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.
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.
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…
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.”
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
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
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.
PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Eliane Radigue Presents “Songs of Milarepa”
Eliane Radigue will present two selections from her masterpiece Songs of Milarepa.
Milarepa is a great saint and poet of Tibet who lived in the 11th Century. Through years dedicated to meditation and related practices in the solitude of the mountains, Milarepa achieved the highest attainable enlightenment and the mental power that enabled him to guide innumerable disciples. His ability to present complex teachings in a simple, lucid style is astonishing. He had a fine voice and loved to sing. When his patrons and disciples made a request or asked him a question, he answered in spontaneously composed free-flowing poems or lyric songs. It is said that he composed 100,000 songs to communicate his ideas in his teachings and conversations.
Eliane Radigue - Born in Paris, France Radigue studied electroacoustic music techniques at the Studio d’essai at the RTF, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1957-58). She was married to the artist, Arman, and devoted ten years to the education of three children, deepening classical music studies and instrumental practice on the harp and piano at the same time. In 1967-68 she worked again with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio Apsome.
Radigue worked for a year at the New York University School of the Arts in 1970-71. Her music, its source an Arp synthesizer and medium recording tape, attracted considerable attention for its sensitive, dappled purity. She was in residence at the electronic music studios of the University of Iowa and California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Becoming a Tibetan Buddhist in 1975, Radigue went into retreat, and stopped composing for a time. When she took up her career again in 1979, she continued to work with the Arp synthesizer which has become her signature. She composed Triptych for the Ballet Théâtre de Nancy (choreography by Douglas Dunn), Adnos II & Adnos III, and began the large-scale cycle of works based on the life of the Tibetan master, Milarepa.
In 1984 Radigue received a “bourse à la creation” from the French Government to compose Songs of Milarepa, and a “commande de l’état” in 1986 for the continuation of the Milarepa cycle with Jetsun Mila. Notoriously slow and painstaking in her work, Radigue has produced in the last decade or so on average one major work every three years. Very recently, in response to the demands of musicians worldwide, she has begun creating works for specific performers and instruments together with electronics. The first of these was for bass player Kaspar Toeplitz, and more recently the American cellist Charles Curtis.
Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence), Albany Museum of the Arts (New York), Galerie Rive Droite (Paris), Gallery Sonnabend (New York), Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), and Galerie Shandar (Paris); at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d’Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), University of Iowa, Bennington School of Music, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996). She has appeared on many broadcast programs including France Culture, France Musique, distribution via satellite covering over 50 stations in the U.S. including special programs on KPFK (Los Angeles) and KPFA (San Francisco).
PROPENSITY OF SOUND: For Eliane – Byron Westbrook + Keith Fullerton Whitman
ISSUE will present performances from two young composers – Keith Fullerton Whitman and Byron Westbrook – electronic sound artists whose works demonstrate and acknowledge direct influence from the works of Eliane Radigue.
Byron Westbrook – Westbrook is an artist working with the dynamic quality of physical space using multi-channel sound and images. His audio/video performances, under the name CORRIDORS, involve the distribution of processed instrumental and environmental recordings through a multi-channel environment with a focus on energy distilled from sound and light. He has presented at venues such as Tonic, Roulette, The Stone, Diapason Gallery, ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia, Exit Art Gallery (NYC), Les Voûtes (FR), Wien Konzerthaus (Austria), NonEvent (Boston), Sonic Circuits Festival (DC), and the Institute of Intermedia (CZ). He has shared performance bills with Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Jandek, Sawako, Heribert Friedl, Stefan Tcherepnin, Maria Chavez, Alessandro Bosetti, Jason Kahn, Jon Mueller, Tetuzi Akiyama, among many others. Westbrook has also collaborated with Rhys Chatham in the drone metal group Essentialist (Table of the Elements), as well as performed in the ensembles of Phill Niblock, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Duane Pitre, David Watson and Jonathan Kane. He has worked as technical coordinator of Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation since 2004. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artists Commission through Roulette Intermedium. In 2008 he was an artist in residence at Hotel Pupik at Sclhoss Schrattenberg. A CD will be released in Fall 2010 on Sedimental Records. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Keith Fullerton Whitman - An American electronic musician, Whitman has recorded albums influenced by many genres, including ambient music, drill and bass, and krautrock. He records and performs using many aliases, of which the most familiar is Hrvatski (the Croatian word for Croatian). His works under the Hrvatski moniker hewed closest to the drill and bass facet of IDM and were his primary musical outlet in the mid-to-late 1990s. Other solo aliases include ASCIII and Anonymous. Keith has been in many bands in the 1990s, including El-Ron, The Liver Sadness, Sheket/Trabant, The Finger Lakes and Gai/Jin.
