Micah Silver + Backbreakerneckbrace
Backbreakerneckbrace is a collaborative effort between video artist Dawn Bendick and audio/visual artist Michael Haleta, which continually works with collaborators to fully realize their structured audio and video endeavors. Timing and synchronization are key elements in their work placing the audio and visuals in a constant exchange of information within pre-composed time constraints.
They have shown their work at numerous shows and events including, Tonic, NY, NY, Art Scape, Baltimore, MD, Transmissions Festival, Chicago, IL, the Back-Up Festival (Bauhaus), Weimar, Germany, and at the Whitney (Graduate Program Film Series), NY, NY.
Micah Silver is an artist, composer, and curator working in music and its intersections with other areas of cultural production. Shows of his work have been mounted by the Jersey City Museum in a mini-retrospective called BE STILL. TAKE UP AS MUCH SPACE AS POSSIBLE. by Artspace New Haven, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, The James Joyce Centre in Dublin Ireland, The Place in St. Petersburg, the 2008 MATA Festival in NYC, among others. His current project is a commissioned installation-opera titled The End of Safari for Mass MoCA, which opened in April 2009.
As a curator and co-conspirator in the work of other artists, Silver has been Associate Curator at Diapason Gallery for Sound in New York from 2003-2006, Administrator of The Earle Brown Music Foundation from 2002-2006, Director and Conductor of the Wesleyan New Music Ensemble, and currently Curator for Music at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer. Silver is a member of The Earle Brown Music Foundation and Diapason Gallery for Sound Board of Directors.
mem1 + Jascha Narveson + Lainie Fefferman w/ Matt Welch
mem1
Mem1 seamlessly blends the sounds of cello and electronics to create a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. In their improvisation-based performances, Mark and Laura Cetilia’s use of custom hardware and software, in conjunction with a uniquely subtle approach to extended cello technique and realtime modular synthesis patching, results in the creation of a single voice rather than a duet between two individuals. Their music moves beyond melody, lyricism and traditional structural confines, revealing an organic evolution of sound that has been called “a perfect blend of harmony and cacophony” (Forced Exposure). Founded in Los Angeles in 2003, Mem1 has traveled extensively, performing at Roulette (NYC), REDCAT / Disney Hall (LA), the Orange County Museum of Art, Electronic Church (Berlin), the Laptopia Festival (Tel-Aviv), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and the Borealis Festival (Bergen). In 2007, they were awarded an artist residency at Harvestworks in New York for the creation of a new Surround Sound piece entitled Sonodendron. They have since taken part in residencies at STEIM and Kunstenaarslogies in the Netherlands and USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway. In 2009, they created a site-specific installation for the Museums of Bat Yam (Israel); their work has been screened and installed at venues including the Sundance Film Festival, Fringe Exhibitions (Los Angeles), and the Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen). Their third full-length album, +1, consisting of collaborations between Mem1 and artists such as Steve Roden, Jan Jelenik, and Frank Bretschneider, was released in Spring 2009 by Interval Recordings.
Jascha Narveson is a Canadian composer and sound artist based in New York. His work ranges from traditionally scored music to multi-channel sound installations to electronic music for fixed media, live processing, and laptop orchestras.
For this piece, a specially constructed coffin was equipped with 15 separate microphones and buried. The resulting multi-channel recording will be played back over Issue Project Room’s overhead 15-speaker array, and the audience will be invited to lie down in the dark and contemplate it.
Lainie Fefferman
After studying music and near eastern languages at Yale, Lainie is currently in her third year of the composition graduate program at Princeton.
Lainie has participated in workshops including: the Sentieri Selvaggi composer workshop in Milan (with Julia Wolfe), the Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble Workshop in New York City, The Bang on a Can Summer Residency in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Arabic Music Retreat with Simon Shaheen at Mount Holyoke College.
Lainie’s recent performance projects include writing for and singing alto with avant vocal trio Celestial Mechanics (with sopranos Anne Hege and Sarah Paden) and writing for and singing with post-minimalist folk funk band Phthia (with Missy Mazzoli on melodica, Sara Phillips Budde on clarinet, and James Moore on banjo).
Lainie has enjoyed rich success with her soulful kazoo playing. Her performance experiences include joining the Bang on a Can All-Stars in a performance of Louis Andriessen’s “Worker’s Union” and numerous New York area performances of Terry Riley’s “In C.”
Lainie’s past, present and future collaborators include: pianist Michael Mizrahi, cellist Jody Redhage, guitarist/banjoist James Moore, electric guitar quartet Dither, So Percussion, the New York Virtuoso Singers, and the Yale Collegium Musicum.
Matt Welch
music of Matthew Welch (b.1976) stems from a remarkably multi-faceted foundation. Matthew holds contains a BFA from Simon Fraser University (1999) and a MA from Wesleyan University (2001) in Experimental Music Composition; studying with noted composers such as Barry Truax, Rodney Sharman, Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton. His compositions range from traditional-like bagpipe tunes to electronic pieces, improvisation strategies and fully notated works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles and orchestra. He participated in a number of compositional collaborations with Indonesian Gamelan composer-performers in Bali and Java, performed in free improvisation contexts with numerable New York City improvisers, and played with art rockers in the Brooklyn underground. As a virtuoso of the Highland Bagpipe, he studied traditional music with Gold Medalist masters such as Colin MacLellan, Jack Lee, Angus MacLellan and Andrew Wright. Matthew also was a member of the four – time World Champion Simon Fraser University Pipe Band, winning with them in 1999 and 2001. Indonesian Gamelan percussion music, both Javanese and more recently, Balinese, have been another focus of Matthew’s, which he has pursued throughout his academic career, with the New York Indonesian Consulate gamelans, and in Bali. Matthew appears on Anthony Braxton’s 10 [Solo Bagpipe] Compositions, 2000 and a few compact discs of his own music including Ceol Nua ,(Leo 336) highlighting orchestral and chamber works; Hag at the Churn, (Newsonic 33) a collection of electronic concoctions; and Dream Tigers, (on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records’ Composer Series 8015) a program of ecstatic chamber music featuring his critically acclaimed string quartet Siubhal Turnlar. His compositions for Balinese Gamelan Semara Dana are featured in his multi-media collaboration with Ikue Mori known as Bhima Swarga (Tzadik DVD edition 3007, 2007). The eclectic breadth of his interests in Celtic music, gamelan, minimalism, improvisation and rock also converge in compositional amalgams for his New York based ensemble, Blarvuster…”
Cecelia Lopez + Tucker Dulin
Other recent projects include a duet Vigilante Margarita with composer and pianist Gillermina Etkin where she plays synthesizer and vocal arrangements, composition and direction of “Copas” a piece for 12 cups performed at Centro Cultural Rojas, Festival Experimenta and other places at Buenos Aires.
