Yoga with Liz Kresch (Sundays at 10am)
Liz teaches Iyengar-based vinyasa yoga and pilates.
She has maintained a dedicated yoga practice since 1996. Her teacher training was completed with Adrienne Burke at Atmananda currently Centerpoint Studio in early 2004. She is certified in pilates mat and equipment through the Kane School of Core Integration and appreciates the support that pilates offers a yoga practice and movement in general as well as the profound physical results of the discipline. Her Wat Po Thai massage work, certified at the Pai Spa in Bangkok and the Swedish Institute in NY and her bellydance work with Dunya McPherson also inform her teaching. Liz’s B.A. (1993) is from Sarah-Lawrence College where she majored in art & philosophy of religion. More recently she has completed both Nalandabodhi and New York Shambhala’s Buddhist study courses which have illuminated ground to her asana practice.
Liz has taught previously at Finetune Pilates, Omala, Body Elite Fitness, Vayu Yoga and Jaya Yoga in Brooklyn, The Standard Hotel, Brown’s Apothecary, and the Nirvana Spa in Miami, the Caribo B&B in Cozumel, Mexico, The United Nations, The Urban Justice Center and The New York Studio School for Painting & Sculpture. She currently works privately with students of varying experience, strengths & challenges.
Liz strives to create the support to let our own evolutionary capacity surprise us.
She is Yoga Alliance certified at the 500 hour level and a member of the International Dance Exercise Association. She adheres to their ethical guidelines. CPR certified.
please email Liz at kresch71@hotmail.com to rsvp.
In Conversation With Matthew Mottel, Part II
Matthew Mottel is ISSUE Project Room’s Artist-In-Residence for April – June 2010. He is an internationally recognized musician and artist, performing most notably with Talibam! for the past seven years. He’s been hanging around NYC clubs since he was like 16, and dropping electric mind bombs with his synthesizer in those clubs nearly as long with folks like Cooper-Moore, Rhys Chatham, Karole Armitage, Awesome Color, Akron/Family, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear), Kenny Wollesen, Chris Corsano, Ras Moshe, Cooper-Moore, Sean Meehan, and CSC Funk Band.
The final performance in the residency will be a free concert held on June 9 with Talibam!
The following conversation is an extract from an extended chat held on April 28. Check the first installment here.
Matthew Walker: So, tell me how Talibam! first came to be.
Matthew Mottel: I had met Kevin {Shea} in April 2003 on an improv gig with Ras Moshe at free103point9, the pirate radio station. We just connected well and we were like, “yeah, let’s keep playing.” This was right as I was coming back to New York. So, that’s how the band started. Kevin went to school for critical theory at New School and I graduated with a liberal arts degree in critical theory, so both of us were interested in music and culture from, like, this critical perspective that was internalizing and analyzing mass culture and avant-garde perspectives together.
The way me and him talked for a while – just like how we have this onstage banter – we had that immediately as like a personal relationship where, some of the first drives we took as a band, it wasn’t just like, “Oh, so what do you think about food?” It was like this weird theatrical point-counterpoint hysterical banter. Yeah, we just would banter at each other for two hours in this like fake, or even actual, deconstructionist language. Like, “I think the hierarchy of the longitude of the platitude does not deserve a… Point!” You know, we would just go back and forth, and then we’d be like, “Oh, we’re at the gig.”
MW: …and then you’d continue the conversation on stage.
MM: Exactly.
MW: So, I’m really curious about how you think your relationship with ESP-Disk’ has contextualized your music, both for yourselves and for audiences and critics. Do you think when critics wrote about {last album} Boogie In the Breeze Blocks, their default inclination was to approach the music in the context of ‘60s avant-garde jazz?
MM: In some ways, that’s definitely sort of the starting reference, and in some ways that’s fine, because I love that music too, and I’m proud to be a labelmate with Sun Ra and Albert Ayler…there’s like serious gravitas to be included in that continuum. And that’s the trick that I think the weight of us being on a label like that is — to really be evident to writers and to the public at large…to spark the thought, “The label is back, it’s a contemporary label, and this is the band that they’ve selected to be one of the larger flagship artists of the moment.’ So, that’s where I’d like to be thought of.
There was a lot of weight back then to the artists that were on ESP, but because of the climate of independent labels in the ’60s, you didn’t have the opportunity to promote and be as successful as independent labels can be in 2010, with the internet and different contemporary marketing tools and things like that. So, if you were an independent label in ’66, you were competing against Blue Note and all the other major labels that had money, financing, pr…all those things. So, of course the ESP music was going to be more obscure simply due to limited distribution opportunities. But I think that ESP — now in a contemporary label world — should have the same weight as Sub Pop, Merge, Secretly Canadian, Thrill Jockey, Young God, Constellation…All of those labels are birthed out of ESP’s desire to be an independent label promoting music that they want to promote. So, Sub Pop and Constellation all found scenes needing support, and it grew into large things for them. So, for ESP, the potential is there for them to be recognized on a larger scale.
MW: Though, I think the music ESP seeks to foster does still have a more experimental bent, trying to support music that pushes boundaries and develops new vocabularies. And that’s not something that necessarily prevents it from pushing into a more mainstream realm, but it does differentiate it from a label like Sub Pop or even Constellation.
MM: Yeah, they’re still dealing with much more traditional, like, four walls and a house whereas ESP is more of a geodesic dome {laughs}. Ya know, the paradigm is a little different…but I think, what we were trying to do with ESP is work in both paradigms. The idea was to be part of an avant-garde minded label, and give them a contemporary pop album. So, that’s what we tried to do…
MW: So there was definitely a conscious effort to move into a slightly more intentional pop soundworld, from Ordination {of the Globetrotting Conscripts} to Boogie? I know there were other things in between, obviously, which I haven’t heard but…
MM: Well, those other albums…to me Ordination and Boogie are the two actual studio albums we’ve made. People talk about our excessive discography, but most of the albums are really treated as sessions — edited down jazz sessions. And it’s great that we’ve released music that holds a high watermark…that stands as a session and can still be good. That’s one thing I like about our band is that we can just be in a room for 45 minutes and, ideally, be happy.
