LITTORAL: Harry Matthews
Harry Matthews is the author of various novels, poems, short fiction,
and essays from New York (1930). He settled in Europe in 1952, and since then has lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. In 1978, he returned to the United States to teach for several years at Bennington College, Columbia University, and the New School University. Now married to the French writer Marie Chaix, he divides his time between Paris and Key West. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the “ New York School of poets”, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Keneth Koch, James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. The author of six novels and several collections of poetry, his most recent publications are Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, 2000), The Human Country: the Collected Short Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), Oulipo Compendium (co-edited with Alastair Brotchie; Atlas Press and Make Now Press, 2005), and My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
LITTORAL: Brooklyn Rail Turns 10
The Brooklyn Rail turns ten this year and that is certainly cause for celebration. Please join Rail Fiction/Intranslation editor Donald Breckenridge as he hosts an epic night of readings from some of the most innovative authors and translators brightening the literary landscape.
“As a self-taught writer and ardent reader of formally experimental fiction, my goal over the last decade has been to highlight the talents of emerging writers, many of whom live in Brooklyn, as well as to showcase the current writing of established authors who have been marginalized by an increasingly risk-averse, profit-driven publishing industry.”–Donald Breckenridge
Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments,including her groundbreaking work of hyper-fiction, Patchwork Girl. She is the author of The Melancholy of Anatomy and the novel Half Life. Her work as appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Grand Street, and The Paris Review.
Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World, KambyBolongo Mean River, and the forthcoming Asunder. His work has appeared in Bomb, The Threepenny Review, The Mississippi Review, Indiana Review, and Nerve.
Lewis Warsh is co-founder, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair Magazine and Books, and co-editor, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists Magazine and Books. He is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, most recently, Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005, and the novel, A Place in the Sun. He is director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University.
Johannah Rodgers is the author of Sentences, a collection of short stories,essays, and drawings and the chapbook, Necessary Fictions. Her stories, essays,and reviews have appeared in Fence, Bookforum, Fiction, CHAIN Arts, Pierogi Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches writing and literature courses at CUNY, where she is an assistant professor in English.
Dawn Raffel’s short story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, was just released. She is also the author of Carrying the Body and In the Year of Long Division. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Art & Letters and numerous other periodicals and anthologies.
Joshua Cohen is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Eugene Marten is the author of In The Blind, Waste, and Firework. He lives in New York City.
John Reed is the author of five novels: A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance,The Whole, All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare, and Tales of Woe. He is the Books Editor of The Brooklyn Rail.
Fran Gordon, founder of the National Art Club’s PAGE reading series, also directs FDU’s MFA in Writing reading series. Her novel, Paisley Girl, was a finalist for QPB’s New Voices Award. She teaches in The New School Writing Program, and for The Pan African Literary Festival.
Yasmine Alwan is the author of Elsewhere and co-editor of Tantalum, a magazine for new prose.
Douglas Glover is one of Canada’s finest writers. In 2006, he won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award,he was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005, and the recipient of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in 2003. He is the author of eight books of fiction and essays, including The Enamoured Knight, his elebrated book on the character of Don Quixote and its eponymous novel. He lives in upstate New York.
Sarah French has had her fiction works published Bomb, The New Review of Literature,and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently working on a novel.
Susan Bernofsky is the translator of four books by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Hermann Hesse, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. The 2006 recipient of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, she has also received awards and fellowships from the NEH, NEA, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently writing two books: a biography of Robert Walser, and a novel set in her hometown, New Orleans.
Translator Alyson Waters teaches literary translation and contemporary French language literature at Yale University. In the past few years, she has won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant, a PEN translation grant, and a “bourse de sejour aux traducteurs estrangers.” She lives in Prospect Heights with her husband and daughter.
Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translations include works by Guy Debord, Jean Piaget,Jean-Patrick Manchette, Paco Ignacio Taibo, J.B. Pontalis & Jean Laplanche, Thierry Jonquet, Henri Lefebvre, and Raoul Vaneigem. His most recent translation is of Apollinaire’s letters to Madeleine, as sent from the trenches of Champagne in 1915. Born in Manchester, England, Nicholson-Smith is a longtime denizen of Brooklyn.
Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein, the novels 6/2/95 and You Are Here. His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Theoretical: “Book Burning — In Honor of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War” Alex Galloway and Jason Smith
A Book Burning:
Come celebrate the launch of the new book Introduction to Civil War by Tiqqun It will be an evening of fire and words hosted by translators Alexander Galloway and Jason Smith.
“Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global bio-political fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of this listless implosion.” –Tiqqun
Alexander R. Galloway is an associate professor at New York University, author, and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. The New York Times recently described his work as “conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.” Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT Press, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (with Eugene Thacker; Minnesota, 2007).
Jason Smith is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
Share – free audio & video jam
What is share?
Share is an open jam, not just for digirati, but for all new culture lovers. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others’ signal and perform live audio and video. We furnish the amplification and projection. Share happens every Sunday.
open jams and walk-in sets — Bring your equipment/instruments/gear etc. to join the jam!
audio jam: Prepared and spontaneous music from eight plus simultaneous performers. This is the time and place to perform a piece of music you’ve written and hear it on a large sound system, improvise spontaneously with other participants, get feedback on your latest project or try out that new max patch/software setup. Bring your noise maker of choice and an XLR, quarter-inch or RCA cable to join.
video jam: multi-user live video synthesis. Generating an immersive visual environment, in the SHARE tradition, in which multiple participants are able to jointly compose the video output. Try out and learn about new VJ wetware. As with the audio, walk-in sets are encouraged. Bring your clips or camera or laptop/amiga and VGA, S-Video, or RCA cables to join
8pm, free —
Share @ Issue Project Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215
direction/map:
http://issueprojectroom.org/contact
http://is.gd/ljow
SHARE is always 100% FREE!! (no admission!)
Show up early!!! and stay late!!
http://share.dj/share
http://facebook.com/sharenyc
http://issueprojectroom.org
z’ev masterclass (FREE)
A very special masterclass with z’ev
rhythms in sound & the sounds of rhythm
A workshop based on published writings by z’ev: rhythmajik and the three fold ear
[both available at myspace.com/rhythmajik]
major topics:
the mytho-poetics of audiology:
ear drum / hammer-stirrup-anvil / labyrinth
drum as traditional trance inducer / the smithy – pythagoras & shamanism / labyrinth as image of return – Initiation
acoustics & psychoacoustics
a phenomenology of sound & consciousness
Minor Musics: Lau Nau + Kuupuu
Minor Musics: Finland
Lau Nau
Lau Nau is free spirited Finnish artist. Since the release of her celebrated debut full length Kuutarha on Chicago’s Locust Music in 2005, Lau Nau has enjoyed considerable recognition for her intimate & playful blend of ethnic tinged folk songs with curious & intuitive sounds conjured from familiar and exotic sound sources.
As a live performer, Lau Nau has enjoyed opportunities to perform in a wide array of venues from small informal spots like Massachusetts’s Montague Bookmill & Westers Gallery on Kemiö Island, Finland to larger spaces like Stockholm’s Kulturhuset, New York’s Anthology Film Archives, the Contemporary Art Centers in Glasgow, Brussels & Castelló and the Avanto festival in Helsinki. In recent years, her rare and special live shows have earned her a special place among a legion of fans. This was further cemented when a Lau Nau performance during her 2005 North American tour was counted among The Wire magazine’s “60 Concerts that shook the world” in its February, 2007 issue.
Lau Nau has been an active presence in the Finnish underground for the last decade playing in groups like Kiila, Hertta Lussu Ässä, Päivänsäde, Avarus and the Anaksimandros, organizing concerts, publishing a magazine and running a handful of small labels starting with POK and, more recently, the Peippo label.
