08/15 @ 2:00pm - Important Records in the Courtyard: Master Musicians of Bukkake

CONCERT RAIN OR SHINE…(Courtyard if sunny, Indoor Garage if raining.)

ISSUE Project Room in collaboration with Important Records presents Master Musicians of Bukkake, Duane Pitre, Helena Espvall + Fursaxa, Kouhei Matsunaga, The New Monuments, Cave and Diane Cluck.

Please note: Jozef Van Wissum and Arborea have had to cancel their scheduled performances.

Full schedule:
3:05-3:45 Helena Espvall + Fursaxa
4:00-4:40 Diane Cluck
4:55-5:30 Duane Pitre
5:45 –6:15 The New Monuments
6:30 – 7:10 – Chord
7:25 – 8:05 Kouhei Matsunaga
8:20- 8:55 – Cave
9:10 – 10:00 – Master Musicians of Bukkake

Important Records was founded in 2001 out of the wake of a management collapse of a popular New England record shop. The first two releases were Merzbow’s Amlux CD and a seven inch from Daniel Johnston, establishing the breadth of the label’s interests. Combining a wire range of contemporary sounds from around the globe Important has released over 300 records and helped establish many young artists as well as reinforcing the significance of established ones. Looking towards the future Important aspires to, if anything, slow down and take it easy for once.

Master Musicians Of Bukkake has now solidified into a 7 piece cosmic psyche force. Like a reverse dark side of the New Age sound, on the Totem series Master Musicians of Bukkake perform ritualistic electric excursions into the outer and inner reaches. Relying more on the electric power of psyched guitars, analog synth chants, and exotic heavy percussion. This Totem Trilogy echos with the delusions of a west coast death cult. Outer spaced gamelan, dusty fuzz rock from celestial deserts, meditations of a deranged Krishna gathering, and the Blurry
acoustic guitar majesty of The Cascade mountains all reveal themselves here in epic form. Master Musicians Of Bukkake’s newest offering in the Totem Trilogy, Totem Two marks yet another psychic and sonic shift from their first record “Visible Sign Of the Invisible order” (Abduction records 2005/LP via Important Records 2010) and it’s predecessor in the trilogy Totem One (Conspiracy records 2009). On Totem Two Master Musicians explores and meditates deep on the death of the Mystics, the Forgotten Ones, the Schisms of our time, and the inability to realize the primary clear light for what it is. Totem Two shifts from electronically altered Bön cult rituals to outer spaced Sufi Sects. Finally succumbing to the fully orchestrated No-age darkness of the religion of the future only to end in delusional “enlightenment” atop Mt. Shasta scrawling the deranged rambling of new age psychosis on the crystal walls of a cave. Every sound and note played put to tape by a group with a singular purging purpose. For their show at the Issue Project room they will perform with a horn trio of New York musicians and will play music from the Totem series as well as a cover composed by Eyvind Kang. This will be the first show on the east coast for the MMOB.

MMOB has collaborated with: Alan Bishop, members of the Sun City Girls, Six Organs of Admittance, Eyvind kang, Members of Secret Chiefs, Shazad Ismaily, and features members of Earth, Asva, Burning witch and more.

Cave is a group of four musicians – Rotten Milk (synthesizer), Cooper Crain (guitars/organ), Dan Browning (bass) and Rex McMurry (drums) – originally formed as a loose collective in Columbia, MO and currently based out of Chicago.  Inspired by Krautrock, classic rock, and composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, CAVE is characterized by their pyschedelic, improvised, and drone-heavy sound, which has been translated into various EPs and LPs, such as Psychic Psummer and their most recent project, Pure Moods (Drag City).

Kouhei Matsunaga is an electronic musician and visual artist from Osaka, Japan.   Although he originally studied architecture, he has been making experimental music and drawings since 1992.  Matsunaga has collaborated with Merzbow, John Waterman, Asmus Tietchens, rlw, Rudolf eb.er, Anla Courtis, Greg Davis, Conrad Schnitzler, Lesser, Carlos Giffoni, Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic), Mr. Maloke (Puppetmastaz), Sean Booth (Autechre) and Sensational from the Jungle Brothers, merging the techno, experimental, and rap music that define his personal taste. Currently he is working on a project entitled NHK (Raster-Noton) with Toshio Munehiro, Internet Magic, and Max Turner (Puppetmastaz).  The artist resides in both Berlin and Osaka.

CHORD was formed at Dr. Wax, a once thriving record store that was a gathering place for musicians and music aficionados alike. Amid endless musings about the finer points of texture and tone, Kyle Benjamin (guitarist for Chicago’s Unfortunaut), Jason Hoffman (a.k.a. darkwave composer Anatole), Trevor de Brauw (of Chicago instrumentalists Pelican) and Phil Dole (of ¸ber-dronists X-Bax) devised an outline for CHORD that lived for many months in the realm of conversation. With a shared appreciation for the works of Tony Conrad, and Glenn Branca the group formulated a collective vision: exploit and explore the sonic depth of a single chord. CHORD performances consist of each player being assigned one note from a pre-selected chord. They are then expected to consider all ranges of flexibility concerning octave, rhythm, playing style and effect treatments. The overall effect CHORD generates is that of a single note being rendered into an unsolvable
riddle ñ a harmonic Gordian knot that creates an almost pastoral feel of being blinded by the sun. The rejection of melody and structure in favor of sweeping and epic tones inspires a sense of rousing apprehension. Shrouded in the individual tunings of each player the pieces never become diluted, instead finding
resolution in collective dissonance and consonance.