But Boogie and Ordination are attempts to utilize the studio as a conceptual building block. A few of the songs that were on Boogie were actually recorded at the time of Ordination but they would have made that album very different. Ordination wound up being very much aestheticized with the label {azul discográfica}. So it turned out that some of the material that wasn’t on that, we used for Boogie. Another thing we did for Boogie, we went through our live concert recordings and found parts of songs we were playing but hadn’t recorded before, and merged them into studio forms and did overdubs and turned them into these pop songs.
MW: Yeah, I love how you guys do that…how Boogie really captures the essence of the manic energy of your stage show — how actual live recordings are integrated in, especially on that song “Slap Yr Boots On! Oysters Await” where you’re playing at Goodbye Blue Monday. The first part is a straight live recording and it becomes more pristine and higher fidelity as it evolves over time.
MM: Yeah, that worked really well. It’s been really nice using the studio as a compositional tool. We like doing that as a band. Boogie was produced in 5 days, so it was pretty intense. But uh, the new albums that we’re working on now have very long arcs of time. One started in a session in October. I did almost all of my overdubs alone, and then Kevin’s going to his overdubs later. So, it gives us more time to think about what we want to do for it.
MW: So are these tracks even more composed than Boogie?
MM: Yeah, we have a single coming out. It’s gonna be a split between Electric Cowbell and ESP-Disk’…actually ESP’s first-ever 45. And these tracks will be the most produced we’ve ever put out. I like to think about the idea of bands losing perspective…like bands starting in the ’60s and by the time they were in the ’80s, they lost perspective and just did whatever they wanted. We’re not in that place yet, but by doing it ourselves with ProTools, we lost some perspective and made something entirely rad that we couldn’t have done in 4 days. The new records have mainly been self-recorded so far. We’ll maybe mix in the studio to warm stuff up, but it’s been a nice process to learn ProTools and Logic and be able to step back from it and not have someone on the clock saying “OK, hey what are you doing next?” To really have time to listen and think about the arcs in which we’re making the album.
But yeah, it’s been nice to be able to examine our concerts, and say, “Oh, I like this 5 seconds” and then those 5 seconds turn into 4 minutes in the studio. Like, we were in Paris working on this duo album and it was literally like two car rides in Italy before the session in which we listened to the live recordings and notated the time frames that we wanted to incorporate into the studio recordings. That’s what separates Talibam! from a lot of more contemporary pop/rock bands. All of those bands are still dealing with the concept of iconic ego, where it’s one person’s vision. I mean, I think that can be interesting, but I like this collaborative approach that involves improvisation and chance elements…you get a more unique thing.
MW: What else have you guys been exploring in these new recordings?
MM: We’re starting to work with new genres and effects…like we’re starting to do some rapping…
MW: Huh, in a way that makes perfect sense. I was actually just recently thinking about you guys in the context of rap because I had read a review that likened the between-song banter on Boogie to the skits on old De La Soul records. But beyond that, I feel like many of the characteristics of Talibam! remind me of rap albums where the projected personas are of these over-sized, larger-than-life personalities. They are reflective of who the artists are to some extent, but there’s also a sort of cartoonish, caricature-like filter happening.
MM: Exactly. That’s again why I like the idea of albums where the music isn’t necessarily the aesthetic choices that define me but we’re instead making music as if approaching these styles as different types of boxes…with the idea that it’s not solely reflective of our own ego. It’s nice that we can approach a variety… But anyways, the personas we make on record are not necessarily directly who we are. Like, when Leonard Cohen sings, you think of Leonard Cohen singing — though I’m sure he puts a character out there, too. But it’s at least perceived as a more direct reflection of himself as a real person. But with Talibam!, it’s not necessarily me and Kevin. We’re going even further into that realm in the next album.
MW: So, you guys just put out an album in collaboration with Peeesseye. I know you guys are friends and probably have had many intersections through the years, but how did it come to the fruition of actually creating a full-length collaborative?
MM: Well, we were both touring, trying to be active bands, and we both had interesting styles that we thought could yield a dialogue with each other. From 2006 – 08, we played one gig with them every year in Europe, so eventually we decided if we were all going to be in town at this one time again, we should make a record.
MW: It’s a great record – I think it feels so natural how well the two groups meld together. That’s one thing about Talibam! that I really like…that it seems whoever plays with you guys can be integrated into your soundworld so naturally. You can have Cooper-Moore or Daniel Carter seamlessly fit into the group’s dynamics and it’s just great.
MM: Yeah, that comes from all of us being natural improvisers first. It wasn’t like one band meeting another band like oil and water…everyone can just float in this ocean. That was where Peeesseye and Talibam! both figured out something around 2001 or 2002 – we were both interested in stopping thinking about ourselves as individuals and trying to form a more cohesive unit.
Darmstadt INSTITUTE at ISSUE in JUNE
DARMSTADT INSTITUTE 2010
ISSUE Project Room Presents the second annual Darmstadt Institute, a festival of interdisciplinary programming including concerts, lectures, workshops, film screenings, and talkbacks which celebrates and critically examines the continuum of the experimental tradition in music and related media. Darmstadt: “Classics of the Avant Garde” is Brooklyn’s celebrated experimental music series, curated by Zach Layton and Nick Hallett.