Keith Fullerton Whitman started recording using his own name in 2001, and most of his work recorded today is under that name. In 2006, he performed at North East Sticks Together.
PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak performed @ 110 Livingston by Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez
**At ISSUE Project Room @ 110 Livingston**
Co-presented by Crossing the Line, the fall festival of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)
Eliane Radigue will introduce the American premiere of her 2009 acoustic composition Naldjorlak, a two and a half hour work in three movements. The concert will mark only the 3rd performance in ISSUE Project Room’s future home at 110 Livingston: a McKim Mead & White-designed jewel box theater, featuring marble floors and 40-ft high vaulted ceilings.
Naldjorlak - After more than 30 years of infinitely discrete electronic music, Eliane Radigue abandoned her cherished Arp 2500 synthesizer to devote herself entirely to acoustic composition. Monumental in length but delicate due to the acoustic treatment of the pulsing and murmuring sounds, Naldjorlak was conceived as a trilogy with incredibly subtle harmonics, sub-tones and partials interacting continuously. The piece was elaborated in close collaboration with three virtuoso musicians who will be performing the piece: cellist Charles Curtis and basset horn players Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez.
The suspension of time, the dialog with eternity, the proximity to silence, an appeal to contemplation, and exceptional concentration… all that has characterized Eliane Radigue’s music since 1970, is now more relevant than ever. But, Naldjorlak takes her even further on her musical journey, because with these three performers, she has found the ideal means of coming ever closer to the “impalpable chimerical” music of her dreams.
Eliane Radigue - Born in Paris, France Radigue studied electroacoustic music techniques at the Studio d’essai at the RTF, under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (1957-58). She was married to the artist, Arman, and devoted ten years to the education of three children, deepening classical music studies and instrumental practice on the harp and piano at the same time. In 1967-68 she worked again with Pierre Henry, as his assistant at the Studio Apsome.
Radigue worked for a year at the New York University School of the Arts in 1970-71. Her music, its source an Arp synthesizer and medium recording tape, attracted considerable attention for its sensitive, dappled purity. She was in residence at the electronic music studios of the University of Iowa and California Institute of the Arts in 1973. Becoming a Tibetan Buddhist in 1975, Radigue went into retreat, and stopped composing for a time. When she took up her career again in 1979, she continued to work with the Arp synthesizer which has become her signature. She composed Triptych for the Ballet Théâtre de Nancy (choreography by Douglas Dunn), Adnos II & Adnos III, and began the large-scale cycle of works based on the life of the Tibetan master, Milarepa.
In 1984 Radigue received a “bourse à la creation” from the French Government to compose Songs of Milarepa, and a “commande de l’état” in 1986 for the continuation of the Milarepa cycle with Jetsun Mila. Notoriously slow and painstaking in her work, Radigue has produced in the last decade or so on average one major work every three years. Very recently, in response to the demands of musicians worldwide, she has begun creating works for specific performers and instruments together with electronics. The first of these was for bass player Kaspar Toeplitz, and more recently the American cellist Charles Curtis.
Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris), Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence), Albany Museum of the Arts (New York), Galerie Rive Droite (Paris), Gallery Sonnabend (New York), Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), and Galerie Shandar (Paris); at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d’Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), University of Iowa, Bennington School of Music, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996). She has appeared on many broadcast programs including France Culture, France Musique, distribution via satellite covering over 50 stations in the U.S. including special programs on KPFK (Los Angeles) and KPFA (San Francisco).
Charles Curtis
The cellist Charles Curtis performs a unique repertoire of major solo works created expressly for him by La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue and Alison Knowles, rarely-heard compositions by Terry Jennings and Richard Maxfield, and works by Cardew, Wolff, Feldman and Cage. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s four-hour long solo composition, Just Charles and Cello in the Romantic Chord, has been heard in Paris, Berlin, Lyon, New York, Dijon, Polling and Bologna. Éliane Radigue’s recent Naldjorlak for solo cello has received over thirty performances worldwide and, as part of a new trilogy, was premiered in the Auditorium of the Musée du Louvre last October. Lucier’s compositions for Curtis include music for cello and piano, cello and sine waves, and solo cello with large orchestra. A former faculty member at Princeton University, and for eleven years the first solo cellist of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, Curtis is now professor for contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego, and tours and records internationally. In the Bavarian village of Polling Curtis performs and teaches every summer in the Regenbogenstadl, a space devoted to the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. His performances in recent seasons have taken him to the Guggenheim in New York, the CAPC in Bordeaux, the Galerie Renos Xippas in Paris, the MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin, Dundee Contemporary Arts, the Kampnagelfabrik in Hamburg, the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York, as well as Chicago, Ferrara, Austin, Los Angeles and Harvard University. He continues to perform and record the traditional repertoire for cello, both as soloist and as artistic director of the chamber music project Camera Lucida.
