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ISSUE PROJECT ROOM and FRONT PORCH PRODUCTIONS
Present
"THE INDEPENDENTS" FESTIVAL
JANUARY 4-28, 2007

Presented in cooperation with Tennessee-based Front Porch Productions, "THE INDEPENDENTS" is a mammoth music festival that will showcase over fifty artists from seven of this nation's most prestigious independent record labels. Throughout the month of January, New York will reverberate with the sounds of epic minimalism (Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham, Phill Niblock, Leif Inge), ecstatic clangor (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Zeena Parkins,Gamelan Son of Lion), raw Americana (Richard Bishop, Loren Connors, Peter Walker), free improv (Charles Gayle, Paul Flaherty, Bern Nix, No Neck Blues Band) and avant songsmithing (Christina Carter, Richard Bishop, Badgerlore, Lichens). Featuring an amazing array of improvised, minimal and outsider musics, as well as full programs of film and video, "THE INDEPENDENTS"promises to be an event of epic proportions, in an intimate setting.

Featuring showcases from the following independent record labels:
TOMPKINS SQUARE
XI
POGUS
LOCUST
ECSTATIC PEACE
FAMILY VINEYARD
TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS

Admission is $15 nightly. Acts and dates subject to change.

TOMPKINS SQUARE Presents:

New York City's Tompkins Square Label released a dizzying array of
important music in its first year, ranging from underground jazz
giants (Ran Blake, Charles Gayle and Bern Nix), four acclaimed
volumes of solo acoustic guitar music past and present (Imaginational
Anthem Vols. 1& 2, A Raga For Peter Walker, Berkeley Guitar), English
folk (Sharron Kraus), reissues (Robbie Basho, Harry Taussig), and
experimental acid-folk from Texas (Shawn David McMillen). 2007
promises more exciting sounds, with new albums by country music
legend Charlie Louvin (w/ Will Oldham, members of Lambchop, George
Jones and others), UK 12-string upstart James Blackshaw, as well as
87 year old Virginian country singer / Alan Lomax-discovery Spencer
Moore.

Thursday, January 4
Bern Nix
Charles Gayle
Peter Walker

8:00 p.m.; $15

XI Presents:

"ex-eye" is the label of Experimental Intermedia Foundation, an arts organization in New York City that has been part of the Downtown New York loft scene for over twenty-five years, presenting concerts of some of the most important and innovative composers and performers. In 1989 XI was formed to release music representative of EIF¹s programming philosophy, so that the experience of hearing these engaging and pioneering artists could be extended outside of the performance space and into the home.

XI runs the avant-garde gamut, specializing in minimal music, although it is minimal in the broadest sense of the word, creating music with a maximum effect utilizing minimal means. All of the composers on the label share a powerful aesthetic, exploring various avenues of sound and opening new horizons. Unlike a great majority of pioneering work, the austerity of the process is not mirrored in the sound; the music presented on XI is pleasing to the ear.

www.xirecords.org

Friday, January 5
Phill Niblock
Alan Licht
David Behrman

8:00 p.m.; $15

POGUS Presents:

Pogus Productions features releases of Electronic, Electro-Acoustic, and Experimental music. Uncompromising, non-commercial, and definitely not for everyone (unfortunately), these releases are geared towards discerning listeners. Performing at ISSUE Project Room are Al Margolis and Nick Didkovsky

www.pogus.com

Saturday, January 6
Monique Buzzarte (trombone) playing Tom Johnson's TILEWORK

Beth Anderson performing her text-sound pieces:
IF I WERE A POET
COUNTRY TIME
THE PEOPLE RUMBLE LOUDER
YES SIR REE
I CAN'T STAND IT
I WISH I WERE SINGLE AGAIN
OCEAN MOTION MILDEW MIND

LMB (Katherine Liberovskaya/Al (If, Bwana) Margolis/Monique Buzzarte)
live video, cd players and live sampling, trombone
with special guests Lisa Abbatomarco (voice) and Sarah Weaver (djeridu)

Nick Didkovsky and the Sirius String Quartet
celebrating the new release on POGUS of
TUBE MOUTH BOW STRING (P21042-2) for electric guitar, string quartet, computer, and live electronics

8:00 p.m.; $15

LOCUST Presents:

Locust Music is a Chicago based label. Since around 2001,we've issued recordings that cover a variety of styles from psychedelic pop, spoken word, peculiar sound art to earthen folk and vintage electronic music. We get just as fired up over the opportunity to do a little archeology and publish a lost gem as we do in savoring the new sounds of the many terrific artists who are a part of our current line up.

Artists who are coming to Brooklyn and IPR include Coach Fingers, Gamelan Son of Lion, Kill the Vultures, David Meltzer, Apothecary Hymns, Ethan Rose, True Primes and Function

"Chicago's locust music is one of those labels in which a discerning and adventurous record buyer could put his trust; the kind of label that understands the thrill of discovery that stimulates every record seekers perpetual travels" - Stop Smiling Magazine

"One of Chicago's most diverse & independent record labels...that releases fine, fine records spanning the musical spectrum" - UR Chicago

"Locust Music specializes in music too weird to be considered old-fashioned" - The New York Times

"Locust Music has been around for five years now, putting out some of the best and most interesting music on the planet. One of the great things about the label is that you never know what to expect. Label founder Dawson Prater keeps your ears on the edge of their seat. Locust is a worldwide whirlwind, dishing out magic from left and right." - Foxy Digitalis

"an odd and incalculably great label." Songs:Illinois

"invaluable" - The Brooklyn Rail

"Without getting too teary-eyed, Locust Music is certainly a cultural resource of immeasurable quality." -Indieworkshop

"Locust is one of those labels…with an amazing ability to hunt down unusual artists from across the globe of the highest caliber" – Boomkat

www.locustmusic.com

Thursday, January 11
Jonny Sender (KONK) performs Ramon Sender
w/ spontaneous visual compositions by Tony Martin
True Primes
film/video by Henry Flynt, Lau Nau, Tony Martin, Sir Richard Bishop, Ethan Rose/Ryan Jeffery

8:00 p.m.; $15

Friday, January 12
Begushkin
Kill the Vultures
Coach Fingers

8:00 p.m.; $15

Saturday, January 13
Gamelan Son of Lion
Function
Ethan Rose

8:00 p.m.; $15

Sunday, January 14
No Neck Blues Band
David Meltzer and Marty Ehrlich
Apothecary Hymns
Sir Richard Bishop

8:00 p.m.; $15

ECSTATIC PEACE Presents:
Ecstatic Peace!
ecstatic peace is a record label started in the early 80s by Thurston Moore of sonic youth. the first releases were a spoken word cassette by Lydia Lunch and Michael Gira (hard rock) and a live sound/noise collage by a young and romping sonic youth (sonic death). since then the label has existed in wicked spurts whipping out vinyl, ferrous oxide tape and nefarious passing-phase digital media by a wild list of living music men and wimmen. whenever coin allowed slabs were slipped into the arcane bins of friendly-fire record rooms. all kindsa kuts! free jazz emanation via William Hooker! forest love haunts via Fursaxa! dual exhaust heartbeat via Dead Machines! pumped and piledriving juicebox via Pagoda! there’s been over 100 different releases and there’ll be 100 more. we are now in league with satan (read: corporate rainbow) and promise to all: purifying action vision!

Artists on the Ecstatic Peace Roster:
Pagoda
Awesome Color
Be Your Own Pet
Black Helicopter
Dead Machines
Magik Markers
Monotract
Mouthus
MV + EE w/the bummer road
Notekillers
Sunburned
Tall Firs
Tam

http://www.ecstaticpeace.com/ or www.myspace.com/ecstaticpeace

Thursday, January 18
Pete Nolan/Spectre Folk
Christina Carter
Lee Ranaldo
Matt Valentine+Erika Elder with the Bummer Road

8:00 p.m.; $15

Friday, January 19
XO4
Religious Knives
TARP (Conrad Capistran + Joshua Burkett)
Bark Haze (Thurston Moore + Gown)

8:00 p.m.; $15

FAMILY VINEYARD Presents:

"... Family Vineyard occupy a particular corner of the music universe, serving up equal parts talent, ambition and pretension from people who don't shrink from the word 'artist' and who make honest, blood-leaking efforts to be worthy of the name." -- John Darnielle in Last Plane to Jakarta

Family Vineyard is based on the newfangled sounds of legendary artists and visceral newcomers from across the globe. Releasing current and archival work from the likes of Loren Connors, MX-80, Paul Flaherty, Dredd Foole, Hisato Higuchi, Jessica Rylan, and many others, FV is dedicated to the presentation of uncompromising and iconoclast vision of its artists. Established 1998, the label is currently based in Lafayette, Indiana.
The artists who will be at Issue Project Room include Loren Connors, Jessica Rylan, Paul Flaherty and Philip Gayle.

http://www.family-vineyard.com/

Saturday, January 20
Loren Connors/David Daniell/Greg Kelley
Paul Flaherty
Jessica Rylan
Philip Gayle

8:00 p.m.; $15

TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS Presents:
Since 1993, Table of the Elements has has staked its claim on a massive enterprise: It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century. And beyond. That's a tall order for even the largest multi-national corporations, whose vaults harbor so much of our cultural data. Imagine, then, the flinty ambition necessary for Table of the Elements to pursue its goal. This modestly funded, cellular organization has thrived on smarts, and pluck, in realizing its projects, which have focused on musicians whose light shimmers outside the frames of convention. The label's 100-plus releases are a vital contemporary archive, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad, if sometimes obscured, horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider musics....
-Steve Dollar

"[Table of the Elements] is a national treasure."
Pitchfork

"Table of the Elements are to the 21st century what CRI was to the 1960s
and Lovely Music to the 1980s — fearless purveyors of the wildest
stuff around."
— Kyle Gann (New York Times)

Arists included in The Independents month include Rhys Chatham, Neptune, Tony Conrad, Jonathan Kane, Leif Inge , Lichens, David Daniel, Zeena Parkins and more.

