To Benefit ISSUE Project Room

Actor, writer, film director and ISSUE board member Steve Buscemi will talk with Emmy Award-winning journalist and Co-Host of WNYC Radio and PRI’s The Takeaway, John Hockenberry, about creating unforgettable characters that ultimately drive a film’s narrative and impact. The brunch which is presented in collaboration with SAGIndie, an organization that unites working thespians of the world with passionate filmmaking mavericks who buck the system.  The afternoon will feature film clips from the actor’s career and will be held at Bussaco located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Actor as Auteur – There are numerous iconic characters in film history, from The Little Tramp to Charles Foster Kane to Colonel Kurtz to Travis Bickle, all of them well drawn and directed. However, had Chaplin, Welles, Brando or DeNiro not played these roles would the film had the same powerful impact on our culture? Can a case be made for actor as auteur?

It is difficult to imagine Buscemi’s roles and their indelible effect on each film without his personal, stylized approach in bringing them to life. They emit essential energies striking a balance between deeply held neuroses and outward bombast. From lead roles in films like Fargo, Resevoir Dogs, Living in Oblivion, Trees Lounge, and Ghost World to supporting roles and cameos in films such as The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink, his presence breathes life into every corner of a film. “Buscemi is a quiet tyrant of artistic fury who threatens to overrun every frame he’s in with the inner desperation he projects even in his most subtle performances,” says Hockenberry.

An active Board Member of ISSUE Project Room, Buscemi began his career in, and continues to support experimental theater, writing and performance. All proceeds from the event will benefit ISSUE Project Room, one of the country’s preeminent centers for experimental culture.

“Actor as Auteur” Brunch To Benefit ISSUE Project Room, Presented in Collaboration With SAGIndie
Sunday, June 6, 12 pm – 2 pm
Bussaco, 833 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
$125 Per Person ($95 tax-deductible, three-course brunch is included.)

SEATING IS LIMITED. Buy Tickets

For more information please call 718-330-0313.

A special anniversary celebration loosely inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece of psychedelic cinema, “The Holy Mountain.”

Tuesday May 19, 2009 @ Galapagos Art Space
6:30 pm Reception with Founder & Artistic Director Suzanne Fiol & Featured Performers
7:30 pm Performances (beginning with Henry Grimes and Andrew Lamb)

Join us as we celebrate ISSUE’s 6th Anniversary of presenting the freshest art of our time and ISSUE’s recent selection as occupant for the beautiful McKim Mead and White theater space at 110 Livingston Street. The night begins at 6:30 pm with a pre-performance reception with ISSUE’s Founder and Artistic Director, Suzanne Fiol and featured artists from the evening followed by performances beginning at 7:30pm by:

Elysian Fields
Henry Grimes and Andrew Lamb
Lone Wolf and Cub
The Pinch of the Baboon (JG Thirlwell, Ed Pastorini, Oren Bloedow and Ben Perowsky)
MV Carbon
Mountains
members of Excepter
Ray Sweeten – live video and performance
Brock Monroe – live visuals (member of the Joshua Light Show)
“Straight and Narrow” (1970), Film screening by Tony Conrad with soundtrack by John Cale and Terry Riley
Films by Martha Colburn, Bradley Eros & Marie Losier
DJ Fabio from WFMU’s “Strength through Failure”
Robot Movie by Jim Sharpe with Soundtrack by Lary Seven

Plus, photo portraits by Carissa Pelleteri, Surprise auctions of visual art, Prize for best “Holy Mountain” inspired costume! And, raffle prizes! Your chance to win: 5 Free Yoga Classes at Prema Yoga NYC, a beautiful gold necklace designed by Michelle Fantaci (see photo below), a beautiful brass Giles & Brother “Railroad Spiked Cuff” bracelet, (see photo below), and more!

Tickets:

$100 for 6:30 pm reception w/ reserved seating for 8:00 pm performances
$50 7:30 pm admission with reserved seating
$30 7:30 pm general admission

buy tickets

Galapagos Art Space - 16 main street – dumbo – brooklyn, ny, 11211

All proceeds benefit ISSUE Project Room’s continued growth as New York’s foremost venue for avant-garde performance and art.

image from "holy mountain"

The Pinch of the Baboon

aka (JG Thirlwell, Ed Pastorini, Oren Bloedow and Ben Perowsky)

The inscrutable J.G. Thirlwell was dropped on this planet some time ago to bestow sonic majesty, chaos, violence & beauty and cunning linguistics on an unsuspecting earth.