Her musical activities spread far beyond her recorded work and permeate almost every aspect of her private and public life from her participation in multimedia events to her workshops teaching music to young children throughout Europe.
Over the past five years, Lau Nau has participated in several spontaneously improvised live film scores to classic avant-garde films including Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, Christensen’s Haxan and Dreyer’s La Passion de Joan d’Arc for the Turku Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives (New York) and Bio Rex (Helsinki) and Tromso Stumfilmdager (Norway). In 2007, the improvised score for Haxan was used as the accompanying soundtrack to the Swedish Film Institute’s DVD release of this legendary film.
Her music was used in a prestigious Magnum Photo essay “No Whisper, No Sigh” alongside fellow Finnish musicians Islaja, Kuupuu and avant-garde legend John Cage in 2006. In 2008/2009, her music will appear as the backdrop to an exhibition by Japanese photographer Moriyama Daido.
Lau Nau lives with her partner, Antti Tolvi, and their young son Nuutti in the remote countryside on Kemiö island
Kuupuu
Kuupuu is a solo project of a Finnish artist / musician —–. She’s been involved in such psych-folk groups as Avarus,
The Anaksimandros, Maniacs Dream, Kukkiva Poliisi, Lussu&Pami, Lussu ja Magneetti, Kermakolmio, Hertta Lussu Ässä, Thriller Bingo, Way Of The Cross etc.
Kuupuu plays partly improvised spooky boogie with tapes, loops, toys, keyboards, effects and voices.
Her live sets are time travels through unfound galaxies, deserted huts, nightmares, dirty doghouses, sweet cakes and cranberry lakes – letting the melodies find their own ways and settle or unsettle in the whole.
Kuupuu has toured in The United States and in Europe. She has supported Animal Collective on their European tour in 2007 and played shows in such places as Stockholm’s Culture House, Anthology Film Archives in New York, Avanto Festival in Helsinki, Palais de Tokyo in Paris and twice at the Colour out of Space Festival in Brigthon.
Minor Musics is an ongoing series which examines experimental musical micro-communities from around the world.
Marina Rosenfeld + Kusum + LoVid
Marina Rosenfeld
Marina Rosenfeld’s work has been widely commissioned by museums and institutions in Europe and North America, including the Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, The Kitchen, and festivals including Faster Than Sound, Performa Biennial, Holland Festival, Wien Modern, Donaueschingen, Ars Electronica, and Los Angeles’ Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, among many others. She has created live scores for the Merce Cunningham and Douglas Dunn dance companies and has collaborated with artists including George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, DJ Olive, Anthony Coleman and many more. Rosenfeld recordings can be found on Room 40, Charhizma, Softl Music, and Innova. She’s been a member of the faculty at Bard College’s Milton Avery School of the Arts in New York since 2003, and co-chair of its graduate program in Music/Sound since 2007.
Kusum
Focusing on the voice in performance and installation, Kusum Normoyle performs with noise, intervention and the rearrangement of performance structures, utilising site specific locations and high energy physical and vocal output. Her vocal style has formed an alignment with extreme extended vocal techniques, using the microphone and amplification system as an instrument on which the performance is dependant. Pushing the threshold of violence, short in duration and coming up from behind you, Kusums performances are highly specific events that effect through volume and her clipping, broken vocal style. Residing in Sydney, her work has taken her interstate and internationally as a solo and collaborative performer and musician.
LoVid
LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.
Theoretical: Cracked Media The Sound of Malfunction with Caleb Kelly
Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction
Caleb Kelly
From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage’s silences and indeterminacies, to Paik’s often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media.
Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
“Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It helpfully extends Douglas Kahn’s monumental Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative mis-use of audio playback technologies. As Kelly ably theorizes it, the ‘crack’ is a productive break that articulates past and future, archaeology and innovation, analog and digital. Hence, this book combines an exhaustive survey and taxonomy of recent experiments with turntables and CD technology (Oval, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, etc.) with a detailed genealogy of these practices that traces them back to earlier moments of sonic experimentation (Futurism, Fluxus, John Cage, etc.). Informed, but not overloaded, by theoretical accounts of phonography and digital media, Kelly helpfully sorts out what is at issue in cracked sound and places this at the center of contemporary debates about art and technology.”
