Zach Layton, Alex Waterman, Ryan Sawyer Trio + Michael Evans’ Swirling Lotus Blossom Bandits Band
Zach Layton
Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser, teacher, and new media artist based in Brooklyn with an interest in biofeedback, generative algorithms, experimental music, buddhism and indeterminacy. His work investigates complex relationships and topologies created through the interaction of simple core elements like sine waves, minimal surfaces and kinetic visual patterns.
Zach’s work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and he has performed and exhibited at the Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, Diapason, PS1/MoMa, Anthology Film Archives, Joe’s Pub, Exit Art, SCOPE Art Fair, Art Forum Berlin, New York Electronic Art Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, Sculpture Center, Millenium Film Workshop, St. Mark’s Ontological Theater, Dumbo Arts Festival, New York Digital Salon, Miguel Abreu Gallery, Participant Gallery, Monkeytown and many other venues in New York, South America and Europe. He has collaborated with Luke Dubois, Vito Acconci, Joshua White, Jonas Mekas, Tony Conrad, Bradley Eros, Alex Waterman, Nick Hallett, Andrew Lampert, Matthew Ostrowski, Michael Evans, MV Carbon, Seth Kirby, Matthew Welch, Christine Bard, Andy Graydon, Ryan Sawyer, Matt Mottel, Bradford Reed, Anthony Huberman, Sarina Basta, Gareth James, Emily Manzo, Patrick Hambrecht, Marissa Olsen, Angie Eng, Adam Kendall, Chika Ijima, Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Tristan Perich and Ray Sweeten among many other artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians and friends.
Zach is also founder of Brooklyn’s monthly experimental music series, “Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde” co-curated with Nick Hallett featuring leading local and international composers and improvisers, was the co-curator of the PS1 summer Warm Up music series from 2007 -2009 and curator at Issue Project Room. Zach has received grants from the Netherlands America Foundation, Free103.9’s AIRtime fellowship, Turbulence, Jerome Foundation, Experimental Television Center, NYFA, the Danish Council for Visual Art, the City of Copenhagen Artist in Residence Program, and is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Alex Waterman
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d’Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His duo projects with the dancer Michael Schumacher have toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, the Opera of Monaco and most recently in all 5 boroughs of New York in a Joyce Theater production in association with the City Parks Foundation in July of 2008.
In 2007, Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU, as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister’s residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson’s film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and won the Tiger Prize for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2008. Alex lectured and performed as part of the exhibition, The Possibility of Action at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2008, and was in residence at the ICA in May 2009 with his ensemble, in addition to performing solo works. He installed a permanent 12 speaker sound installation out in Napa Valley in July of 2009, at the residence of Norah and Norman Stone, is presently working on a new film project in Vieques, and starting up his record label (D.S. al coda). He also plays the music of Arthur Russell with Arthur’s Landing whenever he can. His writings have been published by Dot Dot Dot, Paregon, FoArm, and Artforum.
Ryan Sawyer
Ryan Sawyer aka Lone Wolf (b. 1976) grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he played drums in various punk rock bands, most notably, At The Drive-In. After 21 years in Texas, he decided to move to New York to pursue a formal education of music and broaden his understanding of music making on the drum set. While in New York, he studied under Bobby Previte, Susie Ibarra, Hamid Drake, and Thurman Barker, and was a regular fixture in the New York free jazz and noise scene, frequenting legendary venues such as Tonic, The Cooler, and The Knitting Factory. Interested in combining elements of improvisation, jazz, and aesthetics of the musical avant garde, Sawyer performed his music in underground parties and rock clubs in hopes of making his music widely accessible to the public.
Ryan has played and recorded with hundreds of improvisors and bands while maintaining his own groups (Tall Firs, Glass Rock, Stars Like Fleas) throughout the years. Some of his collaborations include, Charles Gayle, Thurston Moore, Jandek, TV on the Radio, Celebration, Scarlett Johansson, and Rhys Chatham. Ryan also led and co-wrote the New York Chapter of The Boredoms’ 88 Boadrum, a piece that incorporated 88 drummers playing an 88 minute piece of music co-written by Ryan Sawyer and Gang Gang Dance.
Michael Evans’ Swirling Lotus Blossom Bandits Band (a South-African tinged jazz-blues-improvisational band) celebrates the expatriates of South Africa (Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Louis Moholo and Johnny Dyani) that relocated to Great Britain in the early 1960’s. Tunes by Gwi Gwi’s band, Blue Notes members…Chris Mcgregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani and Llouis Moholo as well as Sun Ra, Howlin’ Wolf and Stan Kenton.
Featuring: Michael Attias : alto saxophone, Michael Evans: drums, Evan Gallagher: keyboard, Jeff Hudgins: alto saxophone and Adam Lane: upright bass, Peter Zummo: Trombone
Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/percussionist/thereminist/composer whose work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics. As well as being a drumset player, his work with unusual sound sources includes found objects, homemade instruments, the theremin and various digital and homemade analog electronics. His work with the theremin varies the quality of its sound through set-up and technique. On the theremin he has performed with dancers and in group settings playing experimental, jazz, rock, ersatz lounge and chamber music. In 2000, he was photographed playing a Moog ether wave theremin for the front of Bob Moog’s Big Briar catalog. He has performed in multiple performances of the NYC Theremin Society’s Issue Project Room concerts during 2005, 2006 and 2007. He has studied movement/sparring/drumming with Professor Milford Graves, drum technique with Joe Morello, tabla with Misha Masud, kanjira with Ganesh Kumar and Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming with John Amira. He has studied musicianship with Helen Hobbs Jordan, composition with Richard Cameron Wolf, Blue Gene Tyranny and the theremin with Pamelia Kurstin.
