By STEVE DOLLAR

Four years after winning a rent-free, 20-year lease on its new home, Issue Project Room is finally taking up full residence at 110 Livingston St. in downtown Brooklyn.

“The space is really unique for the city,” said Ed Patuto, the executive director of the nonprofit arts presenter, which makes its big move on Jan. 25. The inaugural event will be the first American staging of the Dutch new-music festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek.

The Livingston Street site, which resides on the ground floor of a stunning Beaux Arts-style building designed in 1926 by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, has been the focus of a $3.7 million fund-raising campaign, boosted in 2009 by a $1.1 million grant from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

Along with more conventional renovations, that sum was necessary for an overhaul of the space’s raw, intensely reverberant interior—which includes a dramatic, 40-foot-high vaulted ceiling—not only to enhance listening quality, but to protect neighbors living on the floors above in what are now condominiums developed by Two Trees Management Company. (The firm purchased the former Board of Education site from the city in 2003 for more than $45 million.)

“New York doesn’t have a European-style chamber-music hall,” said Mr. Patuto, who this year secured another $1.1 million in funding from civic sources to reach the $2.3 million mark—sufficient to proceed with plans to occupy the organization’s new home. “And it doesn’t have a space that is that flexible in terms of how it can
transform. We’ll have everything from black-box capability to a complete white box: We can put visuals anywhere around the room for a completely immersive environment.”

Mr. Patuto took over at Issue Project Room in November 2010—a year after the death of its founder, Suzanne Fiol—and has devoted much of his energy to the transition. With more than 200 performances and 30 commissions in 2011 (much of them focused on avant-garde music and mixed-media work of both local and international significance), the current venue at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus was bustling.

But the downtown space, in the epicenter of the growing Brooklyn arts corridor—which includes the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Mark Morris Dance Center and Roulette, among others—offers a richer spectrum of possibilities.

“The room is really live and has a beautiful, sweet sound,” said Mr. Patuto, who has already overseen a series of special concerts there. Beyond what such acoustics can do for a string quartet, they open all sorts of creative opportunities for experimental artists. This year, in one particularly memorable example, the composer Ellen Fullman ran 50-foot wires across the room. “It became a resonating box,” Mr. Patuto said.

Throughout its new season, the venue will test which kinds of acoustic treatments suit it best. The plan calls for the use of about 50 acoustic panels to deaden specific parts of the space, which features “marble floors, marble columns and brass doors,” Mr. Patuto noted. The organization arrived at a modular approach to design for the space, working with architects Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WORK AC and acousticians from Arup. It will allow for traditional seated presentations and more ambient events, including performances using a unique 16-speaker array currently installed at the Can Factory.

“There will be no fixed stage, no fixed seating,” Mr. Patuto said. “The experience of coming to Issue Project Room will be as unpredictable as the performances themselves.” …

Of course, Issue Project Room hasn’t quit the Can Factory quite yet. January will offer a closing slate of performances, including a farewell party on Jan. 20 with headliners Jonathan Kane and his minimalist blues band, February.

“Issue’s almost our home base,” said Mr. Kane, who will be celebrating the release of an album recorded live at the venue in 2010 as part of a festival for the experimental music label Table of the Elements. The album also marks the first project to be released on Issue Project Room’s own in-house label, which will document performances fostered by the organization.

He added, “It’s maybe what the Southside clubs were to Muddy Waters or what CBGB was to the Ramones. People dance a lot and there’s a lot of audience enthusiasm.”

Ellen Fullman installs her Long String Instrument at 110 Livingston
Performances at 3 PM & 7 PM

Ellen Fullman, composer, instrument builder, and performer, will perform on her life-long work the Long String Instrument, where multiple strings are held tight across an entire room. Originally developed in the early 1980s in her Brooklyn studio, Fullman brushes rosin-coated fingers across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to standing inside an enormous grand piano. Installed for a special event at ISSUE’s future home, 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn, the reverberant and visually stunning jewel-box theater at will amplify this transcendent two-set event.

Program:

Collaborative duet with David Gamper (electronics)
“Never Gets Out of Me” duet for cellist Theresa Wong
Collaborative compositions by Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong and David Douglas
“Through Glass Panes” featuring “box bow” performed by David Douglas and Thersa Wong
Collaborative duet with Sean Meehan

Ellen Fullman, composer, instrument builder and performer was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1957. In 1981, at her studio in Brooklyn she began developing her life-work, the 70 foot (21 meter) Long String Instrument, in which rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. She has recorded extensively with this unusual instrument and has been the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and residencies including: McKnight Visiting Composer Residency in Minnesota (2010); Center for Cultural Innovation Grant (2008); Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission/NEA Fellowship for Japan (2007); and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program residency (2000). Releases include: Fluctuations, with trombonist Monique Buzzarté (Deep Listening Institute), selected as one of the top 50 recordings of 2008 by The Wire (London) and awarded an Aaron Copeland Fund for Music Recording Program Grant and Ort, recorded with Berlin collaborator Jörg Hiller (Choose Records), selected as one of the top 50 recordings of 2004 by The Wire. A documentary short on Fullman, 5 variations on a long string, directed by Peter Esmonde was premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2010 and is currently making film festival rounds. Empty Building, a documentary by Swiss filmmaker François Boetschi on Fullman’ s collaboration with Jörg Hiller is currently in production.

