto, Japan. In 2005, he received the prestigious Alpert Award for music, and the Henry Cowell Award from the American Music Center in 2007. His compositions and soundscape recordings have appeared in over 500 international forums, concerts, broadcasts, and exhibitions.
As a pioneer in the fields of acoustic ecology, bioacoustics, interspecies communication, and scientific sonification, he has composed a body of innovative and experimental musical work and has contributed to projects as diverse as sensory enhancement of healthcare environments, intervention strategies for forest and agricultural pests, reducing sensory deprivation problems in captive animals, and the design of international broadcast networks. He has investigated, among other things, the interrelationship between music and language and the ultrasonic world beyond human hearing. As an expert wildlife recordist, Dunn has invented microphones to record such phenomena as the sounds of bark beetles within trees and underwater invertebrates in freshwater ponds, and the design of self-organizing autonomous sound systems for interaction between artificial and natural non-human systems. As a scientific researcher, Dunn is about to co-file a provisional patent on a device and protocol for control of tree invading invertebrates using acoustic means. Underlying all his work is a common regard for music as a communicative source with a living world.
Ultrasonic Walk 1 (2009)
A few years ago I began to experiment with designs for building ultrasonic microphones that had an omni-directional response and with techniques for translating the resultant recordings into the audible spectrum of humans. Quite recently I have deigned and constructed a binaural version of these microphones capable of preserving the interaural phase and amplitude difference of human hearing after such ultrasonic sounds are slowed and stretched through sample rate conversion into the normal human hearing range. This piece represents a simple 6-minute walk in my backyard in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while wearing the binaural ultrasonic microphones. The sounds consist of small metal and bamboo wind chimes blowing in the wind, wild birds, the sound of my footsteps on dried leaves, and other neighborhood noises. All of the normally audible sounds were filtered out with the remaining high frequency audio component (20kHz to 96kHz) then converted to a new sample rate. This time stretched recording was then edited into the original source recording duration. No other signal processing was used. Only the original inaudible sound component remains but is now heard in entirely new time and frequency domains.
Thresholds and Fragile States (2010)
This live performance uses a one-of-a-kind set of non-linear chaotic oscillators capable of generating an infinite variety of “auditory behaviors” emergent from their status as autonomous electronic systems. Based upon the theory of “biological autonomy” and new principles in cognitive science, these circuits represent an alternative design philosophy for the creation of electronic sound synthesis. More akin to living systems than information processing devices, these circuits produce a dazzling assortment of complex noises andany sounds produced by the circuits emerge as a type of “conversation” that exhibits repetitive action at a local level but tremendous global diversity over extended time periods. In this sense the circuits resemble the closed nervous systems of living unities that are under constant perturbation from other similar closed nervous systems. The intention is not to simulate the high level functioning of biological organisms and their cognitive capacities but rather to take this question down to its most primary level of autonomous-closure machines where self-organization is more obviously inseparable from behavior. Ultimately the emergent complexity of these systems results from the dynamical attributes of coupled chaotic attractors interacting in a high dimensional phase space. The control of circuit parameters determines a range of instabilities and structural couplings between nested chaotic circuits, allowing these autonomous behaviors to emerge.
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This event is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Fund. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported through mediaThe Foundation and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
April: Music & Technology Month
Curated by Zach Layton & Lawrence Kumpf
The intersections of music and technology seem at once divergent and inseparable. Martin Heidegger noted this ambiguity in “The Question Concerning Technology,” where he explored the bond between Technê (craftsmanship) and Poïesis (making or bringing forth). For Heidegger, technology holds an equivocal relationship to truth — technology is that which frames us within the world instrumentality, both limiting our relationship to it while also revealing our ability to bring forth truth through Poïesis.
ISSUE Project Room’s month-long exploration of Music and Technology will explore the intersections of instrumentality and instrumentation through a series of talks and performances. We are excited to present the work of author and trombonist, George Lewis, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971. Lewis’ work as a composer and improviser includes electronic and computer music, computer-based installations, and notated and improvisational forms. In the same vein, the premier of Stephan Moore’s The Occupants offers an exploration of multi-user generative composition. People Like Us will present a live performance of pieced-together audio and video samples that shed light on the relationship between the archive and user, while Aki Onda’s music takes a different, more personal approach to sampling through the live manipulation of a cassette tape sound diary. Laetitia Sonami and Alexander Schubert both use body-sensors in the traditional technological sense of instrumentality as an extension of human desire. For Schubert, this synthesis of technology and performance practice serves as an experiment in the relationship between the freedom and control inherent in live performance: his sensors “extend the musical language of the drum set,” causing the material that is played “acoustically to be temporally shifted and recombined with the triggered playback effect.”
The works of these artists reflect Heidegger’s dual reaction to the potentials of technology and our relationship to the world, stimulating a number of open-ended inquiries examining the line between the subject and technology’s ability to make us subjects. Where does human desire begin? When does it become subject to an outside force? What happens in between?
ISSUE Project Room has also invited Caleb Kelly, an academic, event producer, and curator from New Zealand who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, to speak on his new book Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cracked Media looks at the deliberate manipulation of playback devices, from the analog to the digital. For Kelley, the manipulation of such devices acts as a tactic, a term used by Michelle De Certeau to define a strategy of resistance that is enacted without place and therefore escapes interior-exterior dichotomies, redefining concepts of individuality and subjectivity produced by the playback devices themselves. For example, CD players have their own built-in apparatus that defines their function as well as the user function, one of which would be the separation of user (the one who listens) from producer (the maker of the CD). As Kelley explains, “the original intention of transparently reproducing a prerecorded piece of music is thus snatched and redirected toward an original and creative act.”