He has worked with a wide variety of artists of all sorts including Ron Anderson, Jeff Arnal, Audio Artists, Claire Barratt, Samm Bennett, Jac Berrocal, Carla Bley, Naval Cassidy, James Chance, Martha Colburn, Combustible Edison, Lol Coxhill, EasSide Percussion(ESP), Roger Ely(the Devil’s Chaueffeur), Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Ken Filiano, Fast Forward(Gobo), Chris Ferris, Michael Gira (Angels of Light, Swans), Gisburg, Gilbert Godfried, God Is My Co-Pilot, David Grubbs, Alexander Hacke(Einsturzende Neubauten), Susan Hefner, Steve Horowitz’s Code Ensemble, Jarboe (Swans), Pamelia Kurstin, Skip LaPlante’s Music for Homemade Instruments, Zach Layton, Gen Ken Montgomery, Neil Leonard, Aimee Mann, Karen Mantler, Sean G. Meehan, Donald Miller, Eric Mingus, Gordon Monahan, Joe Morris, Anders Nilsson, Evan Parker, Andrea Parkins, Maxime De La Rochefoucauld, William Parker, Yvette Perez’s Birdbrain, Gino Robair, Lary Seven, Elliot Sharp, Moe! Staiano, LaDonna Smith, David Simons, Jesse Stewart, Toronto Dance Theatre, Stephen Vitiello, Christopher Walken, Jason Willet, Peter Zummo’s Noisy Meditation Band and John Zorn.
He continues his ongoing collaborations with: Jeff Arnal(MEJA duo), Anders Nilsson & Ken Filiano(Fulminate Trio), Peter Zummo’s Noisy Meditation Band, Lary Seven and composes music for and performs with Susan Hefner and Dancers. Recorded examples of his work can be found on EasSide Percussion’s ESP release on Avant records, MESuperstar on A.T.M.O.T.W. records, Karen Mantler’s Farewell and Pet Project releases on XtraWatt records, Just Drums 2 – The Project(a compilation of 35 drummers) on Fever Pitch records, MEJA(Michael Evans/Jeff Arnal) on C3R records, Fulminate Trio: s/t on Generate records and Deviant Shakti: Ladonna Smith and Michael Evans on Trans Museq records.
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: MV Carbon
ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present the third Artist-in-Residence performance by MV Carbon.
MV Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and artist. Her work frequently involves tape machines, voice, cello, analog synthesizers, field recordings, along with hand built electronics. She has recently been developing and performing new works which utilize physical computing and sensor controlled synthesis. Carbon is interested in spatial integration and site-specific consideration.
She has performed nationally and internationally with her solo work as well as in collaborations at spaces including Arnolfi (UK), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Nefertiti Jazz Club (Sweden), PS1 Contemporary Art (NYC), Roulette(NYC), The Sage, (UK), The Stone (NYC), the Tate Modern (UK), and Tesla (Berlin) . Her work with the dark-wave electronic duo, Metalux,has releases out on a number of experimental and independent labels including LOAD, 5RC and Hanson. Her solo release, The Dislodged Perihelion (LP), is coming out sometime in the future on Ecstatic Peace.
Her paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries including the Butcher Shop (Chicago), D’Amelio Terras (NYC), Louis V.E.S.P.(NYC), MCCaigwelles Gallery (NYC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PGH), Salon Invisible (Chicago), Three Rives Arts Festival (PGH), and West Nile (NYC).
ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Martha Colburn with Thollem McDonas
Martha Colburn
Martha Colburn’s work utilizes the language and materials of filmmaking to comment on popular culture, consumerism, politics and sexuality. Through a collage of live action (paint-on-glass) animations, found footage, and documentary filmmaking techniques, she addresses contemporary topics to express her personal anxieties and passions. Martha’s films are a disturbing and at times humorous take on popular and political culture. She creates elaborately layered collages,paintings, and installations that incorporate transparencies,recordings, and live performances. As her conceptual process grows, so follows advances in an already detailed and labor-intensive animating process. Martha is expanding her technique into working with multi-plane glass animation, which represents a physical manifestation of her conceptually layered ideas.
Currently, Martha is working on films that combine art historical representations and current depictions of politics to challenge our notions of truth and fantasy. As a descendent of some of America’s earliest settlers (ministers, farmers and wagon train members), her work demonstrates an awareness of the repository of the guilt haunted twisted history of the American soul. Martha’s current work draws from this perspective and personal experience to address issues such as Methamphetamine use, environmental catastrophes, and man’s relationship to nature.
Thollem McDonas
Thollem McDonas is a pianist and composer of Irish and Cherokee descent, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not long after birth, he began studying the keyboard repertoire from the Medieval era to the 20th century. After graduating with degrees in both piano performance and composition, he dedicated his time to grassroots political movements and ecological restoration projects, before returning to music with his full focus. Currently on tour, his extensive travels as a performer and teacher have covered much of the North American continent and Europe (he often leads listening and group improvisation workshops). He is a founding member of several innovative ensembles, all of varying and disparate musics. In the past 6 years, he has added 20 albums to his discography on 9 different vanguard labels in 4 different countries.
As the founder and Artistic Director of Estamos Ensemble, Thollem McDonas is the recipient of the 2009 US Artists International Award, as well as a 2010 CAP grant from the American Music Center. He was commissioned by The Limon Dance Company for a large-scale commemorative piece for their 50th year anniversary. In September 2008, he was invited to perform the late works of Claude Debussy on the piano on which they were written, as well as his own comprovisations with Stefano Scodanibbio. On Debussy’s Piano And…(Die Schachtel, Fall 2010) is the first album ever recorded on Debussy’s piano.
Minor Musics: Tomutonttu + Kiila
Tomutonttu (“dust gnome”, is the alias of Jan Anderzén, a visual artist and leader of an avant-garde sound group entitled Kemialliset Ystävät. His lonely music is crafted from the colorful sounds of toy reeds, mutilated vocals, and groovy loops of animal noises that come together to create a whirling, whimsical mess. Speaking of his work, the artist describes it as as ”a confusing detail of the Kemialliset Ystävät freedom flow, a microcosmos of strange sound creatures and dirt flying around in the stereo space and interacting with a logic all of their own.” Recently, Tomutonttu played a series of concerts for school children at the planetarium of his home town, Tampere. His discography is a labyrinth reflecting the nature of his own music.