http://www.tableoftheelements.com/index2.php

Wednesday, January 24 (5:00 PM start)
Leif Inge "9 Beet Stretch" (24-hour performance)

Thursday, January 25
Zeena Parkins
Tony Conrad
David Daniell

8:00 p.m.; $15

Friday, January 26
Jonathan Kane
Ateleia
Badgerlore

8:00 p.m.; $15

Saturday, January 27
Rhys Chatham "Guitar Trio All-Stars" with Ernest Brooks III, David Daniell, Kim Gordon, Jonathan Kane, Alan Licht, Robert Longo, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Colin Langenus, Byron Westbrook and Adam Wills.
Lichens/Licht
Neptune

8:00 p.m.; $25

Sunday, January 28 (3:00 PM start)
Poetry Reading by Ira Cohen and films:
The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda + Brain Damage
Live Scores by Sunburned Hand Of The Man + Mahasiddhi
Followed by Hubcap City

$15

Couplings: Likely, Unlikely & Actual

FEBRUARY 3-24, 2007

Saturday, February 3
christine bard + jim pugliese
julian bennett holmes + jim pugliese

first set

CHRISTINE BARD + JIM PUGLIESE

The long-awaited reunion of Duo Bard and Pugliese in Concert
a.k.a. "The Mighty Drums of Christine Bard and Jim Pugliese"

Bard and Pugliese play percussion that creates other worlds and takes you on a guided tour. They will make sounds move through IPR, to surround and suspend the listener on the pulse of their own Chi. Pitched and “non-pitched” instruments will play pieces of precision and beauty. Deep drums will take care of the rest.

second set

JULIAN BENNETT HOLMES + JIM PUGLIESE

Julian Bennett Holmes was born in New York in 1991. He has been the drummer in the bands Stungun, Soñar (which debuted at Issue Project Room) and Fiasco. He co-founded (with Lucian Buscemi) the independent record label Beautiful Records (beautifulrecords.org, myspace.com/beautifulrecordsny) in 2005, which has since released three albums - two Soñar recordings and one recording of Care Bears on Fire's Confuse Me, which was released in November 2006.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, February 8
bradford reed + jane scarpantoni
anthony coleman + ne(x)tworks

first set

BRADFORD REED pencilina + JANE SCARPANTONI cello

Bradford Reed never fails to entertain and inspire. This Brooklyn-based composer, performer and producer fights and tames the idiosyncrasies of the pencilina, an original instrument of his own design and construction. The pencilina is an electric ten stringed collision of the hammer dulcimer, slide guitar, koto and fretless bass with six pickups of varied types. It is struck with sticks, plucked and bowed, giving Reed an incredibly wide sonic palette.

Jane Scarpantoni has transformed the Cello into a new instrument. Her work with the Lounge Lizards, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and many others is enjoyed the universe over.

second set

ANTHONY COLEMAN + NE(X)TWORKS

Members of Ne(x)tworks, with special guests (Marty Ehrlich, Kevin Norton) in a performance of Anthony Coleman's "Lapidation", a piece commissioned by the late, lamented ensemble of the Kitchen, Kitchen House Blend. This performance is in preparation for Coleman's upcoming CD of his Chamber Music, to be recorded for New World Records (look for more such performances as the year progresses...) Opening this half of the program will be a rare short set by the legendary Selfhaters!

CJ Camereri - trumpet
Chris Mcintyre - trombone
Doug Wieselman - clarinet
Marty Ehrlich - sax
Cornelius Dufallo - violin
Dan Barrett - cello
Sean Conly - bass
Stephen Gosling - piano
Kevin Norton, Jim Pugliese - percussion

Anthony Coleman - piano, organ, conductor

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, February 9
marc zegans + aki onda
loren connors + steve dalachinsky

first set

MARC ZEGANS + AKI ONDA
"Women, Waking, Danger"

"Women, Waking, Danger" is a first for Zegans and Onda, a collaboration in which they explore the chemistry needed to combine existing works developed by two distinct personalities. "Women, Waking, Danger" unfolds through spoken words and projected photo images. It is a visual and poetic journey through three regions of a thematic landscape; love, illusion in conscious mind, and the edge of
survival, whose borders, indistinct and interpenetrating, open our eyes to otherness as necessity; to combination and dissolution as the stuff of life, and to the entwinement of love, magic and absolute
exposure in each waking moment. The interplay of these projections, voice in air and light on walls is a meditation on the possibilities of "Combination" that arise when artists of separate intent and common desire bring work together with open hands and curious minds.

Aki Onda is a self-taught electronics musician, composer and producer, and a photographer. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories, for which he uses field-recording sounds he
recorded himself as a diary. He recently started another project Cinemage, which is composed of slide projections of still photo mages and improvised music. He has collaborated with artists including Ikue Mori, Alan Licht, Michael Snow, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock and others.

Marc Zegans is a poet, playwright and author. His current work explores waking dreams and the experience of human fragility in the post-industrial landscape. He is now completing a book, which develops these themes, entitled, Poems of Danger and Abandon. He is also developing a spoken work album for Philistine Records. As a non-fiction writer Marc has written extensively about innovation in the public sector, and philanthropic practice. He is currently completing a book entitled, The Essential Work of Public Management, which is a non-foundationalist theory of the role of administration in democracy. Marc was a 2004 writer in residence at Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes California, and a 2005 Fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation. In 2005 he began the Question Book Project which circulates hand-made books throughout the world inviting individuals to add an ever-growing web of questions to their pages.

second set

LOREN CONNORS + STEVE DALACHINSKY

Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors' singular adpation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors' three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O'Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Steve Dalachinsky is a legendary New York downtown poet. He is active in the scene. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He has been writing poetry for many years and has worked with such musicians as William Parker, Susie Ibarra, Matthew Shipp, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Mat Maneri, Federico Ughi, Rob Brown, Tim Barnes and Jim O'Rourke. He has appeared at most of the Vision Festivals, an Avant-jazz festival involving many of these musicians. He also appears often at the Knitting Factory, a unique live music club in Tribeca. He currently lives in Manhattan.

His books include Trial and Error in Paris from Loudmouth Collective Press and Quicksand from Isis Press. His spoken word albums include Incomplete Directions, I thought it was the end of the world then the end of the world happened again with Federico Ughi, and Phenomena of Interference.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, February 10
anthony ptak + alex waterman
lee ranaldo + leah singer

first set

ANTHONY PTAK, theremin + ALEX WATERMAN, cello

Anthony Jay Ptak is an artist and composer who studied under Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Lydia Kavina, and Herbert Brun, and had technical consultations with Robert Moog. He performed at the First International Theremin Festival, and has been a guest theremin artist at the historic Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2000, where he was appointed visiting researcher in 2001. He has given presentations on the theremin and electro-acoustics at Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), School of the Art Institute, Chicago Cultural Center, St. Louis Art Museum, Krannert Art Museum, FFMUP Princeton University, and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He is a member of the New York Theremin Society. http://axoxnxs.com

Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. Alex has worked with musicians such as Richard Barrett, Keith Rowe, Axel Dorner, Tristan Honsinger, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, Steve Heather, Cor Fuhler, Gert Jan Prins, Andy Moor, Achim Kaufmann, Michael Moore, Chris Mann, Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finissy as well as members of the dutch punk band "the Ex" . He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event Berlin, Champs d´Action-Antwerp, and Q-O2-Brussels. Waterman has also curated music in Musiclab at Les Bains::Connective in Brussels and guest curated for the Kraakgeluiden series in the OT301 in Amsterdam. He has toured the Bach Suites for solo cello over the last two years, and been pursuing a more active solo career in the avant-garde classical world. Alex has a number of groups in Holland and Belgium and is an indispensable collaborator in many projects in Europe and the US. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

second set

LEE RANALDO + LEAH SINGER

Lee Ranaldo / Leah Singer known for their film/electric gtr/spoken word collaboration DRIFT, will present a new work in progress, incorporating audio and visuals.

Lee is a member of the group Sonic Youth. Through January '07 he has visual work in the show "Old News" at CNEAI, outside Paris. Text of Light, his "other group" with Alan Licht, Christian Marclay, Tim Barnes and others, have just released the 3xCD "Metal Box" on UK label Dirter Productions.

Since the early 1990’s Leah Singer has performed worldwide with her film work. Using modified 16mm film projectors in a live setting she manipulates the films speed, direction and rhythm creating improvisational performances. DRIFT, an ongoing live film/music/spoken word collaboration with Lee Ranaldo has recently been released as a single channel work on DVD by Plexifilm. She is currently contributing to Old News, a project at CNEAI in Paris and is working on a new edition of copy, her all graphic newspaper series.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Sunday, February 11 (dinner 4:30 reading 5:00)
Waiting for Godot
performed by Brave New World Repertory Theatre

WAITING FOR GODOT by Samuel Beckett
Ticket price: $18 includes dinner and wine

Brave New World Repertory Theatre draws its members from the rich pool of theatre professionals who live on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. The company strives to create affordable, accessible theatre in and for its own diverse community. Brave New World reaches out to different corners of the borough with site specific readings and productions of classic and neglected plays, as well as new plays by BNW members.

Past readings and productions have been presented in Brooklyn Heights, Stuyvesant Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Sunset Park, Ditmas Park, and Prospect Park serving well over 5,000 people.

BNW's 2005 production of To Kill a Mockingbird on Westminster Road in Ditmas Park received press from, among others, The New York Times, The Daily News, Timeout NY, New York Magazine, The Sun and Brooklyn Magazine. In 2006 Celebrate Brooklyn hosted BNW's acclaimed production of Howard Sackler's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Great White Hope.

In 2007 Brave New World will return to Celebrate Brooklyn and The BRIClab. Brave New World has received grants from The Department of Cultural Affairs, The Brooklyn Arts Council, The Independence Community Foundation and The Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund.