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  himself and other acoustic improvising musicians. He is a member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) since 1990. Among their performances and recordings is their collaboration with Ellen Fullman “Suspended Music” which was performed in the Low Library at Columbia University. Gamper has performed and recorded solo and in other ensembles, including 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. See Hear Now, his collaboration with photographer and video artist Gisela Gamper, performs immersing music and video live improvisations in site specific installations. See Hear Now premiered in upstate New York in 1999 and has performed widely. 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. More recent installations and performances include the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Roulette’s Festival of Mixology, Optisonic Tea at Diapason Gallery in NYC. and ISSUE: Project Room’s Sensorium and Floating Points festivals. More information is at www.seeheranow.org.

Theresa Wong is a cellist, vocalist, composer and improviser whose work encompasses music, theater and the visual arts. Bridging areas of musical and visual expression, Wong seeks to find the opportunity for transformation in each work for both the artist and receiver alike. Her current projects include: O Sleep, a multi-faceted improvised opera which explores the conundrum of sleep and dream life and The Unlearning, a collection of songs for cello, violin and two voices inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings. Her compositions include Castings performed by sfSound, Meet Me at the Future Garden performed with the Magikmagik* Orchestra for Performa 09′s Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners, What Orbs! premiered by Luciano Chessa at the San Francisco Conservatory and Call It Culture a duo for two cellos performed by Joan Jeanrenaud and herself. Wong was invited by dance visionary Anna Halprin to perform a leading vocal role in Spirit of Place, a site-specific performance honoring Stern Grove. She is also a cast member on cello, voice and piano in Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters theater project. In addition, she has collaborated with such artists as Fred Frith, Kanoko Nishi, Joelle Leandre, Gianni Gebbia and ROVA Saxophone Quartet. Her performances have been included at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Festival Internacional de Puebla, Mexico, Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria, Other Minds Brink series in San Francisco, Radio France broadcast, A L’improviste and at The Stone in New York City. Wong currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. More info can be found at: http://www.theresawong.org/index.html

David Douglas was born in Greenville, South Carolina and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied percussion at the University of North Texas, receiving a Bachelor of Music in Performance from that institution in 1999. From 1999 to 2009, he performed most notably as a drum set player with a wide variety of artists and bands including Mandarin, The Baptist Generals, Kelley Stoltz, John Vanderslice, Cursive, Tommy Guerrero, and Mark Eitzel. He has appeared on recordings for a variety of labels including Barsuk, Bella Union, 54/40 or Fight!, Two-Ohm Hop, and C-level productions. Currently in the MFA program at Mills College, Douglas has studied composition, percussion and improvisation with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Brown, and William Winant. He performed Through Glass Panes with Ellen Fullman at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2009.

Sean Meehan’s music practice began in the late 80′s at the amica bunker series for improvised music, then housed at the Anarchist’s Switchboard and later ABC No Rio in New York City. For nearly 20 years he has collaborated with Tamio Shiraishi on their annual summer concert series. This project, which explores the social construction of space, invites its audience off of the city’ s mercantile grid and into elusive spaces that are commonly overlooked and unwatched. In 2007 an expanded version of the endeavor that included Ikuro Takahashi and radical cartographer Denis Wood was exported to the United Kingdom for a tour produced by Arika Heavy Industries. Meehan also creates object-based discursive compositions for speculative listening, such as: Field Recordings, Vol 3, a letterpress folio of aural suggestions; audio, a boxed set of four cassettes without sound; and the recent Meehan Reads Helmholtz, a book on tape, of sorts.

Photo by John Fago

Pre-Renovation Candlelit Performance of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet by Ne(x)tworks

Q2 to Webcast Entire Performance LIVE:
Q2, Classical 105.9 WQXR’s contemporary music stream – in partnership with WNYC Culture – will present a live audio webcast of this rare event.

The public will have a chance to attend a rare performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 in its entirety when ISSUE Project Room opens its doors at 110 Livingston St. for a pre-renovation, inaugural Open House event. Performed by Ne(x)tworks, the six hour-long contemporary masterpiece will be free to the public, commemorating ISSUE’s first concert in their future Downtown Brooklyn home.

String Quartet No. 2 has been performed in its entirety only a few times, the first being in 1999 by the FLUX Quartet at Greenwich Village’s Cooper Union. The Ne(x)tworks quartet (which includes Cornelius Dufallo and Kenji Bunch, formerly of FLUX) will play the entire piece by candlelight in the cloistered hall while audience members are invited to stay for as long as little as they like. The beauty of candlelight is also a necessity as the space is still raw, in need of renovation and lighting.

“Ne(x)tworks is thrilled to present Feldman’s masterful Second String Quartet at ISSUE Project Room as our artistic endorsement of their fabulous new concert venue [at 110 Livingston],” says Ne(x)tworks’ Director, Cornelius Dufallo. “The musical community of New York City has been eagerly awaiting the opening of this performance space.”