Kiila was founded in 1993, by Niko-Matti Ahti and Sami Sänpäkkilä in Ulvila, Finland. The band first performed as a duo and played their first show in Pori, a city near by Ulvila, in 1995.
Kiila’s first release was a six song ep, Original, in 1997, which also resulted in the creation of their record label, Fonal Records. By the millenium, the band had released two more EPs and played an integral part in creating a fertile network of likeminded artists in Finland. In 2001, Kiila released their first full length album, Heartcore. In 2003, Kiila expanded to a seven piece ensemble and started to play tours abroad. Their second album, Silmät sulkaset, was released the next year. At that time, Kiila had a lot of media attention along with other Finnish ensembles, mostly due to a broad article on Finnish contemporary music in The Wire magazine (issue 250). After Silmät sulkaset, Kiila played tours and festivals as a six piece ensemble and prepared music for their next album.
Kiila’s latest album, Tuota tuota, was released in June 2009. The live line-up has consisted of the same musicians for years and this group is also the backbone of the new album. In March 2010, Kiila toured Scotland extensively with Alasdair Roberts & Band with the support of the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune Up-programme.
Minor Musics: Finland is made possible through the generous support of the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the General Consulate of Finland.
Joshua Abrahms + C. Spencer Yeh
Bassist & composer Joshua Abrams has been in the thick of Chicago’s vibrant music scene for fifteen years, playing & recording as a leader & as a sideman in projects across the genres. He co-founded the “back porch minimalist” band Town & Country (thrill jockey/box media) & with Matana Roberts & Chad Taylor the trio Sticks & Stones (thrill jockety/482 music). He has released four records under his own name as well as two under the moniker Reminder that navigate the realms of jazz and improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, beatmaking, minimalism and field recordings (Eremite/Delmark/Eastern Developments/Lucky Kitchen). He has appeared on over 50 recordings including records by Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake and Bonny “Prince” Billy. “Natural Information”, Abrams first record for Eremite focuses on creating sustained meditative, hypnotic, highly rhythmic spaces. At the music’s heart is the guimbri, a 3 stringed lute traditionally used by the Gnawa of Morocco in trance ceremonies. Abrams presents new melodies, structures, and situations for the traditional instrument to create a space that contrasts the rate/mindstate of contemporary technologically paced living. He will be performing with Chicago drummer Michael Avery.
C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan (1975), moved to the US in 1980, studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, lived in Cincinnati, Ohio for over a decade, and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Yeh works as a solo artist and improviser, most notably with his project, Burning Star Core. He has collaborated with a variety of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Okkyung Lee, Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, John Wiese, Nate Wooley, Wally Shoup, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Clare Cooper, Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, Issue Project Room, No Fun Fest, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, and ZKM Karlsruhe. His video and sound works have been showcased internationally.
Brian Chase is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Growing up on Long Island, he started taking private drum lessons at an early age which lead to earning a Bachelors of Music from the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Brian is probably best known as a member of the rock group Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band that has toured extensively throughout the world and has been nominated for three Grammys. Other recorded projects include a minimalist punk rock band called the Seconds, a duo ensemble with saxophonist Seth Misterka, and Jeremiah Lockwood’s Sway Machinery. Performance collaborations have also included Alan Licht, Okkyung Lee, Matt Welch, Stefan Tcherepnin, and Kid Millions’s Man Forever. Brian is also interested in the Just Intonation tuning theory and, heavily influenced by the work of La Monte Young introduced to him by guitarist Jon Catler, has begun an ongoing recording and performance project in which the principles of Just Intonation are applied to drums and percussion. Influential drum and percussion teachers are and have been Susie Ibarra, Greg Bandy, and Michael Rosen. Away from the drums, Brian is a regular practitioner of Ashtanga yoga.
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.
S K L S + Climax Golden Twins
S K L S
S K L S consists of Joachim Nordwall (iDEAL label boss, Alvars Orkester, Oceans of Silver & Blood) and Henrik Rylander (ex-Union Carbide Productions) — the key members of Swedish drone rock band, The Skull Defekts. They formed this new duo to be able to work independently from The Skull Defekts temple. In this collboration, Nordwall performs on analog synths and effects and Rylander on no-input mixing desk, creating a sound they characterize as “deep, dark electronic music entering your skull.” The concert at the Issue Project Room is their debut in North America as S K L S.
Climax Golden Twins
Climax Golden Twins is a Seattle, WA based experimental collage outfit originally consisting of Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor, and later Scott Colburn, who joined the group in 1996. The group’s earliest material was recorded in 1993, but wasn’t released until their 1996 album, Imperial Household Orchestra. Early CGT albums, such as Climax Golden Hiss (1995) and the aforementioned Imperial Houshold Orchestra (1996), offer a glimpse into their unique world of lo-fi collage — organic, acoustic instruments mixed with found sounds, electronics, and clips of sampled exotica. Their later CD, Locations (1998), focuses on voice and found sound, while Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds (Anomalous, 2000) is a studio album that returns to their earlier formula with random noise-punk interludes, dreamyscapes and acoustics mixed with field recordings.
A Sublime Frequencies film screening: THIS WORLD IS UNREAL LIKE A SNAKE IN A ROPE
THIS WORLD IS UNREAL LIKE A SNAKE IN A ROPE
A film by Robert Millis (Sublime Frequencies)
55 minutes
A collage of sights and sounds from the eternal never-ending collage that is INDIA. A trip through the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, nagaswaram improvisations, impossibly loud cities, processions, devotion, blessings, color, abstractions, detail, music and more. India is impossible to know: it is too vast, too rich and too much of a dream. Offered here is one perspective, one dream, subjective and flawed, hanging by a thread. Robert Millis is a musician and artist, a founding member of Climax Golden Twins and AFCGT and a frequent contributor to the Sublime Frequencies and Dust-to-Digital record labels. His previous films include Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan and My Friend Rain and was the co-author of Victrola Favorites released on Dust to Digital in 2008.