Waiting For Godot by Irish born Samuel Beckett will be presented at The Issue Project Room on February 11. BNW Producing Artistic Director Claire Beckman will direct.

For reservations:
e-mail: theatre@bravenewworldrep.org
www.bravenewworldrep.org

4:30 p.m.; $18

Thursday, February 15
Littoral Launch
w/ Sam Lipsyte + Ben Marcus

lit·to·ral

adj. Of or on a shore, especially a seashore: a littoral property; the littoral biogeographic zone.

n. A coastal region; a shore; the region or zone between the limits of high and low tides.

a new performance series curated by Tony Antoniadis and Suzanne Fiol, featuring writers and musicians whose work dissolves boundaries between language, sonority and art.

Sam Lipsyte
Ben Marcus
Musical Guest TBA

Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, a collection of stories, and Notable American Women, a novel. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, and McSweeney's.

Sam Lipsyte's most recent novel is Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book for 2005 and winner of the Believer Book Award. He is also the author of The Subject Steve and Venus Drive, named one of the 25 best books of the year by the Village Voice. His work has appeared in The Quarterly, Open City, N+1, Slate, Fence, McSweeney's, Esquire, Bookforum, The New York Times and Playboy, among other places. He teaches at Columbia University.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, February 17
Elliott Sharp + Janene Higgins
R. Luke DuBois + Lucian Buscemi

first set
Elliott Sharp and Janene Higgins
"Suspension"
Janene Higgins: video mix
Elliott Sharp: guitar, clarinette, laptop
"Suspension" is a duet of image and sound: a veritable dialog, an eloquent and compelling interaction that pulls the audience in and through, simultaneously parallel, conflicting, complementary. As a duo, Higgins & Sharp have performed throughout the US, as well as in Italy, Germany, and Montreal.

"Suspension" explores the the contrast of the instant and the extended duration suspended in time: the awareness of momentary stillness in a city: "Suspension of disbelief" as an essential component of the cinematic experience, and the metropolitan air of continuous mystery, calamity, and suspense.

Composer/multi-insrumentalist/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and biological metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, The Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Rezonanz, Continuum, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Flux Quartet, sirius Stirng Quartet, and Zeitkratzer and collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, blues legend Hubert Sumlin; playwright Dael Orlandersmith, cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti, sci-fi writers Pat Cadigan and Lucius Shepard; jazz greats Sonny Sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah. Sharp's orchestra piece "Calling" was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik and the CD won the January 2004 German Critics' Prize. His composition "Quarks Swim Free" was premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 2003 and his chamber opera EmPyre was premiered at the 2006 Biennale. Sharp's most recent CD releases include "Quadrature", a collection of solo acoustic guitar compositions; "Calling" with the Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; Terraplane's "Secret Life"; and the string quartet "Dispersion Of Seeds". He founded the ongoing zOaR Records in 1978 both for his own productions including the critically-acclaimed compilations Peripheral Vision and State Of The Union and for other radical music. He has recently completed the scores to the feature-films "What Sebastian Dreamt"", "Commune" by Jonathan Berman, and "Spectropia" by Toni Dove. Installations include: "Suspension", a video and audio work in collaboration with video artist Janene Higgins, Chelsea Art Museum, NYC, 2003; "Fluvial", computerized multichannel audiowork commissioned by Engine 27 gallery, NYC June 2002; "Chromatine", an interactive string sculpture/audiowork created for the Gallery of the School of Museum Of Fine Art, Boston, 2001.

http://www.elliottsharp.com

Janene Higgins' videos and digital media have been described as "abstract narratives: undefinable journeys filled with sudden layerings and allurings." Her single-channel works and installations have been performed and exhibited at numerous festivals and galleries worldwide, such as The New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center; documenta in Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon; City of Women festival, Slovenia; The Chelsea Art Museum, NYC; MAD '03 in Madrid; Art Institute of Chicago; Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires; The Hamburg Short Film Festival; and at The Impakt Festival in The Netherlands. She developed a technique for live video performance, and has collaborated with many of New York's preeminent composers and improvisors of new music, including duo performances with Elliott Sharp, Ikue Mori, Alan Licht, Aki Onda, Nurit Tilles, Okkyung Lee, and Zeena Parkins.

http://www.echonyc.com/~myrakoob

second set
R. Luke DuBois, video and Lucian Buscemi guitar, bass

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia's Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and is the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling'74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling'74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

http://lukedubois.com

Lucian Buscemi plays drums, bass and guitar and has a certain passion for noise and played at the Issue Project Room at least 5 times in various bands/combos. He plays guitar in band the LEGS, bass in Fiasco and whatever is needed to be played in the noise group Soñar. He co-founded the record label Beautiful Records and the noise group Soñar with Julian Bennett Holmes, who plays drums in Fiasco, and who has known Lucian since he was 1 year old. Soñar has released 2 albums and are currently working on a 3rd. Beautiful Records has 8 bands on it, has 3 albums out and is still recording other groups. Please check out beautifulrecords.org or myspace.com/beautifulrecordsny for more info on everybody.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, February 22
BAM Brooklyn Next Festival:
Kimiko Hahn, poet + Harold Schecter, writer
Alan Licht - Puzzle Number 1

Kimiko Hahn is the author of seven books of poems, including: The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006), The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award, and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. Kimiko has also written text for film, such as the 1995 two-hour MTV special titled Ain't Nuthin' But a She-Thing (for which she also recorded the voice-overs); and most recently, a text for Everywhere at Once-- a film by Holly Fisher’s based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau. Among her editorial projects was Issue 122 of The Tri-Quarterly Review, which focused on writers who use outside source material. Kimiko is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. She is currently working on a sequence of poems inspired by the science section of The New York Times and is a Distinguished Professor at Queens College/CUNY.

Harold Schechter is the bestsellng author of DEVIANT and other historical true-crime books, as well as a series of mystery novels starring Edgar Allen Poe. He teaches at Queens College, CUNY.

Alan Licht is an guitarist and composer, living in Brooklyn whose work combines elements of pop, noise, free jazz and minimalism. His earliest musical influences, in the 1970s, were mainstream rock bands like the Bee Gees and Wings—he remarks in an interview with Paris Transatlantic magazine that 'What made me want to play guitar was that painting of Wings in concert in the gatefold of Wings Over America. It looked so exciting... I wanted to be part of it.' Later, in school, he listened to punk and no wave bands like Mission of Burma, Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth. However, his musical trajectory was set when his guitar teacher gave him a copy of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, which would lead to his discovery of other minimalist music. Licht majored in Film Studies at Vassar College in New York. Since the 1980s, he has worked and recorded with the bands Lovechild and then Run On, and with other avant-garde musicians including Jim O'Rourke, Rudolph Grey, Loren
Mazzacane Connors, and La Monte Young.
Puzzle Number 1 is a new piece for pre-recorded tape and live radio transmission that deals with issues of volume thresholds, audibility and inaudibility, interruption, the assertion of the individual within society, and mortality.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, February 23
BAM Brooklyn Next Festival:
Angela Jaeger + Byron Coley

Angela Jaeger and Byron Coley: NOUVELLE VAGUE...JAMAIS!

Angela Jaeger and Byron Coley met at Hampshire College in 1977. Both flush with excitement from the incipient punk movement, Jaeger's trajectory carried her through a series of musical groups in both New York and London (Stare Kits, Drowning Craze, PigBag etc.), Coley's into a world of underground journalism (NY Rocker, Forced Exposure, Arthur).

Tonight they summon the spirit of the period through records, eyewitness testimony and memoirs. Angela will read from her extensive punk diaries, which are currently being shaped into book form; Byron will read from The Moisture of Diapers, a bilingual collection due soon from Montreal's l'Oie de Cravan. The records they play will not be chosen by committee!

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, February 24
BAM Brooklyn Next Festival:
ISSUE Project Room’s Theremin Society
in an evening of couplings

MICHAEL EVANS, theremin and ANDREA PARKINS, electric accordion/laptop
ROB SCHWIMMER, theremin and DORIT CHRYSLER, theremin
DAVID SIMONS, theremin and LISA KARRER, vocalist, performer, composer
ELIZABETH BROWN, theremin and STEPHANIE SKAFF, voice
ANTHONY PTAK, theremin NICOLAS COLLINS, electronics

8:00 p.m.; $10

March

Friday, March 2
sensorium
exhibition opening

“Portable Scentorium /Olfactory Factory”
Performance by Laure Drogoul  

Laure Drogoul, a Baltimore based sculptor, installation and performance artist will be performing her “Portable Scentorium” and inviting visitors to expand their olfactory awareness with her scent infusions derived from various fragrant flora.  Drogoul has earned various awards for her performances, installations and video art, including a US/Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, Mid Atlantic Arts “ Artist as Catalyst Award”, and 3 Maryland State “Individual Artist Awards”.

6-9p.m.; $10

Saturday, March 3
films by stan brakhage +
stan van der beek +
steina and woody vasulka

STAN BRAKHAGE
Dog Star Man + selected films

Stan Brakhage (1933 – 2003) was one of the most influential experimental film makers whose explorations on the subject of light led him to paint directly onto  film strips creating abstract films of fleeting sensations and sensorial rapture.  Several films will be screened including his unequivocal masterpiece “Dog Star Man”, called a “rapturous, orgiastically beautiful viewing experience” by the Austin Chronicle.

STAN VAN DER BEEK + STEINA AND WOODY VASULKA
“Synaesthetic Video Revival” + selected films
presented by Sabrina Gschwandtner

Includes rarely screened video by technical pioneers who were among the first to experiment with analog sound and image

Stan Van Der Beek  (1927 – 1983) was one of the members of the American Expanded Cinema.  An artist in residence at NASA, in 1964 he created his “Movie Drome” self built space capsule to experience full sensory film projection. He was a poetic visionary who produced theatrical multimedia events that included projection systems, dance and early computer graphics and image processing systems.