In 2009 she attended a residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts with master artist Elliott Sharp. Artistic collaborations with Lobi Meis, Wenchi Lazo, Carmen Baliero, Calos Vega, Gerardo Cavanna, Jacob Wick, David Kant and visual artist Mariana López and Ian Kornfeld.
Argentinean composer/performer Cecilia Lopez comes to NY for performance of her composition/installation “Música Mecánica para Chapas,” for two amplified sheets of metal and variable performers. The group work is centered in the encounter between written form and improvisation. What is being investigated is sound feedback, and the possibility of filtering sound through the metal sheets. Performers: Cecilia López, David Kant, Facundo Gómez, Jacob Wick and Yoon-Ji Lee.
Tucker Dulin
Tucker Dulin, trombonist and player-at-computers, recently improvised with Justin Morrison and Amanda Waal in San Diego and David Gross, Ernst Karel, and Bryan Eubanks in Berlin. While continuing his study, Tucker is trying to maintain hip, urban environment of Hillcrest.
He will be performing A piece & breath/night.
A piece : slow-moving electronics and live performer.
breath/night : many channels of unedited trombone recordings and simple synthesis.
Blevin Blectum + Volume II (Thorpe, Chavez, Burgon, Moore)
Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum)
She began work on a PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia in Brown University’s Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments (MEME) department in the Fall of 2009.
As an improviser, Thorpe has performed with Chris Brown, Chris Cogburn, Rob Cambre, David Dove, Annette Krebs, Maggie Nicols, Liz Tomme, Bhob Rainey, Pauline Oliveros, Mike Bullock, Gino Robair, and Miya Masaoka among others. She was a 2008-featured performer at San Francisco’s Activating the Medium festival, performing with Zbigniew Karkowski, Anti-Matter, and Ulrich Krieger, and at Issue Project Room’s Floating Points festival, 2008, where her multi-channel composition Nautical Twilight was premiered.
As a founding member of Mercury Rev, Thorpe composed, performed, recorded, produced and toured with the band, from 1989 through 2001, earning numerous critical accolades and a gold record for 1998’s Deserters’ Songs. With Mercury Rev, Thorpe found herself sharing the stage with Bob Dylan, Hole, Spiritualized, Pavement, High Llamas, Dinosaur Jr., My Bloody Valentine, Porno for Pyros, Hum, Cat Power, Ride, Sonic Boom, Sonic Youth, and more.
Moore
Stephan Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, and sound designer in New York City. His creative work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. Many of his performances and installation artworks make use of large, multi-channel arrays of his Hemisphere speakers. He performs regularly with Scott Smallwood in the electronic duo Evidence, and with a variety of musicians, live-video artists, and dancers. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught college-level courses in composition, sound art and electronic music at several schools. He is currently the Sound Engineer and Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and one of its core musicians.
Burgon
Multi-instrumentalist Shelley Burgon is best known for her improvisatorial work using harp and laptop. She is a member of the chamber group Ne(x)tworks and the band Stars Like Fleas. Shelley has performed her music for series such as the the MATA Festival, Issue Project Rooms Points in a Circle, free103point9 Wave Farm and Summer Winds. In May 2009 she was honored to premiere a new piece for the Merce Cunningham Hudson Valley Project at the Dia:Beacon. Shelley holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. She can be heard as a collaborator and guest on many labels including Hometapes, Skirl, Tzadik and Ipecac. She is inspired by Maryanne Amacher and is currently at work on a solo electronic record.
Chavez
Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Chavez’s work is focused on short solo electro-acoustic sound pieces using a collection of new and broken needles that she calls “pencils of sound” and a selection of records, which provide the palette. Many of her live sound installations have focused on the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art.
Her work has been recognized by the Jerome Foundation, which awarded her the Emerging Artist Grant by New York’s Roulette Intermedium in 2008. In 2009, she became a recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship which is generously offered to young sound artists by The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust.
She has traveled extensively, sharing the stage with Pauline Oliveros, Alan Licht, Phil Niblock, and Otomo Yoshihide to name just a few. She has performed in venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum in Bordeaux, France; the Akademies der Kunste in both Vienna and Berlin; and Sonoteca in Lima, Peru. She was an artist in residence in 2008 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the DIA:Beacon Museum and recently performed for Christian Marclay and the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC as part of Christian Marclay: FESTIVAL.
Barry Seroff + Barbara Held
Barry Seroff was born in Flushing, Queens on July 4, 1978. He earned his Bachelors at the Aaron Copland School of Music where he studied with some of the great minds of the twentieth century; theory with Joe Strauss, composition with Paul Alan Levi, Jeff Nichols, and Bruce Saylor, and musicology with Henry Burnett. At the same time outside of school, he studied classical flute with Michael Laderman and Petina Cole, modern and traditional jazz guitar with Joe Giglio and Bern Nix, and shakuhachi with Ronnie Nyogetsu Seldin.Improvised music developed into one of his deepest musical passions through regular performances with musicians including William Parker, Anthony Braxton, Marc Ribot, Daniel Carter, Merry Fortune, and Ken Schalk, among others. It was in this setting that his musical voice matured, leading to the release of the critically acclaimed 27 New York Antisonnets’ with Little Ricky’s House of Chankletas, and the upcoming release A Pass Toward Solace with pianist Stefan Paolini, both on OKS Recordings of North America. He also runs an improvised music podcast, featuring a wide variety of top notch musicians from NYC to New Haven.
Aside from being an accomplished musician, Barry Seroff has also earned high accolades as a composer. His compositions range from traditional chamber ensembles and orchestras to more modern settings featuring electric guitar and drumset. His collaborations with poet Merry Fortune were performed at St. Marks Church, and eventually led to recordings with legendary guitarist Marc Ribot. He is also the winner of the Hubert Sukoff Award for Composition in 2006 and was awarded the AMC Composers Assistance Grant in 2009 for his cantata Democracy, which was premiered at Issue Project Room in March of 2010. His work has been premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Second Instrumental Unit, New Haven Improvisers Collective, ThingNY and Anti-Social Music.