John Cage’s Song Books + Lecture on Nothing
ISSUE Project Room and Gisburg present a rare performance of John Cage’s extraordinary masterpiece for many voices, Song Books (1970), preceded by Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (1949).
A treasury of superimposed vocal solos in a wide variety of styles ranging from Indian ragas to Italian Bel Canto, Cage’s score envisions a kaleidoscopic performance layering the songs of Erik Satie, with 19th century opera excerpts and electronic theater works. Primarily utilizing texts drawn from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, Marshall McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Buckminster Fuller and Marcel Duchamp, Cage created an anthology of 90 solos for voice (and sometimes electronics) specified and arranged using hance procedures drawn from the I Ching, producing a “happening” that revels in Zen visions of anarchy, ecology and time. This event will feature performances by Dafna Naphtali, Gisburg, Jessica Feldman, John King, Travis Just, Nick Hallett, Fast Forward and many more…
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.
Electric Temple Presents: Drone Marathon
Electric Temple will present a day long musical event focusing on contemporary performers working with long sustained tones and sounds. The program will feature 6 musicians curating segments of the event. Audience members are welcome to come and go as they please. Stay tuned for full line up.
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE: Richard Garet
Richard Garet works interweaving multiple media including moving image, sound, live performances, and photography. He completed his mfa at Bard College, and was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Grant. He currently has an artist residency at Issue Project Room, NY, and previously completed a residency at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Scottsdale, Arizona in 2006. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Never Can Say Goodbye at the former Tower Records Store; Sonochrome: an exhibition of recent works by Richard Garet, at the Public Trust Galllery, Dallas, Texas; Leervoll, Diapason Gallery; and previous exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain; Biennial Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; El Museo del Barrio, NYC; and more. His sound compositions have been published through sound based labels such as And-Oar, Non Visual Objects, Winds Measure Recordings, Unframed Recordings, Con-V, Leerraum, White_Line Editions, and Contour Editions. Additionally Garet co-curates with Louky Keijsers Koning, the monthly performance event LMAKseries, which integrates film, video, sound art, and media performance into the gallery’s mission at LMAK Projects in the L.E.S, NYC. Garet also currently directs the independent media label Contour Editions publishing works that explore the various possibilities of sound and light.
Richard Garet is interested in the phenomena found and produced in time-based media, and human beings’ relationship with both artificial and natural environments. His audiovisual exploratory steps are focused on concept and function, material and process, listening, viewing, and experience. even though garet’s work suits the standard gallery setting, many of his other activities as an artist explore the various practices of experimental sound and video performance. All of these modes are additional ways in which Garet’s work exposes the audience to real time explorations of audiovisual processes, emphasizing the experiential, the sensorial, and the active-reception of the body and mind. Richard Garet states, “when creating a piece I reflect on what the work is meant to accomplish, how it functions in relationship to the space, how it affects the audience, and how sound and visual content are connected to one another. These questions determine my choices and influence the direction of the work.”
Richard Garet is also interested in the vast landscape of noise that surrounds him, and how these noises establish the background-sonic-field that he experiences on a daily basis; consciously or unconsciously. The material for making his pieces emerges from this arena where sounds manifest from all directions and inevitably he becomes the receptor of such phenomena. He’s interested in how what he hears constantly derives from living situations and existential conditions and how the sonic world is constantly changing and modifying living experiences. Garet observes and pays attention to these mechanics and situations where sound is attached to function, purpose, commodity, decay, transformation, and environment. These sonic situations encapsulated in architectural structures or open without walls are very much responsible for activating sensations and states that trigger experiential, psychological, intellectual, emotional, and political responses. Some examples are media noise, the sounds of traffic, the sounds found in a nuclear plant, sounds created by electrical objects of commodity, the sounds of a street protest, the sounds encountered within the walls of a room, and appropriated sounds from mass media communication such as pop music and recorded sounds found in the Internet. The transformations and transpositions applied to each work focus on voicing not only the formal musical potential of the material but also the politics attached to its content. Garet’s intention is that his work function not only highlighting the experiential and listening qualities of the piece but also offering accessibility to its content, and that the subject matter activates the intellectual and political prospects of the work
ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
The Thirteenth Assembly + Pierre-Yves Macé presents Miniatures/Song Recycle
Forged from a shared history of collaborations ranging from intimate duos to Anthony Braxton’s sprawling Sonic Genome Project, The Thirteenth Assembly features four distinguished musician/composers working together as equals to create distinctively eclectic, yet cohesive music. Drawing on years of familiarity, as well as its members’ diverse backgrounds in genres ranging classical, folk,rock, jazz and the avant-garde, this collective ensemble has performed across the United States and Europe since 2007, and released its debut recording (un)sentimental (Important Records) in 2009.
“Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, guitarist Mary Halvorson, violist Jessica Pavone and drummer Tomas Fujiwara are among the most exciting new jazz musicians to emerge on the New York scene,” declares the Wall Street Journal’s Martin Johnson, “and it is hard to talk about any one of these players without mentioning the others. Each of these musicians is a masterly soloist, and they all are creating music that is delicate, complex and eclectic. There isn’t much—if any—repertoire written for cornet-viola-guitar-drum ensembles, but with the appealing blend of unique sonorities and lithe rhythms found on (un)sentimental,that may soon change.”
Critics have credited the group with “truly remarkable capabilities”(Nick Storring, Exclaim!), “a knack for detailed and apropos framing of each others’ solo turns” (Bill Meyer, Dusted), and “an admirably relaxed sense of self, and a shared conviction to keep all options open” (Nate Chinen, New York Times). AllAboutJazz.com’s Troy Collins adds, “The unified ensemble sound of The Thirteenth Assembly is centered around empathetic communication and a willingness to subvert ego for the good of the group; there is no grandstanding here, only four longstanding friends conspiring to make adventurous yet accessible music. A stunning achievement,(un)sentimental demonstrates the endless possibilities of contemporary music by players at the top of their game.”