The Vasulkas, founders of The Kitchen,  were early pioneers who contributed to the evolution of video art with their investigations of analog and digital processes.  They were some of the primary architects of expressive electronic imaging.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, March 8 + Friday, March 9
see hear now: visible music

David Gamper – multi-instrument acoustic music with live digital transformation using Max/MSP/Spat and 16 channel sound

Gisela Gamper – live video mixing and multi-stream projection using Isadora on laptops, video mixers, mirrors and servomotor shutters

Geoff Gersh – electric guitar with electronic devices and found objects
+ Guest on March 8

David and Gisela Gamper’s See Hear Now (www.seehearnow.org) is a real-time music and video collaboration that merges the sonic and the visible into a transcendent experience. In their individual work, the artists are fascinated by sounds and images from nature and life. To create his live improvisations, David begins with the acoustic sounds he draws from his instruments and found objects. When he expands them through live electronic transformations they retain the power of natural sound. Originally a photographer, Gisela has extended her image making into video.  Her imagery reveals how movement and rhythm create our world. With a system David developed, Gisela performs her imagery with the same immediacy as David performs his music. For these live improvised performances at Issue Project Room, the Gampers create a unique installation using projectors, mirrors, and speakers.

See Hear Now premiered in upstate New York in 1999 and has performed and given workshops widely. In a series of loft installations, the Gampers have explored alternative ways of immersing both audience and performers. Many of these performances included guest artists. RouletteTV produced a performance which was first broadcast in 2003. The duo was featured in Brooklyn College’s Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2003, the 2004 SOUNDPlay festival in Toronto and in Juilliard’s 2005 Beyond the Machine festival in New York City. They released their DVD See Hear Now: Visible Music in 2005. Their 2006 performances include the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Roulette’s Festival of Mixology, and at Optisonic Tea at Diapason Gallery in NYC.

David Gamper moves freely among the worlds of music performance, improvisation, and electronic instrument design. These passions merge in the performer controlled sound processing environments he has created for acoustic improvising musicians. A member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) since 1990, he developed a major redesign of the Expanded Instrument System for DLB and others. In addition to his other ensemble and solo work, Gamper has performed frequently as a duo with Oliveros.  The recording of their concert at the IJsbreker in Amsterdam has been described as “the pinnacle of the Oliveros-Gamper collaborations, music that through its depth, reveals ever more profound expression.” Gamper’s solo piece Conch was in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s BitStreams exhibition and is on the CD of sound art from that show.

Gisela Gamper has been photographing and exhibiting for over 30 years. She exhibited her photographs widely and in 1997 Fabrications, a catalogue of her photographs for two concurrent solo shows in New Orleans was published by the Contemporary Artists Collection of Station Hill Arts of Barrytown, NY. Among her grants and numerous awards are two fellowship grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts and the Hasselblad Cover Award in 1991. Gamper's photographs are in the collection of the Albany Institute of History & Art in Albany, NY, and in many private collections. In 1999 she extended her fascination with textures and collage into the medium of video. Since then her main focus has been See Hear Now, creating video for live mixing in her improvised performances and creating site specific installations.

Guitarist/Composer Geoff Gersh explores the sonic boundaries of the electric guitar with and without the aide of electronic devices and found objects. Aside from the various musical projects he's involved with, Geoff has worked with choreographers Robert LaFosse, Cynthia Oliver, Karen Graham, Lawrence Goldhuber and has composed two scores to go along with paintings by David Stoupakis. Geoff has received grants from Meet the Composer, American Music Center, New York Foundation for the Arts and a Bessie Award for his collaborative score for Cynthia Oliver's SHEMAD.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, March 10
video & film by
assume vivid astro focus +
aldir mendes de souza
           
Brazilian Sensorama featuring the psychedelic videos of Assume Vivid Astro Focus and the first showing in the U.S. of Brazilian avant garde artist Aldir Mendes de Souza’s ground breaking innovative film “Brazilian Suicide” shot entirely in X-Ray. Assume Vivid Astro Focus’ collaborative brand of 60’s influenced psychedelic installations, graphics, videos  have been exhibited internationally most recently at John Connelly Presents and the travelling exhibition “Tropicalia”.  Aldir Mendes de Souza (b 1941) artist/plastic surgeon, developed a unique and innovative body of work in the 1970’s using the medium of X-ray to explore themes of portraiture and social  and political commentary. “Suicidio Brasileira” was shown first at the XI Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1971.

Filling in the evening , DJ Elena, spins the infectious sounds of Brazilian music, as caipirinhas are served in celebration of  that vibrant cultural force.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Sunday, March 11
riley lee with ned rothenberg & ralph samuelson
an evening of shakuhachi - traditional and modern music in solo and ensemble settings

Shika no Tone - classic Kinko duo with Ralph
Birdwing for Shakuhachi and tape by Frances White
Ryuhei/Exile - Chikuho solo honkyoku
World Premier duo composition for 2 2.4 shakuhachi by Ned Rothenberg
The Universal Flute - solo shakuhachi work by Henry Cowell played by Ralph Samuelson
Raftsong at Sunrise by Ross Edwards (1996)
Azuma Jishi traditional Do-Kyoku piece
Improvisation for Shakuhachi and Bass Clarinet with Ned Rothenbeg
The Summons by Tim Constable and Riley Lee for Shakuhachi and tape
Mushi Kuyo (Chikuho duet) with Ralph

(all pieces are performed by Riley unless otherwise specified)

Riley Lee has played the shakuhachi and wadaiko (Japanese festival drums) internationally since the 1970's. In 2003, he became the first shakuhachi specialist to be invited by Princeton University (USA) as one of its Visiting Fellows. He performs regularly in Australia and abroad both as a soloist and with others, notably with TaikOz and harpist Marshall McGuire. Over 50 of his recordings have been released on international labels. In 2005, he premiered Ross Edward's shakuhachi concerto, "Heart of Night" with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and with the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra in April 2006. Riley will be instrumental in organizing the Fifth World Shakuhachi Festival in Sydney in July 2008 to be held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where he teaches. He lives in Manly NSW.

Composer/Performer Ned Rothenberg has been internationally acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble music, presented for the past 25 years in North and South America, Europe and Asia. He has played shakuhachi since 1980, studying with Ralph Samuelson in NYC and Katsuya Yokoyama and Goro Yamaguchi in Tokyo.  His latest cd is "Inner Diaspora" on Tzadik which features his trio Sync with guest artists Mark Feldman and Erik Friedlander.   Other collaborators have included Sainkho Namchylak, Paul Dresher, John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Yuji Takahashi and Evan Parker.

Ralph Samuelson was trained in the classical tradition of the Kinko school of shakuhachi under Goro Yamaguchi, Kodo Araki V, and Shudo Yamato, both in Japan and in the graduate World Music Program at Wesleyan University.  He has performed in numerous concerts of traditional and contemporary music in North America, Asia, and Europe, and is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and music schools.  He has been presented in radio and television broadcasts in the United States and Japan and has recorded for Lyrichord Records, Music of the World, and CBS Masterworks.  He teaches the shakuhachi in New York, where he is also the director of the Asian Cultural Council.

7:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, March 15
spring artist in residence audrey chen solo
+ susan alcorn (pedal steel guitar)
+ nate wooley (trumpet)

Audrey Chen (cello/voice electronics)

Audrey Chen is a Chinese-American musician and performance artist born outside of Chicago in 1976. Using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work focuses on the combination and layering of traditional and extended techniques. a large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is often extremely personal and visceral. Her performance work incorporates sound, movement and simple visual/sculptural concepts. Chen performs solo and in collaboration with a wide number of musicians and dancers. Some current projects include duos with Gianni Gebbia, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alessandro Bosetti and Nate Wooley. The SILO trio with Nate Wooley and Leonel Kaplan. and Trockeneis with Andy Hayleck, Dan Breen, Catherine Pancake and Paul Neidhardt. Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD  USA where she is member of the Red Room and High Zero Collective, an on-going series and festival devoted to experimental music. www.redroom.org, www.highzero.org, www.audreychen.com

Susan Alcorn (pedal steel guitar)

Susan Alcorn  began playing the pedal steel guitar over 25 years ago, and in that time has evolved into a musician/composer of such rare inspiration that her music has redefined, for many, the very perception of the instrument itself.
She has collaborated in performance with electronic composer Pauline Oliveros, German bassist Peter Kowald, and multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chadbourne. "Uma", her debut CD, was released on the US label Loveletter Recordings in the summer of 2000, and a CD of recordings with Chadbourne, "Texas Music", was released on Chadbourne's own imprint soon afterward. Ms. Alcorn currently resides in Houston, TX.

Nate Wooley (trumpet)

Nate Wooley grew up in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the leap between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father. Nate's music deals more with a cobweb of sound then with pure melody and meter. He is sought out for his work in the free jazz idiom, but finds more meaning in a well prepared sound or silence or burst of feedback. He currently resides in Jersey City, New Jersey and has performed or recorded with Anthony Braxton, John Butcher, Alessandro Bosetti, Chris Forsyth, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tony Buck, Joe Morris, Jack Wright, Fritz Welch, Jason Roebke, Scott Rosenberg, Herb Robertson, Randy Peterson, and Tim Barnes. www.natewooley.com

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, March 16
The  NY Theremin Society and IPR proudly present an evening of Theremin,
introducing new members:

Duet for Theremin & Lapstell
John Hoge
Kip Rosser
Bruce Tovsky

plus special guests:
Dorit Chrysler & Bradley Eros & Rob Schwimmer
Anthony Ptak

featuring a special
Theremin Orchestra Performance to the Theme of "SYNAESTHESIA"

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, March 17
“we are happy”
w/ jim pugliese +
donna-maree wilding

Are we just mere tourists traveling through life?
Are we looking through glass tainted by life and all she has dealt us?
Your truth?  My Truth? The Truth?  What is reality?