Barbara Held is a flutist, composer and sound artist, whose current focus is the rhythmic relationship between music and image. She has commissioned and performed an idiosyncratic body of new repertoire for flute by both Spanish and American composers, and was the creator and producer of “Music at Metrónom”, a series of concerts of experimental music that gave special support to collaboration between musicians and visual artists, co-curator of “Possibility of Action; the life of the score” for the Documentation Center and Archive of the Barcelona MACBA museum of contemporary art during the 2008-09 season, and “Lines of Sight”, a series of 7 programs of experimental music and radio art for radio web macba. Current projects include a duo with Barcelona composer Ferran Fages who uses camera flash apparatus to subvert and create ephemeral, musical interferences in the transmission of shortwave radios, and a performance piece for video and sound, in collaboration with painter Francesca Llopis, called “The Time in Tokyo”.
Ricardo Arias, Tim Feeney, Vic Rawlings + Sebastien Roux
Sebastien Roux
Since 2005, Sébastien Roux has been working on acousmatic concerts where, different from a typical live performance setting, the audience is invited to sit or lay down comfortably in the dark to listen to a series of spatialised pieces. Each listening session is about 40 minutes long and includes 3 to 8 separate pieces. The collection of pieces is unique and depends on the venue and the listening conditions. At IPR Sébastien Roux invites you to listen to the result of a 3 day residency that has consisted in designing a special set for IPR’s 15 channel speaker system. Within the last year Sébastien Roux has presented listening sessions at Maison des Métallos (Paris), Pannonica (Nantes), Störung Festival (Barcelona), Electronic Church (Belin), AKOUSMA 5 (Montreal), and Cafe Oto (London).
Ricardo Arias is an experimental improvising musician and sound artist
Most of Arias’ music is improvised and made in collaboration with other musicians. Apart from occasionally playing the flute, he uses unconventional instruments and found objects as sound sources in his works. Since 1992 he has focused almost exclusively on the balloon kit, a number of rubber balloons attached to a suitable structure and played with the hands and a set of accessories, including various kinds of sponges, pieces of Styrofoam, rubber bands, etc.
He has performed in Europe, Canada, the United States, Lebanon, Colombia, and Argentina, both solo, and in collaborations with other musicians such as Michel Doneda, Mazen Kerbaj, Dror Feiler, Hans Tammen, Bruce Gremo, Phil Durrant, Jack Wright, Sean Meehan, Barry Weisblat, Vic Rawlings, Gunter Müller, Gabriel Paiuk, Diego Chamy, Axel Dörner, Nicolas Collins, Miguel Frasconi, Tatsuya Nakatani, Pascal Boudreault, Jane Rigler, Luis Conde, Nate Wooley, Matthew Ostrowski, Joel Ryan, Anne Wellmer, Pauline Oliveros, Andrew Drury, Chris Mann, David Watson, and James Fei, among many others.
He has participated in many festivals of new and improvised music such as: Festival Phonos and Zeppelin (Barcelona); Festival Internacional de Música Contemporánea, Festival de los Tiempos del Ruido, and Colón Electrónico (Bogotá), Festival Synthese (Bourges, France); Urban Aboriginals Festival (Berlin); Experimenta (Buenos Aires); High Zero and SoundShift festivals (Baltimore, U. S. A.); Roulettte concert series, Vision Festival, and Improvised and Otherwise (New York City); STEIM; No Echo Festival (Middletown, CT, U. S. A.); and NoNet (Philadelphia, PA, U. S. A.).; Festival Internationalle de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (Victoriaville, Quebec, Canada); and Festival Musique Action Internationalle (Vandeouvre Les Nancy, France), and ExperimentaClub (Madrid) among others.
Arias has been artist in residence at Harvestworks (New York City, 1999) and at Engine 27 (New York City, 2003), at Music OMI International Musicians Residency (Gehnt, New York, 2008) and was a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center (Umbria, Italy, 2004).
MV Carbon + CrudLabs
MV Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and artist. Her work frequently involves tape machines, voice, cello, analog synthesizers, field recordings, along with hand built electronics. She has recently been developing and performing new works that utilize physical computing, and sensor controlled synthesis. Carbon is interested in spatial integration and site-specific consideration.
She has performed nationally and internationally with her solo work, as well as in collaborations at spaces including Arnolfi (UK); Issue Project Room (NYC); Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC); Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit); Nefertiti Jazz Club (Sweden); PS1 Contemporary Art (NYC); Roulette (NYC); The Sage (UK); The Stone (NYC); the Tate Modern (UK); and Tesla (Berlin) . Her work with the dark-wave electronic duo, Metalux, has releases out on a number of experimental and independent labels including a future one on Obsolete Units. Her solo release, The Dislodged Perihelion, (LP) is coming out sometime in the near future on Ecstatic Peace. Her paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries including the Butcher Shop (Chicago), D’Amelio Terras (NYC), Louis V.E.S.P.(NYC), MCCaigwelles Gallery (NYC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PGH), Salon Invisible (Chicago), Three Rives Arts Festival (PGH), and West Nile (NYC).
Steven Litt
CrudLabs is Brooklyn-based artist Steven Litt. He creates gritty, industrial techno using an instrument he developed and built called the CrudBox— a hardware step sequencer which replaces the digitally manipulated or analog synthesized sounds usually associated with sequencers and electronic music with the raw, real time amplified sounds of whatever electromechanical devices are plugged into it, ranging from turntables to solenoids to power tools.
For the second part of the program Carbon will collaborate with Steven Litt, using hand built electronics, synthesizers, hand built electric stringed instruments and field recordings. They will work together to expose precious, glistening pieces of rubble that lie within their rhythmic industrial soundscape.
John Butcher + The Please
John Butcher’s work ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked saxophone pieces and solo explorations with feedback and extreme acoustics. Originally a physicist, he left academia in 1982, and has since collaborated with hundreds of musicians, mostly involved with improvisation – including Derek Bailey, John Stevens, Gerry Hemmingway, Polwechsel, Gino Robair, Rhodri Davies, Orig Toshimaru Nakamura, Paul Lovens, Eddie Prevost, Phil Minton, Steve Beresford, Otomo Yoshihide and John Tilbury. His compositions include pieces for Polwechsel, Elision, Rova Saxophone Quartet and “somethingtobesaid” for the John Butcher Group.