Caleb Kelly is a lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
—Christoph Cox, Professor of Philosophy, Hampshire College, co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music “Finally, a deep, scholarly accounting of the aesthetics of failure. Props to Caleb Kelly for laying bare the various histories of ‘malfunction’ as a compositional device. This book should be required reading for anyone working in electronic music today.”
—Kim Cascone, Composer and Writer “For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990s, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction.”
—Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle
For more information, please click here
————
Caleb Kelly is an academic, event producer and curator from New Zealand who lives and works in Sydney, Australia. His first book was published by MIT Press in October 2009 and is entitled Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. The book looks at the deliberate use of cracked and broken everyday playback technologies for the creation of music and art.
Caleb has been producing experimental sound events since 2000, including impermanent.audio (http://impermanent.info) and the Australian experimental music festival What is Music? Musicians who have performed at his events include: Tony Conrad (USA), Merzbow (JP), Bernard Parmegiani (FR), Haino Keiji (JP) Akio Suzuki (JP), kk null (JP), Ami Yoshida (JP), Atau Tanaka (JP/FR), Haco (JP), Taku Sugimoto (JP), Kaffe Mathews (UK), Kim Cascone (USA), Toshimaru Nakamura (JP), Jojo Hiroshige (JP), Phil Dadson (NZ), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), Rosy Parlane (NZ), Aki Onda (JP), Francisco Lopez (SP), Chris Abrahams, and Oren Ambarchi.
Caleb has also curated numerous sound exhibitions, run the year long sound in gallery space project PELT, and written on the sound arts for numerous publications.
Caleb is a lecturer in contemporary art theory at the Sydney College of the Arts, at the University of Sydney.
Littoral: Gregg Bordowitz
Gregg Bordowitz
Volition
For one year, every day, from August 2007 to June 2008, Gregg Bordowitz wrote questions, one line after the other. On May 2nd, the author will read aloud all the collected questions recently published by Printed Matter in a book titled Volition—
Consisting entirely of questions, Volition is 142 pages of active, mind-bending engagement with the reader, who is led down paths of inquiry involving art, meaning, philosophy, choice, happiness, and identity. Bordowitz organizes his questions into lists, paragraphs, and stanzas, which are themselves organized into five chapters: Questions, Topics, Aesthetics, Beliefs, and Morals. The resulting text is something like a spiritual guide crossed with an epic poem crossed with a transcription of the meandering thoughts of a philosophic insomniac, kept awake by such questions as “How can I touch creation as a principle without reproach?” and “How does gratitude unfold from virtue?” *
Suspending any responsibility to answers, Volition presents all the ways questions approach their objects—seducing, beseeching, mocking, taking, giving, shining, withdrawing. Reading his questions aloud over the course of an afternoon, Bordowitz will exhaust the will to know through a kind of public liquidation.
Starting at 2PM and continuing (with breaks) until approximately 7PM, the performance will be segmented into four sections. Food, beer, wine and tea will be served.
2:00 PM Welcome
2:15PM—3:00PM
Book I: Questions
Book II: Topics
3:15PM—3:45PM
Book III: Aesthetics
4:00PM—4:30PM
Book IV: Beliefs
4:45PM—6:45PM
Book V: Morals
Appendix: On Why
* Volition is published and distributed by Printed Matter; description taken from catalog
http://printedmatter.org 195 10th Avenue New York, NY 10011 (212) 925-0325
Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.} is a writer, film and video maker and teacher. A collection of his essays, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Recently, his writings have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Fence, Casco, and Texte Zur Kunst. A long poem titled Admissions was included in the book Considering Forgiveness, edited by Aleksandra Wagner and Carin Cuoni (Vera List Center, 2009). His most recent book consisting entirely of questions, titled Volition, was published by Printed Matter (2009). His films, including Habit (2001), The Suicide (1996), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), and Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters and broadcast internationally. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. Bordowitz is Chair of the Film, Video, and New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
ISSUE’s Littoral Series is supported, in part, by The Casement Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Nat Baldwin + peace, loving + Woody Sullender
Nat Baldwin
New Hampshire-native Nat Baldwin is an experimental upright bassist and singer-songwriter who cut his teeth studying with free jazz legend Anthony Braxton. In addition to his three critically-acclaimed solo releases, Nat has collaborated on works with Extra Life, Vampire Weekend and is a long-time member of The Dirty Projectors.