The New Monuments is a collaboration between saxophonist Don Dietrich, violinist C. Spencer Yeh and percussionist Ben Hall.  What was originally to be an acoustic “Babi Music” cover band became the electro-acoustic behemoth The New Monuments. Sharing a common head for so-called “abstract sound” constructions, they attempt to soundtrack the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship constructed solely out of granite cement and ball bearings.  Following a series of limited-edition live recordings on American Tapes sourced from their Northeast US tour in Fall 2008, a self-titled record was released by Important Records in December 2009.

Duane Pitre is an American avant-garde composer and performer whose work often focuses on the tensions between electronic sound and acoustic instrumentation, chaos and discipline, as well as site-specificity and performativity. He frequently works with long-tones and utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonality, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships. He has scored works for large string/wind ensembles, string quintet, his own Bowed Harmonic-Guitar Ensemble, and solo performers, among other instrumental configurations.  He has performed at spaces such as Roulette, The Stone, P.S.1 MoMA, Phillips de Pury & Co., St. Marks Church, The Knitting Factory, and as an Artist in Residence at the ISSUE Project Room in Spring 2009. He’s appeared on compilations with artists such as Keith Rowe, Sir Richard Bishop, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Jandek. Most recently, he curated and contributed a track to a Just Intonation compilation (released on Important Records), alongside Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Michael Harrison, Greg Davis, and Charles Curtis.

Diane Cluck is a musician who also cooks, gardens, draws, bikes, and studies wild plants.  As any involved and creative artist, all of her personal hobbies serve as inspiration for her original songs, which are not only characterized for their keen lyrics, dynamic vocals, and close-fitting harmonies, but also a visceral and sparse guitar style.  Having performed since 2000, Cluck’s live shows focus on singing as a healing and physical experience, proposing her music as a therapeutic and engaging space for her audience.

Jozef Van Wissem is a composer/lute player from Maastricht, Netherlands.  He is renowned for his ability to appropriate the Renaissance and Baroque lute in the context of contemporary experimental music.  By cutting and pasting classical pieces, reversing melodies, and adding electronics and processed field recordings, he is able to bridge the language of 17th century music with that of the 21st century without compromising the timbre and resonance of traditional lute playing techniques.  Van Wissem coordinates the Incunabulum label, lectures at Wesleyan University and Mills College, and performs throughout the world.  He has collaborated with M.B. / Maurizio Bianchi, Smegma, James Blackshaw and Tetuzi Akiyama.  He is in a duo with Blackshaw called “Brethren of the Free Spirit” and has had two releases on Important Records as a duo as well as two solo records.  Most recently he has been commissioned by the National Gallery in London.
Helena Espvall is a Swedish-born musician who plays pyschedelic folk music and free improvisation.  She is renowned as a cellist/guitarist and as one sixth of the Philadelphia pysch folk band, Espers, which includes Greg Weeks, Meg Baird, Brooke Sietinsons, Otto Hauser, and Chris Smith.  In addition to her involvement in Espers and her solo improvisational performances, she has also collaborated with the Amnesiac Music & Dance Ensemble, Oluyemi Thomas, Sharron Kraus from Quagmire, Lukas Ligeti, Samar Lubelski, Eugene Chadbourne, Pauline Oliveros, Scorces, Katt Hernandez, and Fursaxa.  Espvall has performed at various improvised musical festivals, most notably the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the High Zero Festival in Baltimore, Improvised and Otherwise in Brooklyn, the Big Sur Experimental Festival, and at Terrastock 2006 in Providence.  She is currently based out of Philadelphia.

Fursaxa is an acid folk project led by Tara Burke, a musician from West Philadelphia.  Burke is regarded as a key figure in the North American free-folk movement, of which also enlists Jack Rock, Charalambides, Ben Chasny, and the Jewelled Antler Collective as its supporters.  The hypnotic quality of her strong vocals likens her to the disaffected psychedelia of Nico and Barbara Manning, as well as the 12th century Benedictine mystical abbess Hildegard von Bingen. Her album, Alone in the Dark Wood, evokes “pale moonlight and deep shadows where tree limbs bend to form cathedral arches over a procession of mystics.” The low drone of chord organ and farfisa, the ringing of her detuned guitar, and delayed looped vocals produce an effect that is at once medieval and psychedelic in mood.  She has performed with Acid Mothers Temple, Bardo Pond, Iditarod, Scorces, The Valerie Project, and Six Organs of Admittance.

Arborea is a Maine based Alternative-folk duo comprised of husband and wife, Buck and Shanti Curran. Their music follows in the progressive folk and rock traditions created by artists such as Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, Pentangle,  andTim Buckley. Since 2005, they have released three records: Wayfaring Summer (2006), Self-titled (2008), and House of Sticks (2009).  They have performed shows and festivals throughout the U.S., UK, and Europe, including a session for the BBC World on 3 program in London in 2009. Arborea has also curated and produced a various artist compilation titled Leaves of Life released in summer 2009, including artists Alela Diane, Devendra Banhart, Starless and bible Black, and Marissa Nadler.