Recent projects include “Thermal” with EX guitarist Andy Moor & Thomas Lehn and “The Contest of Pleasures” with Axel Dörner and Xavier Charles.
The Please
Brendan Murray is a composer from Boston, MA who uses digital processing and analog synthesis to create large-scale compositions based in drone, pulse and repetition.
Linda Aubry Bullock’s earliest memories include being fascinated with the sound of humming transformers, birds, and the drone of the distant television. After music composition studies at Berklee College of Music (MA) and Bennington College (MFA), she developed a career primarily in the visual arts: porcelain, painting, and murals. She now performs and composes electronic music and has played in many settings domestically and internationally. She makes sound via field recordings, electronics, and harp.
Michael T. Bullock is a composer, performer, visual artist, and writer living in Boston, MA, USA. His modes of work include electroacoustic composition, improvisation, drawing, and video. Bullock performs across the US and in Europe, collaborating with a huge range of artists, including Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, Steve Roden, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley of nmperign, Mazen Kerbaj and Theodore Bikel. Bullock also performs with the BSC, an octet of Boston-based improvisers; as the trio MAWJA with Kerbaj and Vic Rawlings; and in the sound & light duo rise set twilight.
For Floating Points, The Please will simultaneously go back to basics and forge new territory for themselves.
The musicians will form a standard rock trio: Linda on guitar, Mike on bass, Brendan on drums. IPR’s multichannel hemispherical speaker array will be used to create an evolving atmosphere of sounds composed of field recordings and filtered samples of the constantly simmering groove created by the band. The band’s sound will be gradually displaced by that of the speaker array, until the band stops and begins a new, introspective segment to carry the performance to its conclusion.
Kaffe Matthews
Since 1990 she has been making and performing new electro-acoustic music worldwide with a variety of things and places such as violin, theremin, Scottish weather, desert stretched wires, NASA scientists, melting ice in Quebec and the BBC Scottish symphony orchestra. Currently she is researching 3D composition through Hammerhead sharks in Galapagos and Atlantic salmon in Northumberland rivers. Acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation and live composition, Kaffe has released 6 solo CD’s on the label Annette Works.
Often collaborating, her present projects are with sonic furniture project ‘music for bodies’ and climate change activist fan band The Gluts with Café Carbon
Recent works include: Where are the Wild Ones?(2010), 12 channel composition, The Sage, AV Festival 10; In clean air we fly(2009), bicycle powered 8 channel installation for London’s Gillett Sq; The Marvelo Project(2008), Folkestone Sculpture Triennial; Sonic Bed_Marfa(2008), Texas; Sonic Bench_Mexico (2007), Laboratorio Arte Alameda Mexico City, 2007; Body Abiding, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Glasgow ; Sonic Bed_Shanghai,(2006) Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai, China, 2006; This is for you,(2005) work for chaise longue, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2005; Three Crosses of Queensbridge, work for bicycles + radios, Drawing Room, London, 2005; No-one here but us chickens, 2005 The Starr auditorium, TATE Modern, London, UK, 2005.
Her 2004 collaboration Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA, she received a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship in 2005 and an Award of Distinction, Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for the work Sonic Bed_London. In February 2006 she was made an Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory, China and in 2009, a patron of the Galapagos shark conservation society.
A 12 channel audio performance in which she attempts to make salmon language whilst moving up river from Tynemouth to Kielder water.
All music is made and processed from underwater recordings taken in the River Tyne Jan, Feb 2010.
Dafna Naphtali + Bora Yoon
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist/ improviser/composer from an eclectic musical background. As a singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using her Max/MSP programming for sound processing of voice and other instruments.
Dafna has collaborated / performed with many experimental musicians and video artists over the past 15 years, such as Ras Moshe, Alexander Waterman , Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Darius Jones, Kathleen Supové and Hans Tammen as well as video artists Benton-C Bainbridge and Angie Eng and choreographer Daria Fain. She’s co-lead the digital chamber punk ensemble, What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton (www.whatbat.org) , and is a founder of Magic Names vocal ensemble. She’s received commissions and awards from NY Foundation for the Arts, NY State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, Experimental TV Center, Brecht Forum, and residencies at STEIM (Holland), Music OMI and iEAR at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute. She’s twice received commissions from American Composers Forum (for pianist Kathleen Supové, and in 2010 for Magic Names vocal ensemble), . She’s performed and traveled widely and under usual circumstances for her music (to festivals and venues around the globe), including to India in February 2010 for collaboration with Hindustani singer, Vidya Shah (with funding from American Music Center). Dafna received a 2011 Franklin Furnace Fund award to develop work with Eric Singer’s LEMUR music robots.
Dafna also teaches and gives workshops at universities in the US and Europe , holds a Masters in Music Technology from New York University, where she is part-time faculty, and teaches programs and consults about computer music at Harvestworks and freelance since ‘95. She’s done sound design and/or programming work for the projects of many artists at the forefront of digital and interactive music.
Dafna can be heard on Mechanique(s) (Acheulian Handaxe), on What is it Like to be a Bat? (Tzadik/Oracles) (4 Stars, All Music Guide) with Brazelton and Danny Tunick, Her newest CD Chatter Blip with Chuck Bettis is on Acheulian Handaxe.
Dafna Naphtali will perform a set of interrelated multi-channel aleatoric sound and vocal pieces building on work created during her years as a programmer at Engine 27, and during a residency at Diapason (“Audio Chandelier and Haas“). She will also present excerpts of “Panda Half-Life,” a new multi-channel vocal work written for the vocal ensemble Magic Names (American Composers Forum commission), which premiered in June, with Gisburg and other guest singers from the ensemble.
Bora Yoon
Yoon has collaborated with musicians DJ Spooky, Ben Frost, Kaki King; data artist Luke DuBois; site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance; multimedia theatre companies Ridge Theatre and Dhamma Theatre West; composer Michael Gordon; poet Sekou Sundiata; and the League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots (LEMUR).
Yoon has collaborated with musicians DJ Spooky, Ben Frost, Kaki King; data artist Luke DuBois; site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance; multimedia theatre companies Ridge Theatre and Dhamma Theatre West; composer Michael Gordon; poet Sekou Sundiata; and the League of Electronic Musicians & Urban Robots (LEMUR).