Carol Robinson
Composer and clarinetist, Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life. Equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms, she performs in major concert halls and international festivals (Wien Modern, RomaEuropa, MaerzMusik, Huddersfield, Archipel, Musica, Musica Contemporanea, etc.). In addition to working closely with composers, she pursues the new in more alternative contexts, collaborating with video artists, photographers, and musicians from divers horizons. Improvisation is her passion. Carol Robinson plays all types and sizes of clarinets, including more exotic instruments such as the Lithuanian birbyne.
She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Her works often combine acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination for aleatoric systems. Particularly interested in dance, she has collaborated with choreographers Susan Buirge, Nadège MacLeay, Thierry Niang, François Verret, and Young Ho Nam. In 2008, she was awarded a composition fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy.
Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. A CD of her composition Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was released by PLUSH in 2009. Other recent releases include solo monograph recordings of music by Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio for MODE, Phil Niblock for TOUCH as well as classical music and jazz for SYRIUS, BTL and NATO. A DVD of the aleatoric musical system Cross-Currents is currently in production for the label Shiiin, with support from IRCAM,
Carol Robinson was born in the United States and graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory. After receiving a H.H. Wooley grant to study in Paris, she settled in France.
Bruno Martinez
Bruno Martinez was born on September 13, 1963 in Maubeuge France. Principal Bass Clarinetist at the Paris Opera since 1992, he has performed with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Seiji Ozawa, Charles Dutoit, Kurt Sanderling, Myung Wung Chung, Armin Jordan, Georges Prêtre, James Conlon, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Witold Lutoslawski, Yehudi Menuhin, Valery Gergiev, Esa Pekka Salonen, Bernhard Haitink, Semyon Byshkov, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and others.
Bruno Martinez appears as soloist and chamber musician in France and worldwide. Between 1996 and 1998, Bruno Martinez was the Principal Bass Clarinetist with the Lucerne (Switzerland) and d’Aix en Provence International Festival Orchestras. He has premiered several contemporary works. He is also active in feature film recordings among which as clarinet and basset horn soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra for “Alice et Martin” de A.Téchiné. Education: – In 1984, awarded 1st Prize from the Paris Conservatory (CNSM), studying with Guy Deplus – In 1986, awarded “Virtuosity” Prize from the Geneva Conservatory (Switzerland), studying with Thomas Friedli – In 1987, accepted in the “Masters” chamber music seminar at the CNSM, Paris studying with Maurice Bourgue -In 1988, received a French and Canadian government scholarship to study at the Banff Center School of Fine Arts (Canada).
PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Laurie Spiegel With Joseph Kubera
Laurie Spiegel is one of those rare composers in whom head and heart, left brain and right brain, logic and intuition, merge and even exchange roles. Though she is one of the highest-tech computer composers in America, Spiegel is also a lutenist and banjo player, and sees the computer as a new kind of folk instrument. She makes her most intuitive-sounding and melodic music from mathematical algorithms, and her most complex computerized textures by ear and in search of a desired mood. Form and emotion are as difficult to separate in her music as they are in that of her idol, J.S. Bach.
Spiegel was born in Chicago where in her teens she played guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and through them cultivated a devout philosophy of amateur music making. After receiving a degree in the social sciences, she returned to music. Having taught herself notation, she studied classic guitar and composition privately in London, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman and Vincent Persichetti.
Having worked with analog synthesizers since 1969, she sought out the greater compositional control which digital computers could provide and wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973-79. She later founded New York University’s Computer Music Studio, and became famous in rock music circles for her music software for personal computers, notably MusicMouse.
Despite her innovative involvement with technology, Spiegel the composer has never been dominated by Spiegel the computer technician. Her music from the 70s used compositional algorithms (in one case a realization of Kepler’s “Harmony of the Planets”, included in the Voyager spacecraft’s record Sounds of Earth) to generate music in an accessible, minimalist vein. Some of that music was captured on her record on the Philo label, The Expanding Universe, containing works from 1974-6.
But in the early 80s, Spiegel distanced herself from the downtown New York scene that she had helped create, saying that the new music scene’s general direction was toward an “expansion of the collection of tools and techniques available to make music (useful, but not as the central content of a work)”. “For me,” she more recently explained, “music is a way to deal with the extreme intensity of moment to moment conscious existence.” Since breaking away, Spiegel has lived as one of New York’s most independent musicians, supporting herself by her software and circulating her music privately.