A number of artists discussed in Kelly’s book will give performances at ISSUE during the month of April, including Nicolas Collins and Toshimaru Nakamura. To further supplement his lecture, Kelley has programmed an evening of performances featuring the interdisciplinary artist duo LoVid, the turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, and performance artist Kusum. Additionally, Kelley will curate an exhibition of recent music and art from Sydney, to be presented both in our space and online.
- Lawrence Kumpf
Ensemble Simul Cantare + Mick Barr
ISSUE Project Room presents an evening of Sacred Medieval music and Heavy Metal
Chant and the Emergence of Polyphony:
The Adornment of Sacred Christian Text
Vocal choir conducted by Fr. Joel Warden
Abigael Upton Brown
Rebecca Fasanello
Dan Rosenbaum
Dana Haynes
John Tavener: Dum transisset sabatum
Selections from the Libre Vermell de Montserrat
Selections from the Worcester Fragments
Examples from the corpus of Gregorian Chant for the Church Year
Mick Barr
Mick Barr is an American avant-garde metal guitarist. Notable for his relentless speed and agility on his instrument[1], he is most well known for being one half of the band Orthrelm, currently signed to Mike Patton’s Ipecac Recordings label.
Some of Barr’s other projects have included Crom-tech, and a duo with drummer Zach Hill from Hella, as well as appearances with Quix*o*tic, and The Flying Luttenbachers. He has also released albums under the names Ocrilim and Octis, consisting of his own guitar over a drum machine. On the difference between the two, he says “Ocrilim is Mick Barr overthinking. Octis is Mick Barr underthinking. These names mean nothing when a live show is concerned. Come see Ocrilim and you may be forced to watch Octis.”[2]
In 2008, he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts through their Grants to Artists program.
Share w/BENT Festival – free circuit-bending-themed openjam
The Tank, Issue Project Room, and SHARE.nyc have joined together in honor of the 7th annual Bent Festival to present a very special circuit-bending edition of SHARE as an official part of the international homemade electronics music festival.
We are also very happy to announce that several performers from Bent will be participating in the event, giving attendees the unique opportunity to jam and talk shop with a selection of the finest circuit-benders from all over the world. Some artists that have confirmed to participate in the jam include….
* LCDD (Spain)
* Dr. Rek (Japan)
* Stefan Jankus (Germany)
* Playboy’s Bend (Belgium)
*Tasos Stamou
Participants are encouraged to bring bent, modded, or hacked instruments but are not required. As usual, anything goes.
Bent Festival
The Bent Festival is an annual art and music festival celebrating DIY electronics, hardware hacking, and circuit bending. Each year The Tank invites artists from across the country and around the globe to perform music with their home-made or circuit bent instruments, teach workshops to adults and children alike, create beautiful art installations and to generally come together, face to face, and showcase the state of the art in DIY electronics and circuit bending culture.
http://www.bentfestival.org/
The Tank
The Tank is a non-profit arts presenter whose mission is to provide a welcoming, creative, collaborative, and affordable environment for artists and activists engaged in the pursuit of new ideas. Through a wide range of low-cost, high-concept arts and public affairs programming, The Tank seeks to cultivate a new generation of audience for live performance, civic discourse, and the work of emerging artists.
http://www.thetanknyc.org/
Share
SHARE is first and foremost a platform to explore expression, in a variety of artforms. Through its weekly open jam sessions, SHARE.nyc engages its participants and spectators in a continually changing dialog on art and culture. As such, SHARE represents an ongoing exploration of collaborative performance as cultural exchange. It mines the relationship of artistic practice to cultural identity, remapping a multiplicity of cultural discourses. The act of creating artistic content in a multicultural collaborative context is a fascinating and natural extension of the SHARE concept.
http://share.dj
——
To participants
(the below is the general info for weekly jam. As said above in the BENT’s announcement, you are ‘encouraged’ to bring a circuit-bent instrument(s) – but not limited to the category, esp. if you’re interested to jam w/ bent performers, feel free to bring gear/equipment/instruments of your choice. “Anything goes!”, indeed!!:
Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
We generally receive audio &/or visual participants – not necessarily digital. Analog &/or acoustic instruments (analog synths, acoustic string/horn/percussion/etc instruments), homemade gadgets, film/slides (if you’ll bring a necessary projector), etc. are happily invited!
SHARE loves all kinds of experiments with things including (but not limited to) various sensors, collaborative programming, soldering on-site (if you’ll bring soldering equipment), making low-key toy instruments (circuit bent or not), contact microphones, live projections /reflection/refraction, etc! Your suggestions/inputs are always more than welcome!
SHARE is a place to communicate, collaborate, and experiment.
Mistakes are more than welcome at SHARE!
Come & participate, come & chill, or come & hang out!
All the fun is awaiting!
___________
8pm, free —
Share @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
free audio & video jam – In the Munch Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
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.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
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 will take place in the Munch Room tonight. The Munch Room is located on the first floor of The (OA) Can Factory.
Share @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
Share – free audio & video jam
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.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
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 @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
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...