“Nat Baldwin’s upright bass is Joanna Newsom’s harp, Andrew Bird’s violin – a partner so indispensable, it’s a personal trait. Over a gorgeous bull-fiddle hum, he belts out these melismatic flourishes… This delivery is terrifically earnest, terrifyingly intimate, and terribly special.” – The Boston Phoenix
“His musical imagination is expansive, while his lack of pretense is admirable” – Pitchfork
“The New Hampshire-native (and Anthony Braxton disciple) rains hyper-melodic chamber fire in melismatic, cinematic glory.” – RCRD LBL
peace, loving
peace, loving has been a force of new music around new england and beyond the past three years, performing compositions for aromatics and tape (w/ 3 professional chefs), dances for handheld tape recorders, working as set designers, video artists, performance poets, instrument builders, and becoming infamous for having a major rotating cast of performers doing all these things at once. peace, loving was formed out of the whitehaus family record, a community based label/venue in the jamaica plain neighborhood of boston.
Woody Sullender
Woody Sullender is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Over the past few years, Sullender has been emerging as a pre-eminent experimental banjo performer, playing with and against the cultural baggage of the instrument. While alluding to the “traditional” musics of his home states of Virginia and North Carolina, he explores a diverse plane of plucked string music from around the world as well as incorporating punk, noise, free jazz, etc..
“Not too many musicians have redefined what the banjo is about the way Woody Sullender has.”
- Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader
“If he keeps it up, and there seems to be no doubt that he will, he has the potential to become one of the most innovative and historically important players of [the banjo]”
- Tiny Mix Tapes
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet + Occasional Detroit (O-D) The Best In ABSTRAKT ENT
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet
Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet is an ever-changing woodgrain diorama of dark forest characters. Started in 1999 in San Francisco, California, by Hans Grüsel, the ensemble uses electronics, concrète recording, and acoustic instruments to explore the lost Teutonic rites of the past while stumbling into the failure of the future.
Hans Grusel’s “sound” might best be described as the sounds of a Bavarian music box designed by an artist who had been bonked on the head with a brass cuckoo clock chime and left in a dark room for three years with only the music of Scriabin, Wagner, and Prokofiev mixed with off-speed 1960s sci-fi soundtracks and folkloric anthems pumping through the slightly clogged vents. HGKK audio combines numerous divergent elements—rigid structures and sweeping washes of plucky improvisation; classic violin sounds twisting in a mobius strip of clashing yet beautiful sounds and tones; flitting marches and delicate traipsing at the bottom of the sea—to create dense and blissful audio rainstorms.
There are very few bands who truly baffle. Who confuse and confound, both musically and conceptually. Sure, plenty of bands are weird, or strange, or hard to describe, some might even be described as fucked up or damaged, but very very few truly baffle. Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet is most definitely one of those bafflingly confusional elite. . . Hans Grusel and his Krankenkabinet create a bizarre cacophony of sound, theatrical, dramatic, noisy for sure, but weirdly melodic and playful and more than anything, confounding.
Occasional Detroit
My NAME IS Towondo”Beyababa”Clayborn I am a part of the abstrakt hip-hop duo Occasional Detroit (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..
We are an abstrakt hip-hop duo CONSISTING OF MYSELF Towondo’Beyababa’Clayborn”
AND DEMETRISA L. ANDERSON
we will kill it on may 1st the best in ABSTRAKT ENT.