Jesse Stiles + Andrew Neumann
Jesse Stiles (b. 1978, Boston, MA) is a new media artist, musician, and designer of electronic systems. Through the adaptive misuse of emerging digital technologies, Stiles creates works that are simultaneously entertaining, disorienting, immersive, and transcendental. Stiles’ performances and generative installation work engage with and deconstruct a number of populist formats including electronic dance music, narrative cinema, and the “light show” – pushing these mediums into realms both sublime and subliminal.
Stiles’ work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at institutions including Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Lincoln Center (NYC, USA), Eyebeam (NYC, USA), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin/Madrid), and the American Land Museum (various sites, USA). Stiles has also produced a number of site-specific performances in unconventional sites such as “Topics in Advanced Facemelting,” a light and sound performance in one of the United States’ few remaining gasholder buildings (Troy, NY), and “Deja Rendez Vous” a performance on a floating video stage adrift in the Buffalo Bayou (Houston, TX).
In 2000, Stiles was awarded the Watson Fellowship, a one year grant, which enabled him to travel around the world creating electronic music, a project which culminated in the album, “Watson Songs.” His forthcoming release “The Target Museum” is a record of experimental pop songs, employing dream logic and imaginary instruments. Stiles has worked as a sound designer and composer on a wide variety of IMAX films, feature films, touring exhibitions, and experimental video works. He has led courses, lectures and workshops on sound design, digital audio composition, studio production, and field recording at universities and colleges including NYU, Carnegie Mellon University, The New School, Princeton, and the Massachusetts College of Art. Stiles holds a BA in Cognitive Science from Vassar College and a MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Andrew Neumann is a Boston-based artist who works in a variety of media, including sculpture, electronic/interactive music, and film and video installation. In 2004 he received a Guggehneim Fellowship. He has had solo shows at bitforms Gallery in New York City, the DeCordova Museum, Howard Yezerski Gallery and at the Boston Cyberarts Festivals in 2003 and 2005. During 2001, he was an Artist in Residence at the iEAR Studio at Rensalear Polytech Institue and at the Visual Studies Workshop. He has also had residencies at The MacDowell Colony (2000), YADDO (1999, ‘03), Ucross Foundation (1998), Steim (1999), ATLANTIC CENTER for the ARTS (2001), Art/OMI (2000), and the Experimental Television Center (1982, ‘87). Group exhibits have included “Tech-Art II” at the South Shore Arts Center, Art Interactive in Cambridge, Ma, Gallery Bershad, and numerous others. His music is available on Sublingual Records. He has had solo music/video performances at Experimental Intermedia and Roulette, both in NYC. He has taught filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has also been an instructor at the Art Institute of Boston and the Boston Film/Video Foundation.
Tonight, he’ll be performing “Bring Me the Head of Mariah Carey (or, Seven Degrees of Separation)”
Carver Audain + Richard Francis
Carver Audain (b 1981) is a sound artist actively producing works comprised of field recordings, guitar, electronics, organ, and other assorted sources. Strategically, he uses improvisational tactics to integrate a variety of pre-recorded and pre-arranged material with his live playing through the use of controlled feedback and situation-specific spontaneous composition. Sonically, he produces an array of textured sound fields with a focus on controlling the shift of sustained harmonic overtones that both merge with and transform their physical surroundings.
Richard Francis has been releasing works on CD/vinyl, performing solo and in collaboration as a touring artist since 1996. He uses field recordings of acoustic and electronic sounds and a tone generator to compose textural and tonal sound works. He has released solo and collaborative works on a number of labels worldwide and runs his own label CMR, through which he releases limited edition lathe cut records by New Zealand artists. Touring in Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, USA and Europe, he uses a computer and electronics, while in performance. Since 2003, Francis has composed works for sound installation, participating in group and solo shows at galleries throughout New Zealand. He has collaborated for recordings and/or performances with many artists including Bruce Russell, Francisco Lopez, Jason Kahn, Mattin, Birchville Cat Motel, Gate, MSBR, Tetuzi Akiyama, Lawrence English, Rosy Parlane, Howard Stelzer, Jason Lescalleet, Jay Sullivan, Empirical, Pumice, Kuwayama Kiyoharu, Phil Dadson, Anthony Guerra, Sean Meehan, Ishigami Kazuya, Antony Milton, James Kirk, MHFS, Tim Coster, Paul Winstanley, Takefumi Naoshima, Toshihiro Koike.
Leslie Ross + Philip White
Buy Tickets | Admission: $10 ($9 in advance, $8 members)
Instrument maker, composer and bassoonist, Leslie Ross, has been creating in NYC since the mid 80’s when she was very active in the downtown improv-scene. Constantly, Improvisation remains central to most of her pieces. In the past number of years, she has focused her explorations on better understanding bassoon multiphonics and has become ceaselessly amazed at their richness, diversity –and ever-growing numbers. She still periodically constructs instruments and sound sculptures: the latest one in 2007, a bicycle driven mechanical organ. She continues to make replicas of historical bassoons in her workshop on the Lower East Side.
Philip White’s performances center on a non-linear feedback system, which consists of a mixer and several homemade circuits. In addition to his work with analog and digital electronics, White has written extensively for chamber ensembles and created a large body of inter-media pieces that explore meaning in information transmission.
In 2008, Philip received his MFA from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Hilda Parades , Helmut Lachenmann, Roscoe Mitchell and James Fei. His works have been exhibited in galleries across the US and Germany. He currently performs with Suzanne Thorpe (thenumber46), Chuck Johnson (with chuck johnson with philip white) and Charity Chan (Cat on a Wire). Recent performances/exhibitions include The Stone (NYC), Sonic Circuits (DC), Redux New Media Festival (Charleston, SC) and Neurotitan (Berlin). Thenumber46’s forthcoming debut Bleach and Ammonia is being released in cassette format on Tape Drift Records. Philip also writes about music, contributing to the Wire magazine and SEAMUS Journal.
The New Roaratoria: Carlos Giffoni
Carlos Giffoni is a Venezuelan electronic musician who resides in the New York City area since the year 2000. Currently using modular synthesizers, hand made custom instruments, and various types of analog and digital synthesis in the composition of electronic music pieces, as well as improvising live with local and international musicians. His recent solo work has focused in live analog synthesizer pieces that put his style in a line with early techno and cosmic electronic music while maintaining the harsher edge of his previous noise works. Along his solo work he is also working on a new ‘acid music’ project called No Fun Acid.