Highlights for this year’s Institute include a marathon celebration of Anthony Braxton’s 65th birthday, a rare performance by sound art pioneer Z’EV, and William Basinski’s new work Vivian & Ondine in a special presentation at 110 Livingston Street (ISSUE Project Room’s future home). The month focuses on presenting cutting-edge new music ensembles and premieres by established and emerging composers alike (Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Dafna Naphtali, Katherine Young, Mikael Karlsson, and Aaron Young to name a few) within a curated environment of film screenings, lectures, and talkbacks, with an attempt to synergize live performance and pedagogy in the public sphere. Crossover bands that embody the experimental tradition, such as Grouper, Zs, Talibam!, and Man Forever (Kid Millions from Oneida’s new composition for multiple rock drummers) are programmed side by side with Darmstatdt’s reputable interpretations of canonical avant garde music–an evening of Luc Ferrari premieres presented by composer David Grubbs and Ensemble Pamplemousse, a rare performance of Pauline Oliveros’s “Gathering Together” for four pianists (as part of an evening of piano music starring Stephen Gosling, Emily Manzo, Kathleen Supové, and Michael Century), and a lecture-performance on Kenneth Gaburo’s system of music theory by scholar Larry Polansky and trumpeter Nate Wooley, to name a few…
232 3rd Street (at 3rd ave), Brooklyn NY 11215
JUNE 2010
Doors at 8:00pm, performances begin at 8:30pm
Tickets $10/at the door, $9 in advance (available online at http://www.issueprojectroom.org)
“Yes, we’re prone to hyperbole on occasion, but trust us when we say that Darmstadt’s Essential Repertoire series…is one of the most significant musical presentations of the season” – Time Out New York
Watch the trailer by Matthew MacVey of last year’s Darmstadt “Essential Repertoire” festival: http://www.youtube.com/v/_oQ33uzhcpw
ISSUE PROJECT ROOM and SAGIndie present “ACTOR AS AUTEUR” with STEVE BUSCEMI
John Hockenberry Leads Brunchtime Conversation
To Benefit ISSUE Project Room
Actor, writer, film director and ISSUE board member Steve Buscemi will talk with Emmy Award-winning journalist and Co-Host of WNYC Radio and PRI’s The Takeaway, John Hockenberry, about creating unforgettable characters that ultimately drive a film’s narrative and impact. The brunch which is presented in collaboration with SAGIndie, an organization that unites working thespians of the world with passionate filmmaking mavericks who buck the system. The afternoon will feature film clips from the actor’s career and will be held at Bussaco located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Actor as Auteur – There are numerous iconic characters in film history, from The Little Tramp to Charles Foster Kane to Colonel Kurtz to Travis Bickle, all of them well drawn and directed. However, had Chaplin, Welles, Brando or DeNiro not played these roles would the film had the same powerful impact on our culture? Can a case be made for actor as auteur?
It is difficult to imagine Buscemi’s roles and their indelible effect on each film without his personal, stylized approach in bringing them to life. They emit essential energies striking a balance between deeply held neuroses and outward bombast. From lead roles in films like Fargo, Resevoir Dogs, Living in Oblivion, Trees Lounge, and Ghost World to supporting roles and cameos in films such as The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink, his presence breathes life into every corner of a film. “Buscemi is a quiet tyrant of artistic fury who threatens to overrun every frame he’s in with the inner desperation he projects even in his most subtle performances,” says Hockenberry.
An active Board Member of ISSUE Project Room, Buscemi began his career in, and continues to support experimental theater, writing and performance. All proceeds from the event will benefit ISSUE Project Room, one of the country’s preeminent centers for experimental culture.
“Actor as Auteur” Brunch To Benefit ISSUE Project Room, Presented in Collaboration With SAGIndie
Sunday, June 6, 12 pm – 2 pm
Bussaco, 833 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
$125 Per Person ($95 tax-deductible, three-course brunch is included.)
SEATING IS LIMITED. Buy Tickets
For more information please call 718-330-0313.
May is the Month of the Ecstatic Moment @ ISSUE Project Room
May is the Month of the Ecstatic Moment @ ISSUE Project Room
During the month of May, ISSUE Project Room will present a series of performers whose works embody notions of the ecstatic through the use of a variety of extended techniques including free improvisation and sounds bordering on noise.
The ecstatic refers to a state outside of the body. Historically, ecstasy has been associated with religious and mystic states. Willhelm Reich discusses the concept in conjunction with sexual energy and orgasm. Bataille conceives of ecstasy as a “’yawning gap’ between the one and the other” — a dissolving of the boundaries between traditional subject-object relationships. Rather then attaching this idea to a specific state or act, we utilize this term as an active concept describing a means of production. Furthering Bataille’s notion, Jean-Luc Nancy points out “one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no ‘subject’ – but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being.” This concept of ecstasy as a state outside one’s self yields potential for new forms of community and experience.
Perhaps Faruq Z. Bey’s (5/27 and 5/28) comment on his decision to start playing after seeing John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders perform best exemplifies our concept of the ecstatic:
The people who were rioting in the street, they moved like one mind. It was almost like how a hive of insects moves. It was like a wave; it just moved, but that whole episode put me in a frame of mind of thinking about our position here as a subculture, and how to deal with that.
The ecstatic moment is predicated on being there, being present, being an event. Jacques Attali has argued that the rise of the recording industry has had a profound transformation on the production of live music, likening music to a simulacrum of itself where consumers relate more to the recording (better fidelity) than the event of live performance. For Attali, music is the organization of noise and that organization is a mirror of the social; but, rather then being a one-to-one reflection of the social, music can act as a prophetic force for the future due to its inherently anti-material nature.
Re-imagining traditional notions of authenticity and authorship, Sam Ashley’s (May 13) work ranges from symbolic representations of shamanic phenomena to direct presentations of magic events, devices, or objects. Described as amplifications of imaginary sounds, Ashley’s live practice goes beyond the limitations of tangible devices. Engaging with the non-material world through direct spirit possession, Ashley goes as far as to credit ghosts as his collaborative artistic partners.
Free improvisation plays an ulterior role in relation to what Attali defines as the driving force behind the economy of music in a
capitalist society: the reproduction of the original. Performers like Giuseppi Logan, Befo’ Quotet, TAUOM (May 14th), Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano, Okkyung Lee (May 20th), and Paul Metzger (May 21st) all work with varying levels of improvisation in their work to create unique live events that release music from its material constraints (notation).