Pierre-Yves Macé (1980) is a French musician whose musical practice
encompasses improvisation on machines, a background in piano and classical percussion, jazz-rock/prog-rock bands, dance accompaniments, and an interest in literature and musicology. He received his PhD in Musicology in 2009, which explored phonography and the “sound document” in contemporary music. His first recordings, Faux-Jumeaux, was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2002. Subsequently, he released Circulations (Sub Rosa, 2005), and Crash_test ii (Tensional integrity) (Orkhêstra, 2006) for a string quartet. He has held residencies at CalArts in Los Angeles, CNMAT in Berkeley (2004), and GRM in Paris (2006, 2008). Macé has performed in the Octobre Festival in Normandie, MIMI, Villette Sonnique, Brocoli Transnumériques. His artistic collaborations include projects with ON (Sylvain Chauveau & Steven Hess), That Summer, Louisville, artist Hippolyte Hentgen, and writers Mathieu Larnaudie, Philippe Vasset, and Christophe Fiat. He is also a member of the Encyclopédie de la parole, a speech encyclopaedia crew whose goal is to constitute a compositional plan through which different forms of recorded speeches may be compared.
Miniatures / song recycle (2010) for piano and tape (including 12 anonymous found voices):
“I began working on this miniature project when I was asked to perform something for piano and laptop. My first concern was to avoid the typical ambient stuff which melts piano and electronics into long and extended movements. As a limited pianist, I also decided to use the instrument more as an accompaniement to something else (a lead part) than as a soloist in itself. All those thoughts lead me to work on a collection of very small pieces which rigorously alternate between “music concrète” miniatures, and songs made of recycled material. The processed voices we hear on those songs come from anonymous a cappella recordings found on the web (and to a lesser extend on films) ; reversed and cut into small fragments, they constitute a completely new musical material which is then accompanied by the piano. Set up that way, the collection of « songs » unexpectedly evoke a traditional lied form, a song cycle made of recycled raw material.”
Barry Chabala presents the work of Michael Pisaro
Barry Chabla presents ‘An evening of Pisaro’, performing the compositions: appearance (2), E lá fora and Ascending Series (6). Joining him will be Travis Just (reeds) and trombonist Tucker Dulin.
Barry Chabala (b.1961) – NJ guitarist taking cues from wide ranging influences like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Taku Sugimoto, Barry’s music has continued to evolve, reduce, and focus, reaching ever closer to the essence of his intention. His recent work with composer Michael Pisaro has yielded two critically acclaimed recordings: ‘an unrhymed chord(for 25 acoustic guitars) for Confront Recordings, and ‘black, white, red, green, blue (voyelles)’ for Winds Measure.
Travis Just is co-director of Object Collection. His work as a composer comes from a background in improvised music and experimental composition and often uses texts, gesture, and unconventional technologies in addition to instruments and electronics. His opera Problem Radical(s) premiered at PS122 in 2009 and will be followed by another opera Innova in 2011. In addition to his compositional work, Travis has curated at the Ontological Theater, The Stone, an auto repair yard in Berlin and is the Music Curator at Incubator Arts Project.
Tucker Dulin has lived in brooklyn for 3 years. current projects: jango.com, a set of pieces for live musicians and subwoofer, bicycle riding.
Michael Pisaro
Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed over 80 works for a great variety of instrumental combinations. A large majority of his oeuvre consists of solo works, notably a series of 36 pieces (grouped into 6 longer works) for the three-year, 156-concert series organized by Carlo Inderhees at the Zionskirche in Berlin-Mitte from 1997-1999. Another solo piece, pi (1-2594), was performed in installments by the composer on 15 selected days in February 1999, in Evanston, Illinois and in Düsseldorf in 2000-2001.
Pisaro’s work is frequently performed in the U.S. and Europe in both music festivals and smaller venues. He has been selected twice by the ISCM jury for performance at World Music Days festivals (Copenhagen,1996; Manchester, 1998) and has been included in festivals in Hong Kong (ICMC, 1998), Vienna (Wien Modern,1997), Aspen (1991) and Chicago (New Music Chicago, 1990, 1991). He has had extended composer residencies in Germany (Künstlerhof Schreyahn), Switzerland (Forumclaque/Baden), Israel (Miskenot Sha’ananmim), Greece (EarTalk) and in the U.S. (Birch Creek Music Festival/Wisconsin). Concert length portraits of his music have been given in Munich, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Vienna, Brussels, Curitiba (Brazil), Berlin, Chicago, Düsseldorf, Zürich, Cologne, and Aarau. Most of his recents works are published by Edition Wandelweiser (Germany) and two of his CDs have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records. In addition to performing his own pieces, Michael Pisaro has showcased the work of his close associates Antoine Beuger, Kunsu Shim, Jürg Frey and Manfred Werder, and those from the experimental tradition, namely John Cage, Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley and George Brecht.
Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University from 1986 to 2000. In 2006 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
Bonnie Jones and Andrea Neumann + Bob Bellerue
Bonnie Jones and Andrea Neumann will present an evening of electro-acoustic improvised music, using hacked electronics and custom-made instruments. Jones makes music with the circuit boards of digital delay pedals, teasing out tones and crackles by short-circuiting the board. Neumann performs on the inside-piano, a custom made amplified and electronically processed abstraction of a piano sound board.
Bonnie Jones
Bonnie Jones works with sound, text, and performance. Born in South Korea (1977), she was raised by dairy farmers in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, MD. During sound performances, Bonnie plays the circuit boards of digital delay pedals. Her primary sound collaborators are Joe Foster in Korea (as the duet “English”) and Andy Hayleck. She is also a member of the Performance Thanatology Research Society, an interdisciplinary performance group dedicated to the advancement of a higher histrionics brought on by imminent finalities. Bonnie has performed at the Kim Dae Hwan Museum, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the ErstQuake Festival, and the 14 Karat Cabaret.