Portrayed in an interactive multi-media installation using light, sound, movement and reflection, “We Are Happy” is an archetype of the urban mecca of today. The piece is a collaboration by Italian-American, percussionist and composer, Jim Pugliese and New Zealand born, Installation Artist, Donna-Maree Wilding.

DM Wilding is an Installation Artist who was born in Auckland New Zealand.  Since receiving a B.F.A from Auckland University she has resided mainly in Europe. She has had numerous exhibitions throughout New Zealand, London, Italy and the United States.  Wilding now works and lives in the East Village, New York City.

Jim Pugliese is a drummer, percussionist, composer and international recording artist on over seventy CD’s of experimental, Classical, 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. He has recorded and or performed with John Cage, Kent Nagano and Philip Glass among others. For the last fifteen years, while living in the East Village of New York City, Jim has been performing and recording with many of downtown New York’s most prominent composer/improvisers including John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins and Anthony Coleman.
Jim’s music reflects his ongoing quest to explore the powerful, enlightening and spiritual secrets of drumming and is inspired by his recent association and work with Nii Tettey Tetteh, master musician from Ghana, with Milford Graves, learning drumming and healing through the heartbeat and his study of the spiritual songs of the Mbira Dzavadzimu from Zimbabwe.

This will be the second collaboration of these two artists.  The last collaboration in Naples, Italy received rave reviews and sold out.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, March 22
LoVid + C.H.I.A.K.I.

Chiaki Watanabe, media artist known as C.H.I.A.K.I.(http://www.vusik.net), creates moving images that integrate digitally processed images with electronic music as a visual language.  Both minimal and organic, she works with live video, performance, video installation and motion graphics. Chiaki will be performing her work "muxology" with Tristan Perich(live sound), an experimental visual music project that attempts to relate to brain waves from electro-psycho-physical perspectives. Muxing is a term derived from digital processing concerning the fusing of audio and visual data into one.

LoVid is Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, who work in variety of sculptural/video manifestations.  Using homemade electronic devices and DIY sculptural instruments, LoVid explores the translation, decay and preservation of natural, electrical and biological signals. Their multidirectional approach crosses the boundaries of the physically experienced, visually perceived, and sonically induced, creating work that is “romantic, aggressive wireless and  wire-full”.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, March 23
Littoral
w/ Chris Mann, Lynne Tillman and Marc Ribot

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY is her fifth novel. Her previous novel, NO LEASE ON LIFE, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction (1998) and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her stories have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, such as Bomb, The New Gothic, New York Writes After September 11, Conjunctions, Black Clock, The Literary Review, McSweeney's, and Cabinet. Her art and literary criticism has been published in Bookforum, Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, and The New York Times Book Review. Her most recent story collection, THIS IS NOT IT (2002), contained stories and novellas that responded to the work of 22 contemporary artists. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence at The University at Albany. In 2006, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Chris Mann is an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of Compositional Linguistics, described by Mann as "the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do."[1] He is currently based in New York City.

Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. He then left teaching to work on research projects involving cultural ideas of information theory and has been recognized by UNESCO for his work in that field (ibid).

Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburro. He has performed text in collaboration with artists such as Tom Buckner, David Dunn, Annea Lockwood, Larry Polansky, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Mann's unique style of reading incredibly dense, parenthetical texts at a high speed has brought him recognition as a unique performer and recording artist. He has had a variety of recording projects over the years, including the ensemble A Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments (with two backup singers and Mann reading a text simultaneously while only being able to hear one another), and Chris Mann and The Use. His piece The Plato Songs, a collaboration with Holland Hopson and R. Luke DuBois, features realtime spectral analysis and parsing of the voice into multiple channels based on phonemes.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, March 24
an extraordinary evening w/
jim pugliese's "phase III" +
"nii tettey tetteh and the kusun ensemble"

first set

The Kusun Ensemble are an extraordinary group of musicians and dancers from Ghana, West Africa. Founded by Master Musician Nii Tettey Tetteh. The ensemble includes past and present members of The National Ballet and The Pan African Orchestra.

second set

Jim Pugliese will perform Urban Bushmusic with PHASE III,  special guest Nora Balaban - timbila vocals mbira, members of The Kusun Ensemble and more...

PHASE III features: Christine Bard on drums and timbila, Kato Hideki on bass, Marco Cappelli on guitar, Michael Attias on sax & Jim Pugliese on drums, mbira, timbila and signals

8:00 p.m.; $10

Tuesday, March 27
an evening with jack rose

First set
OneLong Lash -Tim and Erica Barnes.
strange rhythmic feels, truncated onto another strange rhythmic feel, then pound on one chord for a dozen measures or so. Some how it all comes out as pop music.

Jack Rose-Member of the legendary drone/noise/folk group Pelt since 1995. Pelt along with Tower Recordings, UN, Charalambides was one of the early groups who forged a new sound that combined free improv, drone, traditional folk music in the early to mid nineties, later coined "weird new america" by the Wire's David Keenan in the early oughts.  Since 2001 Rose has pursued his own path in the solo acoustic guitar solo genre as invented by John Fahey.  Like Fahey Rose draws his inspiration from early rural American musicians like Charley Patton, Skip James and Blind Blake.  In addition to those influences he gleans inspiration from Robbie Basho, Ry Cooder, Zia M. Dagar, La Monte Young, Terry Riley.  Jack incorporates all of these elements into his own idiosyncratic style and it is his sound and his alone. Since 2002 he has released 3 critically acclaimed  LP's for the Eclipse label, 2 cd's for VHF, a 14 min track alongside fellow travelers: Rick Bishop, Stiffen Basho-Junghans and Tetuzi Akiyama on the now influential "Wooden Guitar" anthology released by Locust and one LP side on the massive triple LP set "You Shall Know the Roots, by it's Fruits" with Six Organs of Admittance, Ursa,  Joshua, Dreaded Fooled, MV and EEC that was released and went out of print this year.
This year his 4th LP/CD, "Kensigton Blues", will be out in aug/sept on the VHF, Beautiful Happiness and Tequila Sunrise labels.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, March 29
corridors +
mario diaz de leon w/
the allsar quartet

set one

Corridors: solo audio/video project from Byron Westbrook (also of The Winter Pageant & Rhys Chatham's Essentialist) using dialogue between multiple sound sources and dynamic light projection.  His work involves performance of processed instrumental and environmental recordings through a multi-channel environment with a focus on redistributing distilled energy of sound and light.

This set will present a piece for guitar feedback, piano, field recordings as well as a piece for viola, organ, electronics using ISSUE Project Room's 16-channel sound system.

set two

Mario Diaz de León lives in New York City, where he composes chamber music for instruments and electronics, presents solo performances, and collaborates with Jay King in the audiovisual duo King/Diaz de Leon.  Composition studies with Maryanne Amacher, George Lewis, and Randy Coleman.  His collaborative and solo work has been featured in performances and exhibitions at Roulette, The Museum of Biblical Art (NYC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center, MUSAC (León, Spain), Paris London New York (Brooklyn), Merkin Concert Hall, Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), The Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), The Stone, Rose Studio at Lincoln Center, and Oberlin Conservatory.  He is a recipient of the 2005 Meet the Composer / Van Lier Fellowship and a winner of ICE's 21st Century Young Composers Project. 

Diaz de León's string quartet Psalterion, inspired by the first vision of Ezekiel and passages from the Urantia Book, re-tunes the strings to create tones that dance and shimmer.  Tonight it will be presented alongside the improvisation style that was developed in parallel with its composition, using an amplified zither and mixer feedback.

The Allsar Quartet :

Amie Weiss, Erik Carlson - violins
Miranda Sielaff - viola
Chris Gross - cello

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, March 30
synaesthesia evening w/
the american synaesthesia association
           
“Synaesthesia Evening”  with The American Synaesthesia Association will feature a screening of the documentary “Chroma” about the phenomena of synaesthesia, which features co-founders of  the ASA, Pat Duffy, author and synaesthete, and Carol Steen, painter and synaesthete.  Pat Duffy will be reading from her book, “Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens” a personal account of her experiences with synaesthesia.  Carol Steen will talk and show images of her paintings of the forms and colors that she sees while listening to electronic music.

Also appearing will be Greta Berman, art historian at Julliard, who will speak on the relationship of synaesthesia and music. She will be accompanied by Synaesthetic musicians from the master class at Julliard School of Music.           

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, March 31
herb robertson and agusti fernandez

This duo represents a play between trumpet and piano along with all of the toys and preparations that Agusti and Herb will do to their instruments to create a pallette of unusual sounds unrecognizable as the goal during these improvisations.  Mr. Robertson and Mr. Fernandez have been playing together for a while now usually in Barry Guy’s 10 piece BGNO (Barry Guy New Orchestra).  They have a trio with Evan Parker and this will be their debut as a duo.  These two sound producers together will show an inclination toward play and response while destroying (without damage) and re-building their principal instruments.

Agustí Fernandez considers himself a self trained musician even though he studied in Palma de Mallorca's Conservatory and extended his formation at the Darmstadt Summer Courses and with Iannis Xenakis and Carles Santos, among others. 

His interest in creative orientation was of a main importance in his discovery of two totemic figures of the avant-garde: Cecil Taylor in jazz and Iannis Xenakis in contemporary music.

His continuous collaborations with international free improvisers became fundamental for his maturity and progression, as well as for a later recognition inside this scene. Among many others, Agustí has played with Tom Cora, Evan Parker, Butch Morris, Peter Kowald, Marilyn Crispell, Carlos Zingaro, Lê Quan Ninh, Mat Maneri, William Parker, Susie Ibarra, Matthew Shipp, Assif Tsahar, John Butcher, Ramón López, Frances-Marie Uitti…

Clarence "Herb" Robertson is internationally renowned as an innovative instrumentalist, composer and arranger in both traditional and avant-garde jazz idioms and new music. Since the 1990’s Robertson has recorded and performed internationally with Tim Berne , The Mark Helias Band, The Fonda / Stevens Group, the Simon Nabatov Quintet, Andy Laster’s Hydra and the Barry Guy New Orchestra along with many others. He has since performed/recorded with Anthony Davis, Bobby Previte, Elliot Sharpe, David Sanborn, The George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, the London Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, the Klaus Konig Orchestra, Rashied Ali, Ray Anderson, Bill Frisell, Paul Motian and Dewey Redman, among many others. Currently Robertson’s own ensembles include The Double Infinitives, the Herb Robertson Brass Ensemble, and his improvising trios with Dominic Duval, Jay Rosen, Paul Smoker and Phil Haynes, The Downtown All Stars. Among Robertson’s performances and recordings for theatrical and dance productions are the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation with composer, David Behrman and the Public Theater production of Track and Field with composer, John Zorn.