David Keenan recently coined the term Hypnagogic Pop to describe the work of James Ferraro and his contemporaries, whose work exemplifies the reordering of tropes of 80’s American culture through the sonic unconscious. Through the dissemination of low-cost production and DIY aesthetics, Hypnagogic Pop forms micro-musical communities that reverse Attali’s assessment of the recording industry’s push towards high-fidelity. Ferraro’s live performances and recordings consist of reordered samples that blur all distinctions between the fidelity of the record and the authenticity of the event–ultimately undoing the dichotomy of the simulacrum in capitalist culture.
Exploring questions of spiritual practice and historical conceptions of ecstatic music, Ensemble Simul Cantare will present a program of medieval vocal church music on a shared evening with metal guitarist Mick Barr (May 5th). Prince Rama of Ayodhya were raised on an ashram by Hare-Krishna parents and sing mantra-laden psychedelic anthems of devotion and ecstasy (May 15th), while Genesis P. Orridge’s Thee Majesty explore notions of transgender, identity disruption and the manipulation of form through spoken word poetry.
In Conversation With Matthew Mottel, Part I
Matthew Mottel is ISSUE Project Room’s Artist-In-Residence for April – June 2010. He is an internationally recognized musician and artist, performing most notably with Talibam! for the past seven years. He’s been hanging around NYC clubs since he was like 16, and dropping electric mind bombs with his synthesizer in those clubs nearly as long with folks like Cooper-Moore, Rhys Chatham, Karole Armitage, Awesome Color, Akron/Family, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear), Kenny Wollesen, Chris Corsano, Ras Moshe, Cooper-Moore, Sean Meehan, and CSC Funk Band.
The next performance in the residency will be a free concert held on May 7. Read more about the project here. Preview audio here.
The following conversation is an extract from an extended chat held on April 28. Look for a second installment in June.
Matthew Walker: So, tell me about your plans for the May 7 performance of your residency.
Matthew Mottel: Well, it’s tied to the photography of my father {Syeus Mottel}. I first became aware that he had some hip photos about 11 or 12 years ago when I was going to The Cooler – a now-defunct space in the meat-packing district – a sort of gnarlier Knitting Factory-type venue. They had shows starting at midnight with a sort of Sonic Youth crew plus free jazz guys like Charles Gayle. It was a great place for me, as I was 17 at the time.
So anyway, there was supposed to be a Silver Apples benefit because Simeon {Coxe III} had a car accident. My dad found out about it, and was like, “Oh yeah, Silver Apples — I know them. I shot three of their concerts in the 60s.”
My dad was a recognized photographer — he worked with Lee Strasberg and the Actor’s Studio. He was also working with Buckminister Fuller as his media consultant for a number of years. He published a book called Charas, the improbable dome builders about Lower East Side community activists that decided to build geodesic domes.
As I’ve delved deeper into his archive, I’ve found photos of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in a double bill from ‘67, photos of John Cage doing prepared piano pieces in a gallery in ‘72, and the Silver Apples photos, and thought, “Wow, these are all my influences.”
So, I was excited to start dealing with my dad’s archive, which was basically just negative sheets in a closet. I wanted to mediate a project that tried to make the work contemporary. So, what I’m trying to do for May 7 is creating an environment that thinks about the cultural politics of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. My dad was a journalist – not a direct participant in these different scenes – so the idea is to show the work in a documentary/archival perspective but also to create a new environment, incorporating my music, in which these disparate events and places that he photographed can all merge into a larger consciousness…which is maybe my consciousness.
Photo by Syeus Mottel. Silver Apples at Washington Square Park, 1968.
MW: In contrast to, say, a Talibam! concert, how has your approach to the music been different in thinking about creating an actual environment for people to exist in and interact with the images?
MM: Well, Talibam! has been like a 200% direct over-the-line, you know, “watch us perform, have a fun time.” So, this is an opportunity to step back and focus on an ambiance, and really deal with sound in a more pragmatic way. I’m going to do a solo piano performance, using amps and distortion — thinking about the piano as a guitar in terms of approach and attack. It’s great because it’s an opportunity to be completely in control. I’ve been able to learn what the piano sounds like amplified and been able to spend time exploring the features of the space {at ISSUE}.
MW: Yeah, it’s a pretty unique experience to be able to rehearse and prepare in the actual space where a performance is going to happen. I’ve been able to do that a few times in the past and it feels so much better to know that you’re in complete control of every element of the performance…rather than unloading your gear in a club and playing a show 10 minutes later.
MM: Yeah, and that’s the vibe that Talibam! has managed to thrive on. We can just show up and hit if it has to be 10 minutes, and that’s a way we have progressed. In a sense, it used to be very much about the exploration of the moment, but we’ve now reached a point where we can refine the moment so much that we now have control over it in the most discriminating or indiscriminating situation. But yeah, being in the space for a large amount of time allows me to help shape the work that I’m going to do.
MW: Will there still be a fair amount of improvisation involved in this new environment?
MM: Yeah, I’m more working with motifs, and we’re going to see where they go. It’s me thinking, “Do I like the sound combinations? Do I like my oscillator box with my sampler together? Where does the piano fit in?” I’m thinking compositionally in terms of arrangement, rather than there being a notation and score.
MW: And how will the photography be incorporated?
MM: I’m working with this guy Brian House, who does video and installation work under the name Knifeandfork. He’s going to do video editing, using computer filters with the photos, and make abstraction happen. So, using these music photographs, plus the political and cultural photos that he has, to create an environment that I think is going to be pretty exciting. It’s a way for people to get a further idea of what 1967-68 looked like from a different eye, because almost every image we see from that time period is now an image we’ve been accustomed to for a long time. So, just seeing unpublished photos of Martin Luther King, Jr.…
I mean, there are photos of an anti-war rally from ‘67 where my dad is a frontline photographer, with candid images of Ben Spock and Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King just hanging out, and it’s pretty phenomenal. And the work certainly stands by itself…it could easily just be hanging on a wall, but it’s important for me for it to not just be archival but to feel contemporary…
MW: To not just be tied to a specific time and place…
Photo by Syeus Mottel. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ben Spock, April 15, 1967.