Those who fell in love with the folk like melodies and early algorithms of The Expanding Universe may be surprised to hear how much darker and more complex Spiegel’s recent music has become. “Minimalism” may still aptly describe the slow movement of pitch in these pieces (Unseen Worlds), but it gives no hint of their complex timbres, glacial momentum,and cathartic climaxes. Such vibrant, expressive music could only have come from a composer who put her intuition and imagination first, yet who had the immense technical know-how needed to meet the challenges they posed.
Pianist Joseph Kubera has been a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past three decades. He recently performed at Monday Evening Concerts in L.A. and The Stone in New York, and has been soloist at such festivals as the Warsaw Autumn, Berlin Inventionen and Prague Spring. He has worked closely with legendary composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Robert Ashley and others. Among the composers who have written works for him are Michael Byron, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, and “Blue” Gene Tyranny. A longtime Cage advocate, he has recorded the Music of Changes and Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and toured with the Cunningham Dance Company at Cage’s invitation. Mr. Kubera has been awarded grants through the National Endowment for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.
Mr. Kubera is a core member of S.E.M. Ensemble, the DownTown Ensemble and Ostravska Banda, and he has performed with a wide range of New York ensembles and orchestras ranging from Steve Reich and Musicians to the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He tours with new-music baritone Thomas Buckner, and luminaries such as Terry Riley and Ingram Marshall have written for his duo-piano team with Sarah Cahill. Mr. Kubera’s playing may be heard on the Wergo, Albany, New Albion, New World, Lovely Music, O.O. Discs, Mutable Music, Cold Blue, and Opus One labels.
PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial/Lift + Carol Robinson presents Billows
The second public performance and NYC premiere of Pauline Oliveros’ 1998 work Primordial/Lift, featuring all original performers from the studio recording: Pauline Oliveros – accordion & electronics, voice; Andrew Deutsch – electronics & toy piano; Tony Conrad – electric violin & ring modulator; Anne Bourne – cello & voice; David Grubbs – harmonium. The work is “based on information concerning the shift in the resonant frequency of the earth”.
Pauline Oliveros – A native Texan, Oliveros has influenced American music extensively in her career spanning more than 60 years as a composer, performer, author and philosopher. She pioneered the concept of Deep Listening, her practice based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation, designed to inspire both trained and untrained musicians to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations.
During the mid-’60s she served as the first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College, aka Center for Contemporary Music followed by 14-years as Professor of Music and 3 years as Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001 she has served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is engaged in research on a National Science Foundation CreativeIT project. Her research interests include improvisation, special needs interfaces and telepresence teaching and performing. She also serves as Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College doing telepresence teaching and she is executive director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. where she leads projects in Deep Listening, Adaptive Use Interface. She is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement. A retrospective from 1960 to 2010 was performed at Miller Theater, Columbia University in New York March 27, 2010 in conjunction with the Schuman award. She received a third honorary degree from DeMontort University, Leicester, UK July 23, 2010. Recent recordings include Pauline Oliveros & Miya Masoka and Pauine Oliveros & Chris Brown on Deep Listening, http://paulineoliveros.us, and http://www.deeplistening.org/
David Grubbs - Grubbs has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks). He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. He is an assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). Grubbs was a 2005-6 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice and “le plus Français des Américains” in Libération.
Anne Bourne – With improvised streams of extended cello and voice, Anne integrates the experience of listening and composing for dance, film, experimental context, digital image media, chamber music, and words. She has created with Andrea Nann, Michael Ondaatje, Susie Ibarra, Eve Egoyan, Alvin Lucier, Nicolas Collins, John Oswald, Tom Kuo, Peter Mettler, Fred Frith, and Pauline Oliveros. Anne is interested in each musical expression being an offering of sonic activism, in the sense of resolution between tones, peoples, landscapes, and individual paradoxes through listening.
Carol Robinson’s Billows:
Billows is a twelve-section piece for basset horn or birbyne and a reactive electronic environment. Drawn from a series of recent pieces for solo instruments with live electronics Billows explores the shifting components of timbre and time.
Franco-American composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson has a multifaceted musical life, equally at ease in the classical and experimental realms.