“Robertson transforms his instrument into many things; makes it squeal, purr and chortle; plays beautiful soaring, almost classically contoured cries; and works out a Doppler shift effect, with fluffier notes approaching and receding, only to gradually skew out of equilibrium and become syncopated with ominous growls and squawks.”
Joseph Milazzo / One Final Note

8:00 p.m.; $10

Sensorium and the month of March have been funded in part by; Meet The Composer, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Brooklyn Arts Council, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and media The foundation, inc.

Friday - Sunday, April 6-8
s&w, p&p
sound and word, painting and print

'P&P' is an exhibition of recent paintings and prints. This exhibition will be on view each evening before the performances (6-8pm).

'Simple Methods' is Michael Graeve's ongoing sound performance project. He assists his orchestra of record players and loudspeakers in picking themselves up: Rich textures, rhythms and tones evidence simple interactions between machine process and human gesture.

Michael's work has persistently explored the interaction between painting and sound, and it situates itself in the oscillating terrain found between these two forms. He is fond of the manner in which they suggest new possibilities for each other, the manner in which they re-frame each other, the manner in which they desire to fall together and to fall apart.

Michael lives in Chicago and exhibits and performs internationally. Recent projects and residencies include '[silence]' (Gigantic ArtSpace NY), 'Tonspur Residency' (Vienna), 'Dialogue 1' (raum 2810 Bonn), 'Sonambiente' (Berlin) and 'ISCP Residency' (New York). His 13th year of art school is currently concluding with an MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At this school he also moonlights as an instructor for the Sound, Painting and Art History departments, where he designs and delivers syllabuses exploring the nexus between painting, sound and space. Branden W Joseph reviewed his work in the March 2005 issue of Artforum International.

Friday; 6-8pm
Exhibition opening 'P&P'

8pm Performances ($10):
Alison Knowles performs with Jessica Higgins
Nicolas Collins performs 'Duck Pond'

Saturday; 6-8pm
Exhibition viewing 'P&P'

8pm Performances ($10):
Michael Graeve performs 'Simple Methods'
Chris Mann performs 'told you so'

Sunday; 6-8pm
6-8pm Exhibition viewing 'P&P'

8pm Performances ($10):
Kenneth Goldsmith and David Grubbs
Dan St. Clair and Aki Sasamoto

Nicolas Collins

Duck Pond -- many microphones, many speakers, trying not to feed back, but failing.

Nicolas Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier, worked for many years with David Tudor, and has collaborated with soloists and ensembles around the world.  He lived most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin.  He is a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal.  Recent recordings are available on PlateLunch, Periplum and Apestaartje.  His book, 'Handmade Electronic Music - The Art of Hardware Hacking', was published by Routledge in 2006. www.nicolascollins.com

Kenneth Goldsmith and David Grubbs

Kenneth Goldsmith and David Grubbs will present a collaborative performance of Kenneth Goldsmith's new book "Traffic" (Make Now Press, 2007). This is their second collaborative performance - the first one was a wonderful performance at IPR in June of 2005.

David Grubbs is a professor of radio and sound art at Brooklyn College, CUNY.  He has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.  Grubbs has released nine solo albums and played in numerous groups; his most recent release is Souls of the Labadie Tract (Blue Chopsticks), a collaboration with poet Susan Howe. www.bluechopsticks.org

Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet, writer and critic. He is founding editor of UbuWeb, teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and is Senior Editor of PENNsound. He hosts a weekly radio show at WFMU and has published eight books of poetry. http://www.ubu.com/contemp/goldsmith/index.html

Alison Knowles, with Jessica Higgins
Real-time collages on a lantern slide projector, arrangements of research on beans- a projected poetry of images and sounds.

Alison Knowles is an artist known for her sound works, installations, performances, publications and her association with Fluxus. She is obsessed with beans, and her captivating voice and attention to acoustic gesture is mesmerizing. www.aknowles.com

Chris Mann
'told you so'.
language is the mechanism whereby you understand what i'm thinking better than i do (where 'i' is defined by those changes for which i is required).

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, April 12
an evening with ipr’s artist in residence audrey chen

AUDREY CHEN (cello, voice, electronics) w/
AKI ONDA (tapes) and KATT HERNANDEZ (violin)

Aki Onda is a self-taught electronic musician, composer and producer, as well as a photographer. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories, for which he plays field-recording sounds he recorded himself as a diary. He recently started another project Cinemage, which is composed of slide projections of still photo images and improvised music. He has collaborated with such artists as Alan Licht, Loren Conners, Michael Snow, Shelley Hirsch, Ikue Mori, Noël Akchote, Jac Berrocal, and Linda Sharrock.

Focused primarily on freely improvised music, Katt Hernandez draws a firey
array of electronic-like sounds and keening melodies from her completely
accoustic violin. She works extensively with microtonality, drawn from a
study of a broad mixture of sources. Katt has recently moved to
Philadelphia, after living in the Boston area for nine years, playing the
violin, running spaces, and producing shows. She immediately became
involved in performances on the Bowerbird, Soundfield,and Ars Nova series'
upon her arrival. Over the last year, Katt toured the U.S. with Vashti
Bunyan, as well as the Mill Town/Mall Town Bicycle Tour of performance
artists and electronic musicians from Providence, RI burgeoning arts
community. Before leaving Boston, she also participated in the Voltaic
Vaudeville festival, wherein she played Solo, with butoh dancer Jennifer
Hicks, and with the Beat Circus. Katt has collaborated with a
magnificently variated sea of musicians, dancers, and others including-
but certainly not limited to- Joe Maneri, Zack Fuller, David Maxwell,
Nicole Bindler, John Voigt, Allisa Cardone, Gordon Beeferman, Jonathan
Vincent, Walter Wright, Joe Burgio, Eric Rosenthal, Jeff Arnal, Jack
Wright, Andrew Neumann, and Hans Rickheit. She has twice been invited to
perform on the Autumn Uprising, High Zero,and Improvised and Otherwise
festivals, and has also appeared on a number of other festivals throughout
the country. She has been a guest artist at MIT, Harvard, University of
Indiana and the New England Conservatory, and performed in a vast slew of
localized venues and life-making places throughout the east coast
metropolii.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, April 13
keith rowe
rick reed
michael haleta

Keith Rowe (born March 16, 1940 in Plymouth, England) is an English free
improvisation guitarist. Rowe is a founding member of AMM in the mid-1960s (though in 2004 he quit that group for the second time) and a founding member of M.I.M.E.O. He
trained as a visual artist, and Rowe's paintings--often reminsicent of Pop Art--have been featured on most of his own albums. After years of obscurity, Rowe has achieved a level of relative notoriety, and since the late 1990s has kept up a busy recording and touring schedule. He is seen as a godfather of electroacoustic improvisation, and many of his recent recordings have been released by Erstwhile Records.

Rick Reed (b. 1957) is an entirely self-taught composer/visual artist
who has been working in the Austin music underground for the past 25
years. Using old battered electronic devices like sine wave
generators, short wave radios and a vintage EMS analogue synthesizer,
Reed has performed solo and with various electronic/noise groups
including Frequency Curtain, Abrasion Ensemble, FTC and many others. The
Spring 2006 issue of Signal To Noise Magazine said of his most recent CD
release, Dark Skies at Noon, that "(Reed works) a complex weave of sounds
plucked from the dawn of electronic music-or maybe stolen from some future
fading memory of it's passing".
Since the early 90s, Reed has released several LPs and CDs on labels
such as Ecstatic Peace, Beta-Lactam Ring, Pale Disc Japan and Elevator
Bath. Among other projects, he's been the host of Commercial Suicide, a long
running 'other worldly' music radio program heard on a local station, KOOP
FM . He is also the musical director of an experimental music concert series
called Toneburst, which is dedicated to promoting unheard or underexposed
musicians from the Austin new music community. Since 2004, he has worked
closely with New York filmmaker Ken Jacobs on three soundtracks for his
Nervous Magic Lantern displays, one of which, entitled "Capitalism:Child
Labor", had it's world premiere at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival. Reed
has 3 new releases due out later this year, a new CD on Spectral House, a
Ken Jacobs DVD project and a picture disc LP on Elevator Bath.

Michael Haleta
 (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New Jersey. A classically trained cellist turn electro acoustic composer interested in individual sounds and bits rather than complete things. Haleta has released audio for: Alienation, Raw Special Effects (RSE), Carpark and Hoss records. Michael and his wife Dawn run the small edition label/shop, Raw Special Effects (RSE) which is scheduled to release material by EVOL, Peter Rehberg and others within the upcoming year. Shows/Exhibits/Happenings: Maryland Institute College of Art (Brown Hall) Baltimore, Maryland, E-Werk Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, Transmissions Festival 003 (2001) Chicago, Illinois, Jeff the Pidgeon, Allentown, PA, Whitney ISP Exhibit at CUNY Graduate Center + other
galleries, festivals, bars and clubs.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, April 14
david linton & Z’EV

While they have known each other for over 25 years sonic etcetera artists David Linton and Z’EV have never before performed together in NYC. Their first appearance together occurred on Nov 11th 2006 in Bremen and a collaborative cd released in conjunction with that performance is available through the German company Die Stadt [diestadtmusik.de]. The evening will begin with some acoustic phenomena from Z’EV, followed by an electronic A/V set by David and end with an electro-acoustic A/V duet. Get set for a historic occasion and rare opportunity to see two seminal artists at the top of their game.