MM: Right, to tie it to me, and to my father and I, and to the influences we share… to make a new piece out of it all. What’s nice about a lot of my dad’s photography is that it shows that the public really was part of some of the more avant-garde things happening then. Like, two of the Silver Apples shows that he shot were free public shows — one at Union Square and one in Washington Square Park. Some of these photos are really amazing…like kids interacting with Simeon…and old people {interacting} too. It wasn’t just hipsters, but a much larger field of people, and that’s part of what I want to show in the environment that I’m going to create, that this music {isn’t limited to} the fringe genres that we put people in..it can be a consciousness available for everybody to like.
MW: So did you grow up listening to people like Ornette and Cage because of your dad?
MM: No, because my dad’s not a musician, you know…my parents sort of let me do my own thing. I developed my own tastes growing up in Manhattan, and was culturally aware by the time I was 16. But, I think it’s influence through osmosis, because these things are very much things my parents were both aware of and influenced by.
MW: So, how did your musical interests start to develop?
MM: I took jazz piano when I was 15, and got into improvising and bought a synthesizer. I was welcomed into the improvised music world in NY where you didn’t need that conservatory training — it was about developing your own individual language and so that’s what I did forever.
I went to Brooklyn Tech High School and my junior year I had to pick a 20-year period of history to write a thesis paper on. I picked the avant-garde jazz scene of New York from 1977 – 1997 and so going to concerts became research for me.
MW: So your learning more or less came from direct practice – from going to concerts and just getting out there and playing live with people. Who were you playing with early on?
MM: Well, I played with {Chris} Corsano — I have these tapes of us playing when I was 17 and he was 24. He was working at Tonic and I was just going there a lot and wanting to start a band. He ended up introducing me to Tom Bruno. I was a TEST fan, and I got a page one day – back when I had a pager – and was like, “I don’t recognize this number.”
But I called the number and got a voicemail saying, “This is Tom Bruno, the drummer. I know who I am. If you know who you are, leave a message.” So, I’m like, “Uh, hi Tom, this is Matt Mottel. Yeah, uh, I guess you know me from uh…I’m a big TEST fan, I guess you called me for some reason, so call me back.”
And I’m thinking, “How the fuck did Tom Bruno get my number?” So, I called Corsano up, and am like, “Hey man, did you give Tom my number?” And he says, “Yeah, I guess I did a while back. He said he was looking to play with a young synthesizer player. So, I gave him your number.”
And then, me and Tom played almost every Sunday for about a year and a half or two years. And that was the beginning of playing duos with drummers. Also, at the same time, I would play with Michael Evans and Sean Meehan and Tim Barnes. And then, also, I met Cooper-Moore and played with him on a fairly regular basis…also Daniel Carter. It was just like New York was a welcoming place.
MW: I mean, what better people could you possibly come up playing with?
MM: Yeah, from 17 – 22, those were the people I was hanging with. I would go to William Parker workshops, I was volunteering at the Vision Festival…I got into Tonic for free from early on…So, I’ve seen so much avant-improvised-experimental music that I don’t really need to go to it anymore. But seeing so much of that music for so long, I saw the ceiling you get to with that stuff — both with the level of economic success and stability. So I thought, well, I can start with that influence, and then steer it into larger, different places.
But still, to have that as a fundamental background is really a cool place to start with rather than just being like only into the Beatles or only being a composer or something. So, it was such a great time, like the Pink Pony was a really happening spot…the Gold Sparkle Band guys were all doing shit there. I mean it was like all Lower East Side places.
The Coma series that still happens at ABC No Rio that Blaise Sula runs every Sunday night… that was a really formative place for a lot of people. I met Chris Forsyth there…I met Meehan around that time. All these guys were like ABC No Rio improvisers. It was sort of like the 4th or 5th generation of the NY improvised scene, after Zorn and all that stuff. But it was nice because they’d have a band or two and then an improv session and it was just really great – no one took things too seriously but it was still serious music. And you could see amazing people play in front of 10 people and it was awesome.
Photo by Syeus Mottel. Ornette Coleman at the Village Gate, 1967.
MW: So, have you been in the city your whole life?
MM: I went away to college at New Paltz, a state university in upstate New York, an hour and a half away from the city.
MW: What did you study there?
MM: I created my own major. I didn’t want to be an anthropologist, I didn’t want to be a sociologist. I was more into this kind of cultural study going back to when I was in high school at Brooklyn Tech. I was able to do a contract major, which was basically, like, pick electives from multiple disciplines, have advisors in three different disciplines, and do that. And I called it Political and Cultural studies. Like, I wrote a paper about the 1960s political free jazz connections and did a number of different things.
MW: What was it like being outside of the city?
MM: Well, it was a small town…mountains right there, swimming. You know, after the first year there, I like lived up there. You know, it was great. I got to learn about classic rock, you know, it was that type of thing. You hang out with your friends, you drink beers, you listen to records. It was nice. You have fires, go to the mountains…so, it was cool.
I was the only one at New Paltz who was interested in bringing live music to the college, outside of, like, the music program bringing, you know, their concert series or something. So, I brought it on myself to get involved with the student associations and do all that type of stuff. And I brought really good people. I mean, I had William Parker and Alan Silva play, I had TEST play, Joe Mcphee, Sean Meehan and Toshi Makihara… I had Greg Kelly and Bhob Rainey, I had Eugene Chadbourne, Cooper-Moore.
MW: Wow, that’s a pretty incredible lineup of people. I mean that sounds like an amazing concert series for any venue. What were the responses like?