Andrea Neumann
Andrea Neumannhas composed multimedia projects incorporating film, dance, and performance for the inside-piano — a simplified piano reduced to strings, resonance board, and a metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the inaudible sounds, she has invented numerous playing techniques, sounds, and techniques for preparing the dismantled instrument. Because the original inside-piano is very heavy, a piano builder (Bernd Bittmann, Berlin) constructed a new and lighter one for her. She has worked intensively in the intersection between composition and improvisation and electronic and handmade sounds with Berlin musicians such as Annette Krebs, Ignaz Schick, Axel Dörner, Robin Hayward, and Burkhard Beins.
Bob Bellerue
Bob Bellerue is a composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn NY. Over the last 20 years, he has been exploring live music and sound art, working with homemade percussion ensembles, the Balinese gamelan, dance, performance scores, installation, and live noise. Formerly based in Los Angeles, he ran the sub-garde experimental music and performance space, the I1 Corral, and curated the Beyond Music series and festival. Bellerue’s current work utilizes custom electronics and programming, incorporating feedback, prepared field recordings, de-musicalized instruments, and found oscillators. He is in the midst of long-term collaborations with the choreographer Wanda Z Gala and is involved with other experimental musicians such as Ecomorti, Telecult Powers, David Kendall, Smegma, Joseph Hammer, Phroq, Albert Ortega, Tecumseh, and Jarrett Silberman. He also performs regularly as a solo artist and in KILT with Raven Chacon. His work has been presented in Indonesia, Europe and across the United States, namely at the Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Issue Project Room, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Olympia Experimental Music Festival, Stanford University, California Institute of the Arts, UCSD, UCLA, and Naropa University. He is the Technical Director at The Kitchen and runs the Anarchymoon Recordings record label.
This concert is made possible in part by High Zero Foundation
SWANS + Baby Dee @ The Brooklyn Masonic Temple
ISSUE Project Room in collaboration with Haunting The Chapel and the Blackened Music Series is thrilled to present Swans’ first NYC show in 
more than a decade. It will take place at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the loudest venue in the city.
Michael Gira has handpicked performance artist, harpist and accordionist Baby Dee to open the show, this time featuring keyboards accompanied by cello.
Formed in 1982 and led by Gira, a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Swans instigated and heavily influenced New York’s NoWave scene. They are considered one of the most influential post-punk bands to date, often incorporating droning vocals, thunderous rhythms, and varied, complex instrumentation.
“THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction,” says Gira of the pending new album. “It just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that. I’ll be using what I learned in the last several years to inform the way this new material develops, while carrying forward from where Swans left off with its final album Soundtracks For The Blind, and in particular, Swans Are Dead.” (More here from Stereogum)
The Swans Presented by ISSUE Project Room in collaboration with Haunting The Chapel and the Blackened Music Series
Brooklyn Masonic Temple
Friday, October 8, 2010
8:00 PM (7:00 PM Doors)
317 Clermont Ave (@ Lafayette Ave)
Merzbow + MV Carbon and Philip White (Second Set)
Merzbow
Masami Akita was born in Tokyo in 1956. He 
listened to psychedelic music, progressive rock and later free jazz in his youth, and all have influenced his music. His album Aqua Necromancer, for instance, samples progressive rock drum lines. Later he went to Tamagawa University to study art. It was there that he learned of Kurt Schwitters’ Merz, or art made from rubbish, including Schwitters’ Merzbau, or “Merz building”, hence the name Merzbow. His earliest music was made with tape loops and creatively recorded percussion and metal, and has been compared to Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound (an acknowledged influence). Early methods included what he referred to as “Material Action”, in which he would closely amplify small sounds so as to distort them through the microphone; later, he made several albums of “SCUM” (”Scissors for Cutting Up Merzbow”/”Society for Cutting Up Merzbow”), for which he would cut up previous Merzbow albums until they resembled something new. His tendency to work in themed phases recalls his training as a visual artist. He released his music on cassettes through his own record label, Lowest Music & Arts, which was founded in 1979. In the early 1980s, after meeting the Italian avant-gardist noise artist Maurizio Bianchi/M. B. in Milan, he founded a second label, ZSF Produkt.
MV Carbon
MV Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and artist. Her work frequently involves tape machines, voice, cello, analog synthesizers, field recordings, along with hand built electronics. She has recently been developing and performing new works which utilize physical computing and sensor controlled synthesis. Carbon is interested in spatial integration and site-specific consideration.
She has performed nationally and internationally with her solo work as well as in collaborations at spaces including Arnolfi (UK), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Nefertiti Jazz Club (Sweden), PS1 Contemporary Art (NYC), Roulette(NYC), The Sage, (UK), The Stone (NYC), the Tate Modern (UK), and Tesla (Berlin) . Her work with the dark-wave electronic duo, Metalux,has releases out on a number of experimental and independent labels including LOAD, 5RC and Hanson. Her solo release, The Dislodged Perihelion,(LP) is coming out sometime in the future on Ecstatic Peace.
Her paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries including the Butcher Shop (Chicago), D’Amelio Terras (NYC), Louis V.E.S.P.(NYC), MCCaigwelles Gallery (NYC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PGH), Salon Invisible (Chicago), Three Rives Arts Festival (PGH), and West Nile (NYC).
Philip White
Philip White’s performances center on a non-linear feedback system, which consists of a mixer and several homemade circuits. In addition to his work with analog and digital electronics, White has written extensively for chamber ensembles and created a large body of intermedia pieces that explore meaning in information transmission.