It is not an understatement. We like too show what it feels like in our own words, on how it feels after recovering from taking a piss under scrutiny. So, that is A SYNOPSIS ON how we roll.
Come see us (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..
Theoretical: David Joselit in Conversation with Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether and David Joselit will stage a dialogue about painting. How do paintings slip from subjects to objects, and back again, never staying secure in either position. Why and how have paintings become performative? In the era of digital networks is the outmoded practice of applying pigment on canvas, linen, or wood, our best hope for understanding digital space?
David Joselit
David Joselit worked as a curator at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston from 1983-1989 where he co-organized several exhibitions including “DISSENT: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston,” (1985) “Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture” (1986) and “The British Edge” (1987). After receiving his Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard in 1995, he began teaching in the Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine, where he taught until 2003. He is currently Carnegie Professor of the History of Art at Yale where he served as Department Chair from 2006-2009. Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT Press, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, World of Art Series, 2003), and Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT Press, 2007). He is and editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture.
Jutta Koether
Jutta Koether is one of the central figures in contemporary painting. Yet she is more than just a painter. She is also a performance artist, musician, writer and theoretician. . Her role as an artist was long reduced to being regarded as a feminist response to a specific scene of the late 1980s in Cologne, Germany. With her translucent color fields, the gestural brush stroke, drawings of female bodies and the lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, she frequently seems to assume positions in contrast to artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. As critic and editor of the music and pop culture magazine Spex and as performance artist and musician, however, Koether did not fit the typical image of the art scene of that time. Since the start of her artistic career Jutta Koether has sought to make expansion her program. At the same time, it has always been important to her not to take an unequivocal role as an artist, but always to work from several positions.
Since coming to New York in the 1990s, she moves in an expanded field of experiment and improvisation, literature and theory in the New York scene. Cooperation with musicians like Tom Verlaine (Television) or Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) often provides her with more important inspiration than the work of other visual artists. It is specifically through these apparent detours and alternative forms of energy that she has created a kind of free space for herself, which enables a reevaluation of the medium of painting and its potential that is so urgently needed in today’s situation.
Apothecary Hymns + Sacred Harp + Prince Rama
Apothecary Hymns
Alternately thought of as “drug songs” and “medicine music”, the shambolic, shamanistic realm of Apothecary Hymns came into being at the end of 2003, when ex-The Court & Spark bassist. Alex Stimmel taught himself how to play the drums so he could capture some of his nascent songs in a one-man band format. The resulting 45, “Half of What is Seen” b/w “The Marigold,” drew praise not only from the underground psych community (such as Byron Coley, Gerald Van Waes, and Aquarius Records), but also more mainstream publications like Goldmine, which featured the limited-edition, hand-numbered picture sleeve in its 2004 indie special.
The single caught the attention of Chicago’s Locust Music, who signed Stimmel and the AH moniker upon first hearing. The debut album, Trowel & Era was released in April, 2005. But, after playing a number of ad-hoc release shows, Stimmel dove full-time into his day job – working with public school students with emotional disturbance and autism in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Content to continue to develop his songs over the next two years, Stimmel stayed away from recording in favor of teaching, playing full-band shows in NYC and going on the road as time allowed, playing solo electric sets, looping & droning his Strat through open-tuned folk-cum-fuzz.
Then, in June of 2007, after years of shifting personnel, a new Apothecary Hymns live band solidified around bassist Rob Fellman (the only original band member to remain) and drummer Aaron Nixon. Abandoning the one-man format in favor of full-tilt power trio energy,
Apothecary Hymns began woodshedding new tunes, started taking the band on the road more, and blissfully moved into a heavy rural psych phase
Sacred Harp
Sacred Harp draws influences from Old Time to psychedelia, beveled edges and appalachia, Fuckle, dirty fingernails, killer jowls, rappahannock river, backyard coal train, depersonalization/derealization, family, friends, Marye’s Heights talking box (R.I.P.), The Caroline Street Jug Nugglers, steel strings, nylon strings, Fog Haus.