MM: The responses…it grew and grew. Like, the first year I was there as a freshman, I brought TEST and I had to convince my friends, “You gotta go see this amazing free jazz band!” And they were like, “What’s free jazz?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s this…” But as people got to know me and the series developed…the concerts were more successful. Like, for Cooper-Moore, it was packed. So, it grew into more of a thing.
MW: And you were taking some classes at Bard during this time, too?
MM: Yeah, one class I took that was really a strong class was Joan Retallack’s class… you know Joan Retallack? She’s done some books with Cage, like John Cage in Conversation and then I guess is an artist in some form. But they had, I forget what the program was called, but the class was called “Silence and Art” and it was just about dealing with different perspectives of how art and silence mediate, you know? These were just like types of classes that didn’t exist at New Paltz. And the kids that were going to Bard were like…you could talk about John Zorn with someone. And the Electronic Music Ensemble was a bunch of weirdoes that were into weird music and we did Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise. We did a lot of different graphic score stuff. We did {Zorn’s} Cobra. And then we just improvised too. it was great. It was great to have Bard as part of my education.
Photo by Syeus Mottel. John Cage, NYC, 1972.
Totem: An Installation by Heather Dewey-Hagborg (opens April 24th)
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Totem: Opening April 24th at ISSUE Project Room
Visual artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Totem is a new installation created for Issue Project Room exploring language as an act of power and a force of control. Drawing inspiration from surveillance culture, artificial intelligence, and the research of Julian Jaynes on the origin of consciousness, Totem assumes the form of a ritual icon, eavesdropping on the conversation in its vicinity.
Drawing only on patterns of sound in its immediate environment Totem defines its own language: a grammar and lexicon based on machine intuition, an inductive bias that shapes what is heard. Divorced from their original context words assume new character, meaning and intentionality. Totem transforms overheard conversation and incidental noises into a constantly evolving composition of sound.
Totem is the second in a series of new body of work Dewey-Hagborg has created in the past year dealing with the politics of listening. The first, Listening Post, was installed in downtown Buffalo for five months as part of the Conversation Pieces exhibit at CEPA Gallery.
Totem was made possible by generous contributions from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the support of Issue Project Room.
More information is available on the artist’s website: www.deweyhagborg.com
Residency Unlimited + Matt Mottel
ISSUE Project Room is proud to announce a new partnership with Residency Unlimited in conjunction with our Artist In Residence program.
“Residency Unlimited fosters artist residency initiatives by partnering with local and international arts organizations. Our collaborative strategy offers artists enhanced residency opportunities across multiple platforms, and provides organizations with innovative ways to reach out to new audiences.”
Matt Mottel is currently ISSUE Project Room’s artist-in-residence, which is partnering with Residency Unlimited to expand the scope of the residency program.
Matt Mottel’s visage should be familiar to anyone who’s been going to shows in NYC in the past ten years. He’s been hanging around NYC clubs since he was like 16, and dropping electric mind bombs with his synthesizer in those clubs nearly as long with folks like Awesome Color, Akron/Family, Jeffrey Lewis, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear), Kenny Wollesen, Chris Corsano, Ras Moshe, Cooper-Moore, Sean Meehan, and his new band Shadow Maps.
April: Music & Technology Month
Curated by Zach Layton & Lawrence Kumpf
The intersections of music and technology seem at once divergent and inseparable. Martin Heidegger noted this ambiguity in “The Question Concerning Technology,” where he explored the bond between Technê (craftsmanship) and Poïesis (making or bringing forth). For Heidegger, technology holds an equivocal relationship to truth — technology is that which frames us within the world instrumentality, both limiting our relationship to it while also revealing our ability to bring forth truth through Poïesis.
ISSUE Project Room’s month-long exploration of Music and Technology will explore the intersections of instrumentality and instrumentation through a series of talks and performances. We are excited to present the work of author and trombonist, George Lewis, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971. Lewis’ work as a composer and improviser includes electronic and computer music, computer-based installations, and notated and improvisational forms. In the same vein, the premier of Stephan Moore’s The Occupants offers an exploration of multi-user generative composition. People Like Us will present a live performance of pieced-together audio and video samples that shed light on the relationship between the archive and user, while Aki Onda’s music takes a different, more personal approach to sampling through the live manipulation of a cassette tape sound diary. Laetitia Sonami and Alexander Schubert both use body-sensors in the traditional technological sense of instrumentality as an extension of human desire. For Schubert, this synthesis of technology and performance practice serves as an experiment in the relationship between the freedom and control inherent in live performance: his sensors “extend the musical language of the drum set,” causing the material that is played “acoustically to be temporally shifted and recombined with the triggered playback effect.”
The works of these artists reflect Heidegger’s dual reaction to the potentials of technology and our relationship to the world, stimulating a number of open-ended inquiries examining the line between the subject and technology’s ability to make us subjects. Where does human desire begin? When does it become subject to an outside force? What happens in between?
ISSUE Project Room has also invited Caleb Kelly, an academic, event producer, and curator from New Zealand who lives and works in Sydney, Australia, to speak on his new book Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cracked Media looks at the deliberate manipulation of playback devices, from the analog to the digital. For Kelley, the manipulation of such devices acts as a tactic, a term used by Michelle De Certeau to define a strategy of resistance that is enacted without place and therefore escapes interior-exterior dichotomies, redefining concepts of individuality and subjectivity produced by the playback devices themselves. For example, CD players have their own built-in apparatus that defines their function as well as the user function, one of which would be the separation of user (the one who listens) from producer (the maker of the CD). As Kelley explains, “the original intention of transparently reproducing a prerecorded piece of music is thus snatched and redirected toward an original and creative act.”
A number of artists discussed in Kelly’s book will give performances at ISSUE during the month of April, including Nicolas Collins and Toshimaru Nakamura. To further supplement his lecture, Kelley has programmed an evening of performances featuring the interdisciplinary artist duo LoVid, the turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, and performance artist Kusum. Additionally, Kelley will curate an exhibition of recent music and art from Sydney, to be presented both in our space and online.