Carlos remains a major figure in the US and international experimental music scene, performing live in New York and in a number of tours and festivals in the US, South America, Europe and Japan. He is the curator of the No Fun Fest, a yearly event in Brooklyn bringing together a wide variety of international experimental musicians as well as running the No Fun Productions label. His work has been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Wire, Pitchfork, Art Forum, Tokion, Signal to Noise and many others.
He also holds an MFA in design and technology from Parsons School of Design.
Recent live and recording collaborations include work with:
Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Nels Cline, Chris Corsano, Peter Rehberg, Chuck Bettis, Nautical Almanac, Smegma, Yasunao Tone, Emeralds, Gert-Jan Prins, John Duncan, Rudolf E.ber, Lasse Marhaug, Z. Karkowski, Merzbow, Astro, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori and more.
The New Roaratoria is generously supported by the Greenwall Foundation
Turbulence.org Presents: Stephan Moore + Luke Dubois with Todd Reynolds
New works commissioned by Turbulence.org will feature the World Premieres of The Occupants, by Stephan Moore, and Moments of Inertia by R. Luke DuBois.
Stephan Moore will present The Occupants, a generative composition with some aspects that can be influenced through single- or multi-user interaction. Moore has used the piece to search for answers to both profound and insipid questions, such as: What does it mean to compose a “site-specific” composition when the site is the internet?
This is a long-term project that will eventually encompass multiple sub-compositional personalities. The premiere performance will focus on a single personality, i.e. the first occupant, with its (mostly) monophonic voice and (mostly) agreeable disposition. A number of copies of this personality will be distributed throughout Issue Project Room’s array of Hemisphere speakers and set loose to compose themselves.
Moore dedicates this concert to Suzanne Fiol.
Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, and sound designer in New York City. His creative work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. Many of his performances and installation artworks make use of large, multi-channel arrays of his Hemisphere speakers. He performs regularly with Scott Smallwood in the electronic duo Evidence, and with a variety of musicians, live-video artists, and dancers. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught college-level courses in composition, sound art and electronic music at several schools. He is currently the Sound Engineer and Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and one of its core musicians.
“THE OCCUPANTS” is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
R. Luke DuBois will present his piece, Moments of Inertia featuring Todd Reynolds on violin. The piece is an evening-length performance based on a teleological study of gesture in musical performance and how it relates to gesture in intimate social interaction. The work is written for solo violin with real-time computer accompaniment and video. Moments consists of twelve violin études — ranging from 3-5 minutes in length — each of which uses a different violin performance gesture as a control input for manipulating a short piece of high-speed film (300 frames-per-second) — of a person performing a social gesture. Taking its cue from principles in physics that determine an object’s resistance to change, the violinist’s gestures time-remap and scrub the video clip to explore the intricacies of the performed action.
DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. 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 was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.
Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival.
An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through electronic performance and remixing of cinema.
DuBois has lived for the last fifteen years in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
Todd Reynolds is a composer, conductor, arranger and violinist, is a longtime member of Bang On A Can, Steve Reich and Musicians and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project . His commitment to genre-bending and technology-driven innovation in music has produced innumerable collaborations with artists that regularly cross musical and disciplinary boundaries, regularly placing him in venues from clubs to concert halls around the world.
“MOMENTS OF INERTIA” was commissioned through Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, which is made possible by the generous support of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund.
FLOATING POINTS Festival 2009
THE FLOATING POINTS FESTIVAL RETURNS
FOR ITS FOURTH YEAR AT ISSUE PROJECT ROOM
July 1, 2009 – Brooklyn, NY – A month-long program experimenting with and utilizing ISSUE Project Room’s custom-built 15 channel hemispherical speaker system, the Floating Points Festival returns this year with a line-up of luminary sound artists including Hisham Bharoocha, Morton Subotnick, Stephen Vitiello, Zeena Parkins, Suzanne Thorpe, C. Spencer Yeh, and Tony Conrad.
Also on display throughout the month, Kaffe Matthews’ multichannel sound installation “Sonic Bed Marfa” will be on display before each performance starting at 7 pm.
All performances begin at 8 pm and are $15 (ISSUE members, $12) unless otherwise noted. Please visit the web site for more information at www.issueprojectroom.org.
WEEK 1
Thurs Jul 2
Hisham Bharoocha w/Ben Vida
+ Ateleia and Sadek Bazaraa
Fri Jul 3
Alan Licht and Loren Connors + Evidence
WEEK 2
Tues Jul 7
Wed Jul 8
See Hear Now (David and Gisele Gamper)
Fri July 10
Lesley Flanigan w/ Luke Dubois
WEEK 3
Wed Jul 15
Mari Kimura
Thurs Jul 16
MV Carbon + Okkyung Lee
WEEK 4
ISSUE Artist-In-Residence: Ha Yang Kim
ISSUE’s AIR program made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation.
Thomas Ankersmit + Tony Conrad
WEEK 5
Wed Jul 29
Suzanne Thorpe + Zeena Parkins
Thurs Jul 30
Dan Senn + Stephen Vitiello with Molly Berg
CLOSING NIGHT!
Reception 7:30 pm
Performance 8:30 pm
Tickets $15
Available at Door
Purchase in advance online
Morton Subotnick
Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work which brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon [1966-7], was commissioned by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium – a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system constituted a present-day form of chamber music. He is also pioneering works to offer musical creative tools to young children. He is the author of a series of CDROMS for children, a children’s website [www.creatingmusic.com] and developing a program for classroom and after school programs that will soon become available internationally.
He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.
Lavalier
Lavalier is in indie-experimental group that formed in NYC in late 2008. With a penchant for vocal harmonies, fuzz/slide guitar, harpsichord, and accordion, the group creates cinematic music that is both psychedelic and fantastical. Lavalier was created by two longtime friends and musical
collaborators, Steve Milton, and Dave Horowitz. Having met in high school, Milton & Horowitz have played in various bands together, and spent 2005-2007 on tour with NYC indie band, The Cloud Room. Heavily inspired by Tom Waits’ occasional DIY-low-fi sound, Beach Boys harmonies, and various forms of cinematic music, Milton & Horowitz began recording the first Lavalier tracks in the Spring of 2008.