Prince Rama
Spawned from the vernal heat of the Florida swamps amidst swirling patterns of pine orchards and pre-Columbian artifacts, Prince Rama of Ayodhya was whispered into the ears of Taraka Larson, Nimai Larson, and Michael Collins in the summer of 2007 by the clanging of prayer bells and goat-skin drums. They left the Hare Krishna farm where they
were staying and formed a creative nucleus in Boston, MA where they gained a cult following in the underground art and psychedelic folk and noise circles who were mesmerized by their captivating blend of campfire surrealism and transcendental anthems of every cosmic order.
Taraka studied experimental film in art school, and her songwriting reflects an almost cinematic quality, taking listeners on labyrinthine sonic safaris with sparkling lyrical imagery intensified by Nimai’s tribal drumming and elevated to the astral plane by Michael’s sci-fi synth lines; the result is a sonic experience that takes the listener
through celestial residue and archaeological constellations of a timeless civilization pining for self realization, while conjuring lingering anthemic melodies that haunt the fringes of the collective psyche. At times, one can hear echoes of eclectic influences
stretching from weird folk and hallucinatory operas set to thunder drums to a plethora of ethnographic recordings of Native American and Southeast Asian rituals; yet, the culminating holistic sound is one that is strikingly unique.
In a short time, the trio was picked up by the British-based psychedelic label, Cosmos Recordings. After sending them a handmade tape with a few dozen tracks recorded in forests and candle-lit bedrooms Cosmos released a collection of these lo-fi recordings as
“Threshold Dances” in August 2008 and flew them out to England to tour, play a radio session for the BBC, participate in the Stockton International Fringe Festival and Greenman Festival and record a second album, “Zetland”, which Prince Rama self-released in June 2009 to coincide with a series of extensive US tours.
In their young lifespan, Prince Rama has toured the UK and US several times over, traveling with Teeth Mountain and sharing stages with Caribou, Wooden Shjips, Magik Markers, Psychic Ills, Indian Jewelry, Chris Corsano, Pocahaunted, and Kurt Vile and playing festivals with Pentangle, Spiritualized, Iron and Wine, Clinic, Black Mountain and many others.
Their engaging and often unpredictable live shows reflect their eclectic pool of mysticism; amidst collective chants, werewolf summonings, and Sanskrit invocations, they have been known to distribute hand drums, conch shells, bells, gongs, and other various percussion to members of the audience to create the ultimate communal ritual experience.
They are currently working on their latest record, “Architecture of Utopia” which is a unique collaboration with the internationally acclaimed visionary artist, Paul Laffoley, that explores the act of mapping utopia through the means of a one-sided vinyl record that traces the journey from the far reaches of the cosmos to the center of the earth via the mandalic architecture of the record. They performed the project at the opening of Laffoley’s solo exhibition at the Kent Gallery in New York in January 2009, as well as at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in late November, in conjunction with a European tour with Amen Dunes. In response to the project, the London Institute of Contemporary Art deemed Prince Rama “a group not of this planet”.
Patrick McGinley Sound Workshop
revenant:sound
In this one-day workshop we will explore sound as a transmitter of nonverbal information. We will focus on sound’s ability to define/describe space, and on our ability to resonate, alter, or create space by using sound.
‘revenant:sound’ is a project that focuses on improvised sonic activities in site specific locations. Voices are given to these spaces by producing sound using only objects found in-situ and the space itself. Participants will focus on a development of attentive listening and the ability to successfully participate in group explorations, while learning to find sonic potentials in everyday materials. Revenant derives its name from a concept of spatial memory, or, more specifically, from the long-term gestural memory of space; the ability of a location to retain an imprint or trace of activity or energy that has been present therein.
Participants are asked to bring one (non-musical) object from their living space, whose sonic potentials we will explore as a group.
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