Robinson often works closely with composers, but she also pursues new and alternative contexts for her work through collaborations with video artists, photographers, and musicians from diverse backgrounds. The freely converging musical world of her group Sleeping in Vilna is typical of what interests her. Improvisation is her passion. She began composing by writing for her own music theater productions, subsequently receiving commissions for concert pieces, installations, radio, dance and film productions. Her works often combine acoustic sounds with electronics, and her musical aesthetic is strongly influenced by a fascination with aleatoric systems. Particularly interested in dance, she has collaborated with choreographers Susan Buirge, Nadège MacLeay, Thierry Niang, François Verret, and Young Ho Nam.
In 2008, she was awarded a composition fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Her works have been recorded by the Hessischer Rundfunk, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, Lithuanian National Radio, and Radio France. Billows, for clarinets and live electronics, was released by Plush in 2009. Other recent releases include solo monograph recordings of music by Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono, and Luciano Berio for Mode Records, Phil Niblock for Touch, as well as classical music and jazz for Syrius, BTL and Nato.
Carol Robinson was born in the United States and graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory. After receiving a H.H. Wooley grant to study in Paris, she settled in France.
Merzbow + MV Carbon and Philip White (First 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
Loren Connors + Bill Baird
Bill Baird
Bill Baird is a multi talented musician from Austin, Texas. Known to most for his prolific songwriting and pop productions under the names Sunset and Sound Team, Baird is at heart a musical experimenter without boundaries. The dynamic nature of his approach to songwriting leads to an always-evolving sound, constantly reaching for its true shape yet never settling in on form. With his album Silence! (an August 2010 release on the Austin label Autobus) he has created a rich, analog ambient recording akin to the Folkways records of Craig Kupka and the meditations of early Kranky releases. Silence! is awash with the heavy sonic textures of pianos sent through 24 stereo delays, french horn, and a variety of acoustic instrumentation. For this special ISSUE Project Room performance, Bill Baird will perform live arrangements of the pieces from the album in ensemble with Tucker Dulin, Erica Dicker, Dave Ruder, Nathan Stein, Alexander Waterman, Kenny Wang, Karen Waltuch, and Katherine Young.
Loren Connors
Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has 
recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors’ singular adpation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors’ three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O’Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
This evening is curated by Unseen Worlds Records. With releases by Lubomyr Melnyk, Carl Stone, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and Elodie Lauten, Unseen Worlds pens itself as a record label “releasing quality editions of unheralded and revolutionary, yet accessible, avant garde music.”
Video of “Surfing” by Bill Baird, shot on 8mm in Times Square:
BILL BAIRD – SURFING from autobus on Vimeo.
Oval (First 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.
Chicago Underground Duo
The Chicago Underground Duo formed in 1997 as an organic offshoot of the larger Chicago Underground Collective. The Duo consists of Rob Mazurek (cornet, electronics, piano) and Chad Taylor (percussion, electronics, vibes, mbira, guitar). Both stalwarts of the Chicago Jazz scene, their performances are dually based on notated compositions composed by both artists and on pure improvisation.
Mazurek and Taylor have released five CDs together, their most recent release being Boca Negra (Thrill Jockey, 2010). They have toured extensively in the U.S, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Brazil and are considered to be the most musically adventurous performers of the Chicago Underground incarnations.
Joe McPhee Trio X + Trio Caveat
Trio X consists of three like-minded improvisers Joe McPhee (Saxophone/trumpet), Dominic Duval (Bass), and Jay Rosen (Drums). The band was founded after its premier at the 1988 Vision Jazz Festival. Sharing an affinity for popular jazz standards, the trio’s musical repertoire is on one hand influenced by the likes of Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Freddie Hubbard, and the other refined by the avant-garde sensibilities of their contemporary musical practice.
The three members have performed with a variety of musicians, McPhee with Evan Parker and William Parker, Duval with Cecil Taylor, Mark Whitecage, and Steve Swell, and Rosen with Sonny Simmons, Anthony Braxton, and Charles Gayle. They have released a number of recordings on the CIMP and Cadence Jazz Records labels and continue to receive critical acclaim for their live concerts and festival appearances.
Trio Caveat consists of bassist James Ilgenfritz, saxophonist Jonathan Moritz, and guitarist Chris Welcome. A parlour jazz trio, they have perfomred throughout the U.S. in art galleries, cafes, concert halls, parlors, and basements. Initially formed as a trio with Moritz, Ilgenfritz, and drummer John McLellan, the group’s discreet dynamics and attention to unlikely sonorities facilitate the deepest possible listening experience.
Ann Liv Young presents Cinderella
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.
Photo by Michael A. Guerrero
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.
Share – all night free audio & video jam – In the Munch Room @ The (OA) Can Factory
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 will take place in the Munch Room tonight. The Munch Room is located on the first floor of The (OA) Can Factory.
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