- Lawrence Kumpf
ISSUE’S FIRST PUBLIC CONCERT @ 110 LIVINGSTON, TO BE BROADCAST LIVE ON Q2 – Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2
ISSUE’S FIRST PUBLIC CONCERT @ 110 LIVINGSTON
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
IN MEMORIAM WITH LOVE
Suzanne Fiol, May 9, 1960 – October 5, 2009
Dear friends,
It is with great heartbreak and sorrow that ISSUE Project Room announces the passing of our founder, artistic director, and driving force, Suzanne Fiol. Born on May 9, 1960, Suzanne died at 1:05 pm on Monday, October 5, 2009, after fighting a courageous and inspiring battle against cancer. Suzanne passed peacefully surrounded by loved ones at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Our hearts go out to her daughter Sarah, her sister Nancy, and her parents Lawrence and Arlene Perlstein and her partner Anthony Coleman.
Anyone who has met Suzanne knows that she devoted her life to creating and sustaining a space where artists — acclaimed and emerging, local and international — could develop and perform new, challenging, and exciting works. Regardless of the different venues we’ve inhabited since our inception in 2003, ISSUE has always been Suzanne’s labor of love, a space that housed and reflected her restless intellect, fiery spirit, and great heart. She would often jokingly refer to herself as “Mama Issue,” a fitting moniker considering the unconditional love she unabashedly showed her friends, family, artists and the steadily growing audiences that have been coming to ISSUE over the years.
We are grief-stricken by Suzanne’s passing, yet inspired by her vision and strength, and will devote ourselves to fulfilling her vision with the strength we draw from our memories of her. Programming will continue this week in honor of Suzanne, and we welcome you all to come to ISSUE and share your memories.
A memorial is currently being planned.
Please stay tuned for information on its time, date and location.
(photos by Joe Holmes)
NY1 Interviews Floating Points curators Suzanne Fiol and Stephan Moore
07/12/2009 02:37 PM
Sound Artists Raise Volume At Brooklyn Exhibit
By: Stephanie Simon
From avante garde music to noise you hear on the street, sound artists are creating new worlds to enjoy in Brooklyn. NY1’s Stephanie Simon filed the following report.
The folks at ISSUE Project Room have made a very sound investment in sound. They’ve created a one of a kind audio immersion room. This month, sound artists from around the world will playing their work inside the space.
“The speakers are overhead here, and you can see them from the audience perspective, they have the sound that goes in all directions as opposed to one direction, so they fill the room in a unique way,” said ISSUE Project Room Co-curator Stephan Moore. “I can show you the software that I use to control the room. I can do circles with it, execute different kinds of curves. So it lets artists work with this dimension, two-dimensional movements of sound.”
The dangling speakers are called “Floating Points” and that’s the name of ISSUE Project Room’s month-long Sound and Music Festival. Founder Suzanne Fiol says the festival gives sound composers a place to create and display work that is really cutting edge.
No doubt many people have heard of surround sound. But the latest installation is taking that idea to the extreme. It actually lets people fall asleep, surrounded by speakers, though not all of the sounds are soothing.
“We really wanted to create a place where composers can come and use this system and learn about it,” said Fiol. “So Stephan and I just put this together and it was easy and fun and a wonderful festival and now we’re on our fourth year.”
The piece, by artist Kaffe Matthews, is called “Sonic Bed Marfa.”
“The bed is eight speakers that surround you as you lay in the bed,” said Moore. “And then six subwoofer speakers that sit under you, these are the ones that do the low frequencies that sort of shake things, like the surround sound on a movie or the explosion that makes a rumble and make the low sounds. She takes advantage of all the things that speakers can do.”
Since it started in the East Village in 2003, ISSUE Project Room has been about giving artists a place to do experimental work. With a grant from the Manhattan Borough President’s office they will be moving to a new space next year. The festival runs through the end of the month, but the bed may stay even longer — allowing more time for a sonic snooze.
NY Times features ISSUE’s new home at 110 Livingston
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.”
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
ISSUE Soundwalk-a-thon in the New Yorker
Two Sundays before Make Music New York, the Brooklyn-based venue Issue Project Room, an indispensable site of offbeat programming, organized its own sonic jamboree. Twenty-one musicians led groups on “soundwalks” around Brooklyn and other boroughs, treating the city either as an audio source or as a stage for their work. (The term “soundwalk” was popularized by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who, in the spirit of Ives and John Cage, has long blurred distinctions between composed music and ambient sounds.) Two dozen people signed up for a soundwalk with Betsey Biggs, a young Princeton-trained composer and interdisciplinary artist who often creates site-specific performances. Beforehand, Biggs directed participants to a Web site where they could download “Detox Project,” an electronic piece that she had assembled for the occasion. It consisted largely of sounds recorded in and around the murky old Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn: machine noises, trucks backing up, the bell of a rising drawbridge, sirens, pedestrian chatter, and, for a long while, a voice softly humming a childlike, three-note melody.
Late in the afternoon, we met at a boarded-up house at the corner of Third Street and Third Avenue and began following Biggs’s lead, listening to “Detox Project” on earphones. The streets were deserted, except for a few hipsters pushing strollers. It was unsettling to hear loud sounds without seeing their source. Conversely, certain noises that seemed to emanate from the soundtrack actually came from real life: I was surprised to see live birds in a dead tree. The experience proved to be psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears. And, as Biggs notes in her Princeton dissertation, this kind of work plays off Internet-era listening habits—the use of manicured playlists to create what she calls a “cinematic lull,” a “solitary dream state.” When the walk curled through the quiet streets of Carroll Gardens, the collage of noises subsided and the human voice took over. Biggs began banging on a tin drum that she’d brought along, and a friend played an accordion. An electronically mediated experience veered toward old-time music-making. At the end, we stood on the Third Street drawbridge and applauded the composer, who smiled bashfully, nodding toward the strangely beautiful ruined landscape behind her. ♦
Darmstadt “Institute” in June @ ISSUE Project Room
Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant Garde” presents:
A Month-Long Festival of Concerts, Workshops, Film Screenings, Conversations and World Premieres at ISSUE Project Room Featuring:
Susie Ibarra, Elliot Sharp, Tony Oursler, Anthony Coleman, Tony Conrad, David Grubbs, Joan La Barbara, Luke Dubois, Tom Hamilton, Ha-Yang Kim, Branden W. Joseph, Stephan Moore, John King, Dan Joseph, Ne(x)tworks, Matthew Welch, Elodie Lauten, Bing and Ruth, TILT, Either/Or, Climax Golden Twins, Connie Beckley, Ensemble Pamplemousse and much more!