David Linton entered the downtown NY experimental music scene through the art punk garage door at the tail end of the 1970's. Initially - on drums - he performed and recorded with Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Lee Ranaldo, Elliott Sharp, as well as his own collaborative band Interference - among others...

From here he moved - on one hand - to electro-acoustic improvisation and live solo performance on his own customized proto electronic drum kit... and - on the other - into sound score design for dance and theater - producing dozens of works in this vein between the mid 80's & mid 90's. Notable among these - his scores for The Wooster Group & for choreographers Karole Armitage & Stephen Petronio.

By the early 1990's, somewhat bored and disillusioned with the conventions of the Improv, Indie Rock , and Post Modern Dance scenes to which he had contributed for years, David was drawn to embrace Techno and the emergent 'Immersive' movement in electronic music and digital media. This in turn led to a focus on venue/audience development & 'event design' in the course of advocating the new popular modes of realtime audio and visual performance demonstrated in catalytic events like SoundLab (host), Unitygain (organizer/curator), & Unitygain Television (producer/director).

Linton's most recent solo audio-visual performance work with "The Bicameral Research Sound and Projection System" brings things full circle drawing on his over 25 years of experience in the multi media arts to mark the reaffirmation of the pre-eminent organic values embodied in realtime analog processes in the worlds of sound and visual media.

z’ev TEXT/SOUND ARTS
1972 chosen for the SECOND GENERATION show at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco. Work at this time was primarily Sound and Visual poetries. 1976 concentration on acoustic phenomena, developing a wide range of concussive and percussive instruments, sound scultptures and assemblages devoted to their productions as the basis for subsequent solo work. 1977-8 one of the founders of the so-called Industrial Music/Art Movement codified in the Industrial Culture Handbook published by RE/search in 1983. Began touring – performance/installations in diverse contexts [from Documenta to Amsterdam's Concertgebouw to NYC's Public Theatre and Mudd Club] - currently in over 100 cities in over 20 countries. 1981 produced shake, rattle & roll  VHS, this was the first ‘commercial’ music/art video, Fetish Records UK release. salts of heavy metals EP, Lust/Unlust NYC release. production and decay of spatial relations LP, Backstreet Backlash NL release.  1983-94 resided in Amsterdam, continued touring and releasing over 30 collections of musics on lp’s, cassettes and cd’s. 1986-90 Guest teacher in Composition + Improvisation at the Theatre School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam.
Began working with London Spectacle Group, The Bow Gamelan. 1990 work with Dutch house musician DJ DANO resulted in what became known as Hard Core/Gabbber [tempos over 150 bpm]. 1992 my 1988 LP, BUST THIS! chosen by The Wire as one of the 50 best percussion-based records of all time, and my first book Rhythmajik: practical uses of number, rhythm and sound  was published by Temple Press UK.
1994-2003 retired from artistic endeavors.  July 2003 now out of retirement my focus has been on cooperations and collaborations, resulting in works with: Oren Ambarchi, Nigel Ayres, Joh Irmler/Faust, HATI, David Jackman, KK.Null, David Linton, Francisco Lopez, BJ Nilsen, Stephen O’Malley, Ramona Ponzini, Peter Rehberg, Boyd Rice, Kasper T. Toeplitz, and Chris Watson.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Wednesday, April 18
A PictureBox night at Issue Project Room

PictureBox is a Grammy-Award winning publisher and visual culture studio based in Brooklyn, New York. Led by art director and editor Dan Nadel, PictureBox specializes in bringing artists' visions to
print in startling and unexpected ways. Nadel art directs and oversees all PictureBox projects, from CDs to posters to books.

Amy Lockhart is a Vancouver-based filmmaker, animator and painter. She'll be screening some of her short films collected under the moniker Walk For Walk.

Matthew Thurber is a Brooklyn-based cartoonist and musician who creates 19th century versions of multi-media performances with masks, scrolls, and a small guitar.

Gary Panter is the legendary artist behind Jimbo and the designer of Pee Wee's Playhouse. His paintings, comics, and graphics have influenced generations of artists. He will be performing vocal and guitar songs for the first time in over three decades. Appearing with Panter will be Devin Flynn.

Devin Flynn is part of the bands Plate Tectonics and Gangstahs Wit Gats and has a cartoon show on Adult Swim's website.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, April 19
pure horsehair w/
john haskell, pamela ryder, garrett devoe & shahzad ismaily

John Haskell is the author of I AM NOT JACKSON POLLOCK and AMERICAN PURGATORIO, and has contributed to n+1, A Public Space, the KGBbar website, and recently, a book about memorable concerts.

Pamela Ryder's fiction has appeared in many literary journals. Her
latest work, Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories, is due for
publication in Spring 2008.

Pure Horsehair, is based on the songs of singer/guitarist Garrett
Devoe and the multi-instrumental talents of Shahzad Ismaily.
Initially, bare bones acoustic music accompanied by free form
improvised percussion, their sound has evolved into more developed
arrangements performed with nearly telepathic interplay.

Garrett Devoe was born in Fort Huatchuka, AZ and raised three hours north
of New York in Mechanicville.  After high school he traveled across
the country, working various jobs, learning, listening to guitarists
such as John Fahey and Sandy Bull and lyricists like Robert Hunter and
Leonard Cohen.  Garrett eventually settled and began performing in
Phoenix, AZ before landing in New York in late 2000. It was in
Brooklyn where he began collaborating with Shahzad, also a recent
transplant from Phoenix.

Shahzad Ismaily, was born of Pakistani descent in rural Pennsylvania, taught
himself music theory and composition while studying pre-med in Arizona
and in his time in New York has played on stage and in the studio with
multiple musicians (Marc Ribot, Nels Cline, Cyro Baptista, Laurie
Anderson etc.).

Late 2005, saw to the completion of Pure Horsehair's first full
length cd, 'Aubade', initiated by the gift of four blank reels of tape
and the loaning of an eight track 1/2" recording studio. The album was
then recorded by Garrett in his Brooklyn apartment and was later mixed
by Joe Blaney (producer/engineer of White Magic, The Clash),  whom
they are currently recording a follow up with.

Together, they has been performing and recording regularly since
2003 and has shared bills with Alec Ounsworth (clapyourhandssayyeah),
Kyp Malone and Gerard Smith of TV on the Radio, Viking Moses, Carla
Bozulich, T.K. Webb, PG Six,  and Richard Buckner.  In 2006, they
opened for Laura Veirs on her European tour, won over audiences
unfamiliar with their music and returned sold out of their new album.
The last performance of that tour, at Rouen Sainte Pelletiers, was
recorded by the french label ad-luna and is set to be released in
early 2007.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, April 20
anthony coleman +
kioku

ANTHONY COLEMAN
Composer-keyboardist Anthony Coleman performs, records, and inspires throughout the world. Whether as a bandleader, a sideman, or solo pianist, the work of Anthony Coleman forms an important contribution and has helped to shape and influence the course of New York's Downtown Music scene over the last two decades.
This performance is in preparation for Coleman's upcoming CD of his Chamber Music, to be recorded for New World Records (look for more such performances as the year progresses...)
with
Marty Ehrlich, Doug Wieselman, Jim Pugliese, Ned Rothenberg, Jacob Garchik, Dan Barrett, Joe Kubera, Ted Reichman. Marco Cappelli and Anthony Coleman

The King of Kabay
Mise en Abime

KIOKU
Based in New York City, the musical group KIOKU presents traditional Asian folk music within a new context of collaborative experimentation and improvisation. The trio consists of Wynn Yamami (East and Southeast Asian percussion, including Japanese taiko, Korean gongs, and Filipino kulintang), Christopher Ariza (live laptop electronics), and Ali Sakkal (saxophones, percussion). While committed to the preservation of musical traditions, KIOKU (Japanese for "memory") acknowledges the plasticity of tradition and freely adopts musical techniques found within improv-based and new music circles.
www.kiokugroup.com

Wynn Yamami began his taiko studies with the San Jose Junior Taiko Group and later trained with Soh Daiko, Kiyonari Tosha of the Nihon Taiko Dojo, Takada Yosuke of the Tokyo Chindon Club, the Tachibana School of Nihon Buyou, and ethnomusicologist Terada Yoshitaka. Now based in New York City, he has performed with a wide variety of musicians including Arturo O'Farrill and the Lincoln Center Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Badal Roy, and Giovanni Hidalgo at such venues as Galapagos, Birdland, Merkin Concert Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Arthur Ashe Stadium. He has performed taiko and percussion for theater and dance productions at the NYC Fringe Festival and the United Nations and has appeared in television commercials for the US Open and Iron Chef. When he is not performing with KIOKU, Wynn straps on the portable Japanese drum unit (chindon) with HAPPYFUNSMILE, a group devoted to Japanese street music, enka, bon-odori tunes, and Okinawan rock.

Born in Kuwait of Iraqi descent, saxophonist Ali Sakkal draws from a dynamic blend of musical influences, from the European classical tradition and Middle Eastern music to the trans-Atlantic avant-garde. Ali has studied with Branford Marsalis, Oliver Lake, John Purcell, Hafez Modirzadeh, Andrew Speight, and classical virtuoso Greg Dufford. As a recipient of the Pone Music Scholarship, Ali spent his undergraduate years at San Francisco State University and had the opportunity to study at Kingston University of London under the tutelage of Duncan Lamont Jr. and the European free-jazz pioneer Evan Parker. An Americorps teaching participant, Ali has spent the past few years as a music educator in New York City public schools. Active in both the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, he has performed with Heftpistole, fAt kiD, the Gabe Stivala Quartet, HAPPYFUNSMILE, and the progressive improvisational quartet FISH KNUCKLE at such venues as the Knitting Factory, Galapagos, the Luggage Store and the Monterey, Umbria, and Montreaux Jazz Festivals.