He currently performs with Suzanne Thorpe (thenumber46) and Chuck Johnson (with chuck johnson with philip white). Recent performances/exhibitions include Diapason (NYC), The Frying Pan (NYC), The Stone (NYC), Sonic Circuits (DC), Redux New Media Festival (Charleston, SC), Galerie Neurotitan (Berlin), Princeton University, Bent Festival 2010, NYCEMF 2010, and a featured spot on free103.9.org. He has performed with Toshimaru Nakamura, Gene Coleman, Kenta Nagai, ADACHI Tomomi, Michael Schumacher and Nisi Jacobs. He recently received funding from Meet the Composer to present his work in Washington, DC.
thenumber46’s debut Bleach and Ammonia was released in cassette format on Tape Drift Records and has been described thus: “Listening to this group (for me) required total recalibration as a listener.” Philip also writes about music, contributing to the Wire magazine, SEAMUS Journal, and Notes.
In 2008, Philip received his MFA in Electronic and Recorded Media from Mills College where he worked with Chris Brown, Hilda Parades, Helmut Lachenmann, Roscoe Mitchell and James Fei. While there he taught both Sound Art and Electronic Arts. For more info: www.prwhite.net
Trophies
Composer and sound artist Alessandro Bosetti is joined by Kenta Nagai, and Tony Buck for Trophies. Focusing on mantra loops of spoken/sung abstract and highly emotional poetry, Bosetti has created a powerful trance band where voice and electronic sound melt with the hallucinatory fretless e-guitar playing of Kenta Nagai (Miya Masaoka, Eugene Chadbourne), and the patiently groovy and virtuoso pulses of Tony Buck (The Necks). Trophies uses lengthy, repetitive and highly dynamic text-sound forms in a unique and genre defying way.
Alessandro Bosetti
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: Metalux + Aki Onda/MV Carbon duo
ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present the second Artist-In-Residence performance by MV Carbon.
Metalux is M.V. Carbon and J. Graf
Portraying physical and architecturally improbable spatial themes, Metalux seeks to situate the individual within a tangled web of technological interfaces. Their music can be heard as abstract sonic fiction. The processed human voice, with manipulated guitars, bass and samples, depicts a fictional engagement with the environment. Instruments alternate in carrying dominant themes, rhythm and melody. Metalux employs the use of rock music, only to suggest their compositions’ distant relationship to pop music. Using modified electronic instruments, bass, guitars, vocals and percussion, Metalux expands pre-written ideas with improvisation.
MV Carbon and Aki Onda duo
MV Carbon on cello and electronics, voice and tapes.
Aki Onda on tapes and electronics.
MV Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and artist. Her work frequently involves tape machines, voice, cello, analog synthesizers, field recordings, along with hand built electronics. She has recently been developing and performing new works which utilize physical computing and sensor controlled synthesis. Carbon is interested in spatial integration and site-specific consideration.
She has performed nationally and internationally with her solo work as well as in collaborations at spaces including Arnolfi (UK), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Lehman Maupin Gallery (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Nefertiti Jazz Club (Sweden), PS1 Contemporary Art (NYC), Roulette(NYC), The Sage, (UK), The Stone (NYC), the Tate Modern (UK), and Tesla (Berlin) . Her work with the dark-wave electronic duo, Metalux,has releases out on a number of experimental and independent labels including LOAD, 5RC and Hanson. Her solo release, The Dislodged Perihelion,(LP) is coming out sometime in the future on Ecstatic Peace.
Her paintings and installations have been exhibited at galleries including the Butcher Shop (Chicago), D’Amelio Terras (NYC), Louis V.E.S.P.(NYC), MCCaigwelles Gallery (NYC), Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PGH), Salon Invisible (Chicago), Three Rives Arts Festival (PGH), and West Nile (NYC).
Jenny Graf Sheppard (J.Graf) is an artist and improvisor who works with various mediums. Graf is concerned with the construction of sounds in order to radically shift social space. Using sound, video and collaborative performance that often take cues from the “audience” to direct the work, her work addresses such broad issues as gender, age and social convention. Her improvisiation and scored pieces include long-term investigations such as The Guitars Project and Proud Flesh.
J. Graf has been an active participant in the ongoing thriving international avante garde music scene since 1996. Building vivid, compelling soundworlds using intuitive homebrewed electronics, guitar and voice, her music as one half of Metalux and Harrius as well as her solo project J.Graf has bent the ears and minds of those who venture into her world.
Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set to live guitar improvisation. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Shelley Hirsch. http://www.akionda.net/
ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
EMERGING ARTISTS COMMISSION: Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens Present “Hurricane Season”
“Hurricane Season” is a one-night screening of experimental documentary shorts reflecting the recent history of the U.S. Gulf Coast— catastrophic storms, an oil spill, a pattern of government un-response and other evidence of a complex system out of balance. The screening is programmed by Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens.
Still From Liza Johnson's South of Ten
Produced primarily in the Gulf region, the work included in “Hurricane Season” responds to complex issues with experimental strategies in an attempt to represent the landscape, people, the system, industry and their interrelationships. Representing a range of styles that are more lyrical and differently mediated than images seen in popular culture immediately following each disaster, the line-up features work produced since 2005, including some very recent work that is still in progress. Liza Johnson’s South of Ten considers how Mississippian survivors of Katrina are framed, with gesture and performance as alternatives to conventional interview-based forms of bearing witness. Pawel Wojtasik’s immersive video Below Sea Level (courtesy Priska C. Juschka Fine Art), partly shot with a 360° panoramic camera in and around New Orleans, articulates asense of impermanence inherent in the location, underscored by Steven Vitiello’s soundscape. A collaborative film/video by Courtney Egan and Helen Hill takes a more personal and fleeting look at one block, blending flood-damaged film found after Katrina with video shot of the same site. Work currently in progress examining the BP oil spill will include pieces by Ghen Dennis and Christina McPhee.
Framing the contemporary work will be excerpts from Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story from 1948 (courtesy Flaherty Film Seminar) and Tony Oursler’s Son of Oil from 1982. Louisiana Story, a lushly shot docudrama in black and white commissioned by Standard Oil, features an idyllic Bayou setting and an innocent boy’s adventures there as changes come to the region through the construction of an oil rig. The landscape and lifestyle of the Cajun people appear undisturbed by the drilling process, and even improved by the arrival of the oil industry. Tony Oursler’s colorful diatribe against the oil industry and our culture’s oil addiction is playfully enacted by performers and paper sets.