In a live setting, the group is interested in a variety of improvisational techniques, one such technique employs a process known as “spatitalization.” At various points during the show, different instruments and vocals are sampled in real-time using a custom-designed interface, and played over a ring of loudspeakers installed around the audience area. The group attempts to create a dimensional element that sometimes serves as the back drop or the center piece of the music.
Lavalier is:
Steve Milton – Vox and Various stuff
Dave Horowitz – Guitars
Terence Caulkins – Glockenspiel, DSP
Yasmin Reshamwala – Keytar and Vox
Melati Melay – Guitar and Vox
Nathan Hasalby – Bass
Jason Pharr – Percussion
Ha Yang Kim
Artist In Residence: Ha-Yang Kim
Admission: $15
Cellist, composer and improviser Ha-Yang Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. Ha-Yang made her professional solo debut at age 16 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Hailed as “phenomenal” and playing with “brilliant technique full of energy, concentration, musicality and expression” (Mainpost, Germany), she performs new music as a soloist and with ensembles and artists in festivals and concert venues throughout the world. She is the founder of Odd Appetite, a cello-percussion duo which performs and commissions new contemporary works alongside original works and improvisations. Ms. Kim has developed a unique language of extended string techniques and has created her own music based on this work, as well as collaborating on new pieces from other composers. Her musical influences draw equally from a range of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, jazz, and improvised music, to non-western musical sources from Bali, Korea and South Indian classical music (Karnatic). Her music has been performed in the US, Turkey, The Netherlands, Belgium, Korea, and Germany. In seeking new musical experiences, Ha-Yang has performed traditional and new Balinese music as a member of Gamelan Galak Tika, and has collaborated/ performed with many diverse musicians such as Evan Ziporyn, Cecil Taylor, John Zorn, Christian Wolff, Lee Hyla, Louis Andriessen, Lukas Ligeti, Larry Polansky, and Stefan Poetzsch, with whom she has presented original compositions incorporating electronics, dance, theatre, and multi-media.
Past performances include as soloist at Carnegie Hall, touring and playing at festivals in the US, Europe, Cuba and Bali, Indonesia, performing at the Bang on a Can Marathon with both her duo and the All-Stars, composing for and performing at the Kwacheon International Theatre Festival in Seoul, Korea, a solo recital at the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg, Germany, and broadcast recordings for the Bavarian Radio Network. Upcoming performances of her music include at festivals in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, Holland, Belgium and in the US. Ama, a CD of her own compositions, is released on Tzadik. Ms. Kim has also recorded for New World, Cold Blue, New Albion, Karnatic Lab and Bridge Records.
She has received prizes and awards including a grant from Meet the Composer, Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Argosy Foundation, the Ruth Schwob Foundation, and The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Kim has been an artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Brown University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Bates College, Brandeis University and at the Walden School for Young Composers. Ha-Yang studied cello, improvisation, and microtonality at the New England Conservatory of Music, Karnatic music concepts at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and was on the faculty at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, USA. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence Program is made possible through generous support from the Jerome Foundation
C. Spencer Yeh + John Wiese
C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan 1975, moved to the US in 1980; studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, and is now based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeh is active both as a solo and collaborative artist, as well as with his primary project, Burning Star Core. As an improviser, Yeh is focused on developing a personal vocabulary using violin, voice, and electronics. As a sound artist/composer, Yeh works with all aspects available surrounding a work, aurally and physically, as elements key to the cumulative experience. He is concerned not only with the sensual aspects of ’sound organization,’ but the gestural qualities as well. Yeh has collaborated with a deep and ever-growing list of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Okkyung Lee, John Wiese, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, No Fun Fest, NADA Art Fair, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, ZKM Karlsruhe, and has also exhibited visual art, sound, and video works internationally. http://www.myspace.com/cspenceryeh
John Wiese is an artist and composer from Los Angeles, California.
His ongoing projects include LHD and Sissy Spacek, with plenty of freelance work
with many artists as diverse as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Evan Parker,
Smegma, Kevin Drumm, Cattle Decapitation, and C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core).
He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering Europe, Scandinavia and
Australia as a member of Sunn O))), the UK as part of the Free Noise tour (a tentet
including Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Yellow Swans, etc.), the United States
alongside Wolf Eyes, and recently performed in the 52nd Venice Biennale with artist
Nico Vascellari. More information can be found at www.john-wiese.com.
Betsey Biggs + Shelley Burgon
Betsey Biggs is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work in music, sound, video and installation has been called “psychologically complex” by the New Yorker. Her work aims to expose the beautiful in the mundane, to actively engage the audience, and to transform the city into a creative interface through psychogeographic practice. Recent projects include a theatrical work with flutist and performer Margaret Lancaster, an outdoor mixer powered by people’s shadows and a series of downloadable soundtracks meant for walkers to engage with their surroundings. Betsey recently received her Ph.D. at Princeton University, writing about public sound art, and will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University in the fall of 2009. 
Shelley Burgon (harp & computer) is a member of the performing/composer chamber ensemble Ne(x)tworks and the band Stars Like Fleas. She has spent the last seven years improvising as a soloist and with many legendary people associated with the New York downtown avante-garde. She has been hailed by the New York Times as being a “mesmerizing” interpreter of modern music. Shelley has performed her music and the music of contemporary composers for series such as the the MATA Festival, Issue Project Rooms Points in a Circle, free103point9 Wave Farm and Summer Winds, and the Vision Festival among others. In May 2009 she was honored to premiere a new piece for the Merce Cunningham Hudson Valley Project at the Dia:Beacon. She is currently collaborating on an electronic music project with songwriter/vocalist Paul Duncan. Shelley received a BA in Music from SFSU and an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. She can be heard as a collaborator and guest on many labels including Hometapes, Skirl, Tzadik and Ipecac.
Harpist Shelley Burgon will perform “Mirrored Ceiling,” a new composition by Stephan Moore for harp and multi-channel audio, in which the harp is fed through a network of shifting delays to create shimmering, meditative sonic patterns.
www.myspace.com/shelleyburgon
www.myspace.com/starslikefleas
www.nextworksmusic.net
www.myspace.com/nacnudluap
Alan Licht and Loren Connors + Evidence
Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who’s who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legends like Tom Verlaine, Arthur Lee, Arto Lindsay, and Jandek. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. With Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, he founded Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant garde cinema. Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007, and has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Modern Painters, Art Review, Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and other publications. His first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, was published by Drag City Press in 2003; a second book, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in fall 2007.
Sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood began performing as the duo Evidence in 2001. Focusing on the universe of real-world sound, Evidence pours field recordings like water into their compositional and improvisational process, resulting in music that balances between tight organization and unregulated flow. Using recording equipment, laptops, and other electronic devices, Evidence creates music that deals with gradual change, improvised over time, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes pulsating, always texturally striking and unique. Resisting classification into a single genre, Evidence is equally at home performing in experimental venues, clubs, galleries, planetariums, and rooftops.
Hisham Bharoocha w/Ben Vida + Ateleia w/Sadek Bazaraa
+ Ateleia and Sadek Bazaraa
+ Hisham Bharoocha w/ Ben Vida
Issue Project Room
Doors at 8PM
$15
••••••
Tonight’s performance marks a new instance of ‘Archegram’, the ongoing collaboration between musician James Elliott, aka Ateleia, and visual artist Sadek Bazaraa. Combining Ateleia’s pulsing ambient soundscapes and Bazaraa’s deeply atmospheric video art, the two strive to generate a hermetic sensory environment that melds the streamlined focus of classic modern minimalism with the tranced-out spiritualism of sustained tones, slippery loops and hypnotically repeating geometric imagery.
Since 2004 James Elliott has worked under the Ateleia moniker, releasing propulsive, abstractly melodic electronic music on the Table of the Elements label. Elliott reconfigures a variety of source materials – mainly synthesizer, guitar and electronics – via computer processing into a shifting, constantly mutating framework of psychedelic minimalism. The Wire has called Ateleia’s music, “Quietly breathtaking.” Dusted magazine writes, “… the sensual properties of these perpetually flickering micro-melodies and buried, striated rhythms recall the bright eyelid-movie patterning of Man Ray’s ‘Emak Bakia’ film, where spiralling shapes reflect light in abstruse programs.”
http://www.myspace.com/ateleia
Sadek Bazaraa is a multi-media artist working in the realms of fine art, art direction and commercial design as a partner at the design collective GHAVA. Bazaraa’s recent visual acuity draws heavily on associations between objects, shapes, patterns, and textures taken from immediate surroundings to form unexpected narratives. Through recontextualization and careful manipulation, the mundane becomes glorified. Bazaraa’s process-oriented approach is primarily concerned with the subtle manipulation of geometric shapes and textural distortions to create a truly immersive take on the mathematical ratios of sacred geometry.
Both artists live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Hisham Akira Bharoocha is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He concentrates on creating music, visual art, and photography.
Bharoocha has had solo exhibitions of his work at D’Amelio Terras gallery in New York, as well as Vleeshal, a state run space in The Netherlands. He has been in numerous group exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, John Connelly Presents, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
His work has been published in Art Forum, V, i-D, Flaunt, Tokion, Blend to name a few.
Hisham’s newest works deal with the melting together of images that happens in the mind when one is meditating, dreaming, day dreaming, or going about their daily lives. Bharoocha likes to observe how his visions and feelings all blend together to create a massive medley of images and vibrations that one can feel in the body. Hisham tries to create works that show the absurdity and logic of how each mind works, what kind of relationships it creates between experiences and images that we absorb through our senses moment by moment.
Hisham is well known in the underground music scene for being a founding member of the bands Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. After leaving Black Dice, he created Soft Circle, a solo project that allowed him a more personal exploration of his own musical interests. His first solo album, ‘Full Bloom’ was released in January 2007 on Eastern Developments. Hisham has recently collaborated with the artist Doug Aitken on a sound piece which was performed at the MoMA, as well as musicians such as the experimental rock group Boredoms. Bharoocha is currently working on a new Soft Circle album due to be released sometime in 2009.
Hisham is one of the New York underground community’s creative leaders, continually trying to bring together the visual art, music, and fashion communities for collaboration. Bharoocha was the musical director for the now legendary 77 BOADRUM performance, a musical composition composed by the experimental Japanese music group Boredoms, which involved 77 drummers playing 77 drum kits in a Spiral formation at Empire Fulton Ferry State Park on July 7th, 2007. Bharoocha was also the music director for this year’s 88 Boadrum performance which happened on August 8th, 2008 with 88 drummers playing with Boredoms in Los Angeles, as well as 88 drummers playing with Gang Gang Dance in New York City on the same day.
Keith Fullerton Whitman (CANCELLED)
TONIGHT’S CONCERT IS CANCELLED. MANY APOLOGIES.
Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer/performer obsessed with electronic music; from its mid-century origins in academic studios in Europe straight on through contemporary bedroom “digital music.”
Currently he is working towards implementing a complete system for live performance of improvised electronic music that incorporates elements from nearly every era: a reel-to-reel tape machine, a selection of small “jerry-rigged” / “circuit-bent” battery-powered sound-producing boxes, an analog modular synthesizer, an early “consumer” home-computer, and at the core; a contemporary computer running a custom-built Max-MSP based modular system that both controls these elements and acts as a central conduit into which their sounds are captured/collected, processed, then diffused to up to eight separate channels/speakers/amplifiers.
He is also, at present, composing an as-of-yet untitled piece for Egyptian Oud, Serge and Doepfer Analog Modular Synthesizers, and computer control/processing. It is his first through-composed long-form work.
http://www.myspace.com/keithfullertonwhitman
…
Keith, 33, lives in Somerville, MA, USA with Robyn “Petra-Pixm” Belair and their child; a Korat named “Dribcots.”
He has been known to dabble in “virtuoso” “electronic dance music” under many stage names/pseudonyms, most notably Hrvatski (but also Gai/Jin, ASCIII, Anonymous, Assassassinator X, The Superlatives, etc…).
His current (05/06) favorite albums are ::
Jon Appleton & Don Cherry “Human Music” (Flying Dutchman FDS-121) 1970
Pierre Henry “Mise en Musique du Corticalart de Roger Lafosse” (Philips 6521 022) 1971
Åkos Rozmann “Images of the Dream and Death” (Phono Suecia PS 27) 1974-1977 / 1990
Dariush Dolat-Shahi “Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar” (Folkways FTS 37464) 1985
Pink Floyd “1967: The First 3 Singles” (EMI M31001) 1997
He loves to travel. He hates to cook.