Christopher Ariza is a composer and programmer of sonic structures and systems. He has composed for theatre, film, concert-hall, and interactive media, and his works have been performed at numerous concerts and festivals. Recognitions in composition include the Hugh MacColl prize (1999) and the John Green Fellowship in Composition (1999) from Harvard University, two BMI Student Composer Awards (2001, 2002), and a finalist designation in the 25th Concorso Internazionale "Luigi Russolo" (2003); commissions include new works for the 2003-2004 tour of the Los Angeles based TaikoProject. Research grants include a U. S. Fulbright grant (2004) to the Institute of Sonology, The Hague, the Netherlands, for research in algorithmic composition system design. His research in generative music systems and computer-aided algorithmic composition has been published in journals and presented at numerous national and international conferences, and is made available through the open-source, cross-platform software athenaCL. His music, software, and research are distributed via flexatone h.f.p.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Saturday, April 21
nick rosen trio + invert

Nick Rosen Trio with Mary Halverson and Ches Smith
The Nick Rosen group  was founded on the principle of bringing joy to
people through the wonders of sound. The group focuses on bringing music to
all people and not just musicians or avid music fans. The music is all
original material and is heavily influenced by soul music, gospel music,
jazz, and nature. The music is new and innovative while at the same time
completely grounded and easy to understand, anyone can appreciate it. If the
band can put smiles on more peoples faces then its mission has been
accomplished.

Nick Rosen is a freelance bassist/composer/improviser that resides in Los
Feliz, CA. In 2002,  Nick played a major role in helping jazz legend Henry
Grimes back onto the jazz scene after a 35 year break; Nick was Henry’s only
student and also played in a band with Henry that featured Nels Cline (of
Wilco) and Vinny Golia. Nick has been featured in many major publications,
including:  The Hollywood reporters, the LA Times front page, Jazz Times,
the LA Weekly, and Vanity Fair; there is also a script about Nick’s life
currently in development. Nick was a featured soloist at the 2003 vision
festival in New York City playing with bassist William Parkers big band.
Currently Nick leads his own group, the Nick Rosen Ensemble, the plays all
his compositions and arrangements and is also a member of the Pan Afrikan
Peoples Arkestra, The Arthur Blythe Group, The Michael McDaniel quartet
featuring Sonhip Theus, Adam Rudolph’s Organic Orchestra, as well as many
projects with producer Carlos Nino (including Build an Ark and the Life
Force Trio), and collaborating with award winning writer Chris Abani (Nick
is co-producing/writing for Chris’s debut album). Nick has recorded with
Ndugu Chancelor, Big Black, Pharoah Sanders, X-Ray Dog music, and has
performed with Billy Bang, Joe LaBarbera, The Chris Walden Big Band, Bennie
Maupin, Bobby Bradford, Sherman Ferguson, Ches Smith, Garrett Smith, Nels
Cline, Wadada Leo Smith,  Adam Benjamin and has had his compositions
recorded in numerous countries including France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and
the US. One of Nick’s compositions is featured on the upcoming Build an Ark
album “Dawn” (August, 2007) which features Big Black, Pharoah Sanders, Ralph
“Buzzy” Jones, Jesse Sharps, and many more. Nick currently studies privately
with Charlie Haden, Darek Oles, and Peter Rofe.

Invert, the “upside down” string quartet featuring cellists Steven Berson
and Chris George, violinist Helen Yee, and violist Chris Jenkins, will be
performing at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, New York on April 21, 2007 to
kick-off the release of their new full length third CD.   Entitled “The Strange
Parade,” Invert’s latest release is a fresh departure, even for this already
alternative string quartet.    The CD includes fourteen pieces that showcase Invert’
s distinctive mix of compositions and improvisations by members of the band,
and their own arrangement of Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi’s “Yumeji’s
Theme.”   What sets “The Strange Parade” apart from their previous
recordings is the inclusion of two cuts that feature Roberto Juan Rodriguez on
drums.  
Invert’s often groove-driven music gets an extra rhythmic boost from
Rodriguez (who has performed with Joe Jackson, Paul Simon, Paquito D’Rivera, Ruben
Blades and Marc Ribot among numerous others) on the songs “Dog Days” and “The
Peak.”

Invert’s unconventional approach to chamber string performance challenges the
repertoire and revises the structure of traditional string quartets. Since
coming together in 1999, the group has created its own brand of chamber music by
blending numerous genres into its compositions and performance style.  
Drawing from diverse, eclectic musical backgrounds, Invert’s members defy tradition
by being firmly rooted in rock, jazz and world musics rather than the
classical upbringing typical of most string players. The group’s compositions range
from moody pieces evocative of expressionist cinema soundtracks to driving
melodic works, often leaving open sections for improvisation that add to the
excitement of their live performances.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Wednesday, April 25
littoral:
rick moody +
wingdale community singers

About The Wingdale Community Singers:
Formed in 2002 by Rick Moody (acoustic guitar, vocals) and Hannah Marcus (acoustic guitar, piano, fiddle, vocals). David Grubbs, of the Red Krayola, Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and many other bands, joined in 2003. He plays many instruments, though mostly the electric guitar, and sings sometimes. Nina Katchadourian (acoustic guitar, accordion, recorder, tomato, vocals) joined in 2006, as did Abe Streep (fiddle, mandolin). The Wingdale Community Singers play folk music that could have been written any time in the last sixty years. It's Old Time, it's High Modernist, it's experimental, it's resistant to interpretation, it's funny sometimes, it's full of dread other times. One aspect remains throughout: there's a lot of singing. And a lot of harmony.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Thursday, April 26
Music for music boxes, glass instruments, mbiras, and pianos

Composers John Morton and Miguel Frasconi present an
evening of solo and duo music for re-configured and
de-evolved musical instruments with electronics.
These two composers share a unique interest in going
beyond the intended use of simple sound making devices
to reveal striking new compositions.  Featured on the
program will be Teetines, a collaboration using
 processed music box comb (Morton) plus mbiras and toy
pianos (Frasconi) and works for music boxes and
electronics from Morton’s recently released CD on
innova, Solo Traveler.  Also presented will be a new
collaboration for piano and music boxes, and new work
by Miguel Frasconi for his collection of struck,
blown, and bowed glass instruments.

For the past several years, John Morton has focused on
the manipulation, alteration, and electronic
processing of music boxes.  He has constructed
large-scale music boxes as well as outdoor sound
sculptures. Besides performing in concert on his music
box instrument, Morton has created site-specific works
including a music box sound installation for the
Hudson River Museum. He received NYFA Fellowships in
2002 and 2006, and his first CD on innova, Outlier,
was the subject of a feature on National Public Radio
(NPR).  He is currently working on SonicHudson, a
sound installation for the Piermont, NY Library funded
by the New York Music Fund.

Miguel Frasconi uses glass objects, electronics,
keyboards, and “de-evolved” instruments to create
music that sounds from a uniquely imagined tradition.
His glass instruments have been called “a beautiful
menagerie of pealing contraptions” (Time Out NY),
while his music has been called “lyrical and stormy”
(New York Times).  His recent activities include a new
score for choreographer Alonzo King, performances with
electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick, a newly
commissioned work for Gamelan Son of Lion, and
concerts with the composers collective Ne(x)tworks.
He is currently artist in residence at Harvestworks
electronic media studios.

8:00 p.m.; $10

Friday, April 27
evidence -- iris
dvd release party

Come celebrate the release of Iris, the new DVD collection of
collaborative pieces by Evidence and twelve of their favorite video
artists.

Tonight, Evidence will perform two live sets, joined by two of the
featured video artists: Madeleine Gallagher and Benton-C Bainbridge.

IRIS, the second CD release from the duo Evidence (Stephan Moore and
Scott Smallwood) on the Deep Listening label, is also their first
video release. The DVD has the same sonic material as the music on
the CD, but it features video pieces by the duo's favorite live-video
performers, including Benton-C Bainbridge, Betsey Biggs, Fi$h2000,
Madeleine Gallagher, Dawn Haleta, David Lublin, Jonathan Lee Marcus,
Olivia Robinson, skfl, Diana Reed Slattery, Jack Turner and Walter
Wright. These pieces emphasize the spontaneity of the artists' live
performances, the practice of using "found" materials, and suggest
the emergence of a regional aesthetic stemming from the recent hotbed
of media performance centered around Troy, New York.  The DVD was
produced with a generous grant from mediaThe, inc.

http://www.ecnedive.com/iris

8:00 p.m.; $10, or $25 including a copy of the DVD (regular DVD price $21)

Saturday, April 28
First set
Loren Connor solo

Second set
Sean Meehan and Taku Unami duo

Loren Connors has improvised and composed original guitar music for
about three decades.  His music – which combines the aesthetics of blues,
Irish airs and other music genres –  has been recorded on Family
Vineyard, Drag City, Table of the Elements, RoadCone and other labels. He
has performed with Alan Licht, Jim O’Rourke, Derek Bailey, John Fahey,
Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, Suzanne Langille, poet Steve Dalachinsky,
and other artists

8:00 p.m.; $10

May

ISSUE Project Room honors “Women’s Work,” curated by IPR Artistic Director, Suzanne Fiol, in a month long program during May 2007. Participating women artists will present works that address the range of topics, politics and emotion found in contemporary performance today.  Women's Work will be an open dialog between the participating artists and their projects, presented in an effort to help liberate the definition of “Women’s Work” in the arts. 

Thursday, May 3
littoral
reading series

christine schutt
diane williams
mary caponegro

musical guest tba

Christine Schutt is the author of the novel “Florida” and two collections of short stories, “Nightwork” and most recently “A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer.” Her work has garnered O'Henry and Pushcart Prizes. She is a senior editor of the literary annual, Noon. Schutt lives and teaches in New York.

Diane Williams is the author of six books of fiction. Her newest book, “It Was Like My Trying To Have A Tender-Hearted Nature,” is due out fro