Although the program is regionally focused, the intricately intertwined economic, environmental, social, public and private issues suggested by the films and videos speak to a larger context as we collectively grapple with a gross consumption of fossil fuels, global warming, environmental erosion, newly diminished ways of life and unstable economies—and how to represent these things.
For a full list of work to be screened please visit http://hurricaneseason2010.wordpress.com .
ISSUE Project Room’s Emerging Artists Commission program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Greenwall Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.
Oval (Second Set)
Oval, also known as Markus Popp, is an electronic musician from Berlin, Germany. He is a pioneer of “glitch,” a genre of music that embraces the purposeful mutilation of audio equipment to produce fragmented sounds in a rhythmic electronic style. Originally a trio, Oval also included members Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzer until Popp decided to pursue solo projects in 1995. Since then, he has released various CDs, most notably Ovalprocess (Thrill Jockey, 2000), Ovalcommers (Thrill Jockey, 2001), and his most recent debut, Oh (Thrill Jockey, 2010). Oval’s music has been featured alongside Björk, Gastr Del Sol, and Japanese singer Eriko Toyada, with whom he performed in a trio entitled So.
(POSTPONED TBA) Brian McCarthy Presents “Soziale Plastik II”
David Cronenberg Stereo (1969), excerpts
Gary Hill Happenstance (1982-83)
Paul Sharits Tails (1976)
Michael Robinson The General Returns from One Place to Another (2006)
Ursula Scherrer Live Video Projections (2010)
Aki Onda Sound Performance (2010)
Scott Von, lecture on radical medicine
Joseph Beuys excerpts from New School Lecture (1974)
A live event inaugurating a series on the phenomenology of the projection environment, featuring guest speakers and the work of Paul Sharits, Ursula Scherrer, Aki Onda, Michael Robinson, Gary Hill, and David Cronenberg; tonight short lectures on health and radical medicine will serve to frame an investigation into this dimension of visual abstraction and the politics of projection.
The projected image’s power to condition shifts both in the perception and physical presence of the viewer, and the palliative and empathetic function of this, is an explicit theme in Ursula Scherrer’s work.
Paul Sharits serves as a kind of ur-figure for the fragility of the body in the face of this dimension of the virtual, and the work in tonight’s show will be organized around this idea of the projection environment as radical MATERIAL.
Beuys’ own thought – as motif, point of departure and associative constellation – centers around the issue of health – the apocryphal healing of the individual body as a site for the healing of the social body thus becoming a prism through which projection can be involved in a sustained critique, with the issue of health as central. Scott Von, psychoanalyst and physician, will be present to give a brief lecture on radical medicine within this framework.
Cronenberg’s film – which perfectly crystallizes the fusion of aesthetic, political, analytic, and psycho-sexual aims that characterize the intentional practices that I wish to examine in the series, is structured around the conceit of a pseudo-Reichian telepathic commune in the Ontario North Woods, in which participants in a group “induced telepathy series” explore intra-psychic libidinal intensities (explicitly coded as telepathic), and bonding through group polymorphous sexuality. Tonight Cronenberg’s film will be creatively and minimally reconfigured with the work of Sharits and Hill. In order to expand Beuys’ (pedagogically questionable) theories on political/social recomposition predicated on the radical autonomy of form into the realm of visual abstraction (to complicate the notion, poke “holes” in it, and raise the question of a sustainable art community based on intention to the level of “negative sustainability” a la Bataille and Acephale), the series will focus on contemporary works of film and video that elucidate this.
Brian McCarthy is a curator and videomaker living in Brooklyn. His work investigates the ways experimental film and video can be integrated into live performative text-based events. He programmed a series for the 16Beaver Group in Manhattan entitled “Informe, Abstraction, Ecstasy” in the spring, including collaborations with Thomas Zummer and Leslie Thornton, and has presented shows at the Migrating Forms Festival, Uniondocs and Zebulon Café, and has upcoming shows for the fall at the Goethe Institut and Anthology Film Archives. He has worked for Anthology Film Archives, EAI, and the Filmmaker’s Cooperative and has been involved with the experimental film and video community in New York City since 1999.
Ann Liv Young presents Cinderella
Photo by Michael A. Guerrero
Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella is a reinterpretation of the classic fairy tale, inspired by versions as disparate as Disney’s and the macabre Grimm brothers’. It is a one-woman show starring Sherry, Young’s southern wildcat alter ego. Sherry, playing all characters, confronts personality extremes of kindness, helplessness, and wickedness in conjunction with the stereotype she deals with most directly in her own life, the aggressive woman. We watch as Sherry and these storybook characters tackle decisions together and learn from one another. What unlikely similarities will we find? Why does one tend to prefer the demure Cinderella over the bold and assertive Sherry? Ultimately, Sherry critiques male authorship which created one-dimensional female characters (Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother, the wicked Stepmother and Stepsisters) in ways which were pleasing to men. Our version of Cinderella pleases no one.
Ann Liv Young was born on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and has been creating performance work for over eight years. She is one of the youngest artists to be presented at major venues in New York City and Europe, such as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, Judson Church, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Flea Theater, Laban Centre London, Impulstanz, Springdance, The Arches, Tanz Im August, City of Women, Théâtre de la Bastille, Kampnagel, Brute-Wien, Gender Bender and Inkonst, among others. A 2003 graduate of Hollins University’s prestigious dance program, Young has also studied at Laban Centre London. She was featured in Michael Blackwood’s documentary New York Dance: States of Performance (2010). Ann Liv performed “Sherry” in “Girl Monster Orchestra” presented by Chicks on Speed in Switzerland and Sweden in March 2010. She’s reinterpreted the stories of Snow White (2006–2008), George and Martha Washington (in The Bagwell in Me [2008–2009]), and, now, Cinderella.