Darmstadt ”Classics of the Avant-Garde” music series is proud to announce its first ever Institute, a month-long festival at ISSUE Project Room dedicated to exploring the connection between live performance and pedagogical practice. This month of interdisciplinary programming includes concerts, lectures, workshops, film screenings, and talkbacks which celebrate and critically examine the continuum of the experimental tradition in music and related media. It is the hope ofDarmstadt’s curators that its Institute will deepen the understanding and appreciation of experimental work, both within the New York music community and the general public.
This month of dynamic programming involves both established composers and performers, alongside emerging artists. In addition to countless concerts of premieres and cherished repertoire, highlights of the festival include workshops led by Joan LaBarbara and Susie Ibarra, conversations between David Grubbs and Branden W. Joseph and Tony Conrad and Luke Dubois, a lecture-performance by Merce Cunningham Dance Company musicians Stephan Moore and John King featuring a live rendering of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix,” film presentations by Tony Oursler and Bradley Eros, in addition to “sectional” events—a program of guitar music with Dan Joseph and Elliot Sharp and an evening connecting the voice to visual art, with Connie Beckley and Lesley Flanigan. There will also be post-performance talkbacks with performers and composers.
The Institute kicks off Monday, June 1 with a FREE artist-in-attendance screening of Tony Oursler’s video project, Synesthesia, an oral history of New York’s downtown music and art scenes, and concludes on Saturday, June 27th with performances by Tom Hamilton and David Linton
Darmstadt is describing the artists participating in its June Institute as a “faculty” of sorts, enabling a non-institutional, publicly accessible forum. In the spirit of its namesake’s “holiday course,” Darmstadt aims to provide a vital resource, a venue to connect artists, performers, writers, and educators with each other and, in turn, with audiences…all towards the enrichment of New York’s vibrant new music scene.
Darmstadt ”Classics of the Avant Garde” is the Brooklyn-based contemporary music series led by composer-musicians Zach Layton and Nick Hallett, which presents the best of New York City’s live experimental music, and relevant media. Darmstadt will celebrate its fifth anniversary this November with an annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C, which Alan Kozinn described in the New York TImes as “the most vital, audacious and energizing performance of the score I’ve ever heard.” Darmstadt regularly hosts its concerts and DJ sets at ISSUE Project Room while its founders both create and curate work for such institutions as PS1 and The Kitchen. Darmstadt began as a “listening party” of avant-garde recordings at Galapagos Art Space before quickly evolving into a live performance series, and in 2007 was included in The New York Times ’Best of New Music’ rundown. As DJ’s, Layton and Hallett have delivered memorable sets at Steve Reich 70th birthday celebration at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival.
Darmstadt Institute is sponsored in part by funding from Meet the Composer Creative Connections, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Experimental Television Center (supported by the New York State Council on the Arts)
NOTE: Sunday, 28th with Christy and Emily and Pterodactyl CANCELLED
WFMU Free Music Archive and ISSUE Project Room
We’re pretty excited to be working with WFMU on their new and fantastic Free Music Archive to put up some selected excerpts of performances going on here.
The Free Music Archive is a social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio. Fellow curators include radio stations like KEXP (Seattle) and KBOO (Portland OR), webcasters like DUBLAB (Los Angeles) and Halas Radio (Israel), netlabels (Comfort Stand), and amazing online collectives like CASH Music.
check it out here:
Lethem, Auster and Borough President Markowitz support ISSUE Project Room and Brooklyn Culture
paul auster reading at "grocery"
On Saturday, Feb 7, Authors and ISSUE Project Room Art Advisory Board Members Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster, provided a rare treat for St. Ann’s parents: intimate readings from “The Collector” and “Brooklyn Follies” at Grocery on Smith Street. Marty Markowitz said a few words at the start of the event and we couldn’t have been more pleased to have him join us.
alex waterman performing at 110 Livingston
The lunch was followed by the first public tour of ISSUE’s future home at 110 Livingston with a special performance by Alex Waterman and talk on the unique acoustic characteristics of the room by Raj Patel of one of the world’s leading engineering firms, ARUP.
Interested in seeing the new space? Contact us, we’d love to share it with you!
Eighteen Linear Constructions – Installation by Tristan Perich
232 3rd St (at 3rd Ave), Brooklyn (map)
celebrity t-shirt endorsements
Check out Jonathan Kane sporting the new limited edition ISSUE Project Room T-Shirt designed by Rogues Gallery!
ISSUE Project Room T-Shirts!
This is a very special limited edition Rogues Gallery t-shirt designed specifically for ISSUE Project Room. Rogues Gallery generously designed these one of a kind t-shirts to help us raise money to move into our new space at 110 Livingston. Sizes variable.
available through etsy.com
Welcome to our new website
Thanks for visiting our new site. As we begin 2009, we hope this new site will be a reflection of our new site at 110 Livingston. We have made it easier for you to browse events, and stay updated on the latest Issues at ISSUE Project Room.
Please make sure you join our mailing list.
We’ll be adding many new features in the coming months to help you stay connected, and make sure you know about the events you’re interested in. And as always, please feel free to share your thoughts on our new look by leaving a comment below.