Called his “most extreme” composition, Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983) is a collective paragon encompassing Feldman’s signature free rhythms, muted pitches, quiet and slowly unfolding music, and his experiments with duration.

“The focus at the time [of the premiere in 1999] seemed to be on how we were going to play for six hours without stopping,” Dufallo reflects. “As we immersed ourselves in the music, however, this began to change: we found that duration is by no means the most interesting aspect of this work. The ‘athleticism’ became more of a secondary concern to us. In this work, duration acts as a canvas, on which Feldman paints a stunningly beautiful encomium to the eternal marriage of sound and time. The piece must exist on a large scale in order to portray this relationship.”

In 2008 ISSUE Project Room won the bid for a 20-year, rent-free lease to occupy the landmark theatre at 110 Livingston St., an architecturally significant (McKim, Mead & White, 1926) and stunningly beautiful 4800 square foot performance space located in the former New York City Dept. of Education headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn. Once renovated, this space will offer opportunities to increase ISSUE’s audience, implement new programs and advance Brooklyn’s place as a cultural epicenter.

While this is an extraordinary opportunity, it is also an enormous challenge. ISSUE must still raise well over half a million dollars towards the $2.5 M needed for basic renovations. We hope that the community will join ISSUE on this amazing journey toward building a world-class center for experimental culture.

ISSUE Project Room’s Inaugural Concert @ 110 Livingston
Ne(x)tworks Performs Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2
April 11, 2010
FREE
Reception: 11 am
Performance: 11:30 am – 5:30 pm
110 Livingston St. (Entrance on Boerum Place)
Brooklyn, NY  11201

An Avant-Garde Arts Group Bites Off a Lot to Chew

When it comes to the avant-garde side of the arts, the numbers tend to be pretty small. Record sales of a thousand or two, if you’re lucky; theater audiences in the dozens, not hundreds.

But last year Issue Project Room, a nonprofit arts space that was founded in the East Village and for the last four years has been in Brooklyn, was dealt a dauntingly large number. As part of a city deal, a developer that was converting the former Board of Education building in downtown Brooklyn into condominiums was required to offer 5,000 square feet on its ground floor to a cultural group on a 20-year, rent-free lease.

Issue Project Room won the bid. (Yes!) But then found that the space needed $2.5 million in renovations. (No!)

The organization’s leaders managed to raise about $350,000 but finally were able to exhale when Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, called late last month with the news that he was allocating $1.1 million for Issue Project Room’s renovations, as part of the $37.7 million in capital funds that he has the authority to distribute for the current fiscal year.

The building, at 110 Livingston Street, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1926 as a home for the Elks club. By 1940 the Board of Education had taken it over, and the city sold it six years ago to the Brooklyn developer Two Trees Management for more than $45 million.

With Issue Project Room, whose proposal to Two Trees won over those from more than 100 other organizations, the building will become a home for all kinds of experimental music, theater, dance, literary readings and film. “A Carnegie Hall for the avant-garde,” Suzanne Fiol, the group’s founder and creative director, said.

“I truly believe that this is the work that keeps our culture going forward,” Ms. Fiol said. “We want to be an important space for music and film and literature and poetry and video and sound art. And a little bit of dance.”

Most of the space is a wide, marble-lined room somewhere between a courtroom and a dance hall, said Sarah Garvey, an Issue Project Room spokeswoman. In addition, there is room for offices and an additional space that could be used for a library.

Ms. Fiol opened the first Issue Project Room in 2003 in a former garage on Sixth Street in the East Village and two years later moved to a former oil silo on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where she put on shows like an extremely rare visit by the reclusive Texas musician Jandek.

In 2007 Issue Project Room had to move again, to the former Old American Can Factory, nearby in Carroll Gardens. This month that space has its Floating Points Festival, with experimental musicians like Alan Licht and Tony Conrad (who is an Issue Project Room board member) making use of a custom-built hemispherical speaker system that hangs from the ceiling.

Whether the idea of a big, official institution like Carnegie Hall is antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde is an open question. But with Manhattan rapidly losing performance spaces devoted to experimental arts — like Tonic on the Lower East Side, which closed in 2007 — some kind of home is necessary, and Mr. Markowitz believes that Brooklyn is the perfect place for it.

“Issue Project Room is well respected, avant-garde, cutting-edge, in-your-face — you know what? That’s Brooklyn too,” Mr. Markowitz said. “I don’t understand half the things they do, and when they tell me about them, they lose me. But that’s not the point.” The point, he added, was that “the arts create jobs.”

His contribution brings the renovation budget to within about $300,000 of what it needs for the nuts-and-bolts first phase.

Ms. Fiol said she was at first reluctant to apply for the new space because at the time her organization had no money. But having three homes in six years taught her to keep an open mind.

“Everybody gets kicked out of their space, or they end up shutting down,” Ms. Fiol said. “But instead of getting all flipped out about that, I took the road of just finding a new space. And I’ve been really lucky.”