A Brooklyn-based Australian ex-pat, Thirlwell has used many names for his many visions: Foetus (and its many name variations), Steroid Maximus, Clint Ruin, Wiseblood, DJ OTEFSU, Manorexia and Baby Zizanie. His multitude of influential recordings under the name FOETUS and variations thereof (including Scraping FOETUS off the Wheel, the FOETUS All-Nude Revue, FOETUS Inc., etc.), has amassed a rabid world-wide cult following. Over the course of more than a dozen albums he has stretched from yearning orchestral soundscapes, meticulously organized chaos, electronic swathes, blistering big band pastiche, crunching hard rock and even inventing stupefying collisions of genres and forms with a raw emotion and irresistible musicality.

His instrumental Steroid Maximus project contains JG’s cinematic stylings of encompassing haunting soundscapes, twisted neo-blaxploitation, spy/crime noir-intrigue, sinuous carnal funk, soundtracks of the unimagined and ethnic music from civilisations yet to be conceived, among other things! It was this project that led to his re-imagining of this music to be played live by a nineteen-piece ensemble, including brass and string sections and concert percussion, with musical director Steven Bernstein. As Manorexia, JG exorcises even darker instrumental inclinations over two self released albums, Volvox Turbo and The Radiolarian Ooze. Baby Zizanie, a collaboration with Jim Coleman, allowed him to explore improvisation and collaboration via laptop with visual backdrops on several European tours. An accomplished re-mixer and producer, he’s worked his magic on the likes of NIN, White Zombie, JSBX, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coil and countless others. JGT has also worked in film and even voiceovers for MTV. His acclaimed graphic design appears on his sleeve as well as gracing several magazine covers and fine art lithographs.

More recently JG has also branched out into audio installations (the freq_out project curated by CM Von Hausswolf, with whom he also conducted an audio workshop at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt), DJ-ing (as DJ Otefsu), has appeared in an opera (Der Kastanienball in Munich in 2004, directed by Stefan Winter), has scored a cartoon series for The Cartoon Network in the USA (The Venture Brothers), and recently completed a commission for Bang On A Can. In 2005 he will be writing his first commission for Kronos Quartet, which will premier in 2006.

Elysian Fields

Legendary cult heroes Elysian Fields have always travelled in mysterious waters. Led by the enigmatic New York co-composers Jennifer Charles (vocals) and Oren Bloedow (guitar), the music born of their collaboration is not easy to categorize. They carry a torch for nature, sex, love, the cycle of death and rebirth, and the sounds of folk and jazz ballads, no wave and classical music, seamlessly interwoven into a style that is at once languorously romantic and tough. TimoutNY writes “the voice and presence of Jennifer Charles are so powerful that almost any criticism falls flat,” and Oren has been called a “guitar god” by the Village Voice.

www.elysianmusic.com

Their seventh record “The Afterlife” was released last month in Europe to high critical acclaim. Here is Brooklyn writer Peter Spagnuolo on their new album-Now that you’ve eaten your own heart, will you ever taste ambrosia again? Never mind that now—the Afterlife brings you sustenance of a different kind: the bitter palate of true love, as it is lived and endured. Ten new songs from Elysian Fields stir the pot of Romance through all its flavors—from deranging eros to self-less devotion—but it is a menu of cold comforts. There is regret, and there are secrets; there is love that requires surrender and submission, like Baudelaire’s surgeon and patient; there is truth and treachery, and yearning that collapses into disillusion; there is love that panders, and great tenderness; and there is ecstasy, but only for tonight.

Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow make songs of such refinement, one searches in vain for the seams between sound and word: it is at times as if one heartsick, enraptured mind inhabited two heads. As always, they are joined at the table by their extended family of players from New York City’s jazz and pop demimonde, in music of timeless dislocation, uniting elements of cabaret, Noir rock and torch, Art Song and gospel: a murderous piano vamp is coming for you, now a guitar mocks, a vibrato-soaked chord quivers at the ear and falls off like a lover’s sigh; while an unadorned, simple tune leads us through a catechism of sworn love at first sight. Song-craft so rarely strikes such collaborative equipoise between lyric and setting—each partaking of the other’s instincts for allusion and inflection, attack and release—as here. This is hand-made pop music, patient and thoughtfully wrought, risky and knowing, inhabiting its unique idiom as easily as a sharp-dressed man mixes his woolens and silks, never sounding like pastiche. The band sinks us under a constant spell, while its emotionally naked, unflinching singer—in a voice sometimes only above a whisper—lowers her ladder of dark hair and dares us to climb.

A founding member of Booklyn collective, Peter Spagnuolo’s poetry and translations have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Threepenny Review, and Danta.

Ray Sweeten

Ray Sweeten is a composer and software designer, working in the intersection between image and sound using a hybrid of digital and analog media. His visual music has been performed at The Kitchen, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Lux festival (Seville), The Stone, Eyebeam, ISSUE Project Room, MATA Interval, Aurora Picture Show’s Media Archeology festival, Monkey Town, and Millenium Film Workshop. He has released music as The Mitgang Audio on the Suction record label.

http://www.raysweeten.com

Brock Monroe

Brock Monroe is a live cinema artist and designer, working mainly in the connection of improvisatory projections to music. In collaboration with the Joshua Light Show and Mighty Robot A/V Squad, Monroe has created visuals at The Kitchen, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Netmage festival (Bologna), Aurora Picture Show’s Media Archeology festival (Houston), Monkey Town, ISSUE Project Room, and Secret Project Robot. His new project with Seth Kirby, named Light + Stage Design, recently performed at Performa’s Metal Ball and for Wired magazine as part of an event curated by Anthology Recordings.

http://www.lightandstagedesign.com

Straight and Narrow

Directed by Tony Conrad, with music by Terry Riley and John Cale
US 1970, 16mm, b/w, 10 min.

“Filmmaker, composer, musician, conceptual artist, Tony Conrad (b. 1940) is a multi-faceted and polymath artist who has exerted an immeasurable influence over the American avant-garde film and music scenes. Conrad’s first experience in film came from his creative partnership with Jack Smith as the sound designer for Smith’s best known works, Scotch Tape (1959-62), Flaming Creatures (1963), and Normal Love (1963-64). An accomplished violinist, Conrad began a fruitful partnership with minimalist music pioneers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and John Cale, as a key member of their multi-media performance group, and as one of the inventors of “dream music,” a mode of improvisation that explored the musical possibilities of drone harmonies.

Conrad’s musical work informed his breakthrough film debut, The Flicker (1966), a radical reduction of the cinema to its most essential properties – light and darkness, black and white, sound and silence – that brought film fully into the emergent minimalist art movement. With subsequent works such as Straight and Narrow (1970), Coming Attractions (1970) and Four Square (1971), Conrad created some of the purest and, to this day, among the most arresting examples of structural film.

An important complement to Conrad’s films is found in his path-breaking work as a performance artist who has explored a wide range of unusual materials and methods in order to challenge traditional notions of film events. Conrad has not only experimented with various ways of cooking film – treating raw film stock as an ingredient to be stir-fried or pickled, and then projected – but has also played film as a musical instrument (stretched taut and played upon with a bow) and, most recently, has used a Tesla coil to electrocute film stock. The theatricality, mystery and off-beat humor of Conrad’s performances have made them among the most rewarding and thought provoking forms of expanded cinema.”
-Harvard Film Archive

FILMS BY MARTHA COLBURN

Artist Statement

In my work I utilize the language and materials of filmmaking to comment on popular culture, consumerism, politics and sexuality. My work addresses contemporary topics to express my personal anxieties and passions. Through a collage of live action (paint-on-glass) animations, found footage and documentary filmmaking techniques, my films are a disturbing and at times humorous take on popular and political culture.

Complimenting my films, I create elaborately layered collages, paintings, and installations that incorporate transparencies, recordings, and live performances. As my conceptual process grows, so follows advances in my already detailed and labor-intensive animating process. Technically, I am expanding my technique into working with multi-plane glass animation which represents a physical manifestation of my conceptually layered ideas.

Currently I am 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), I have an awareness of the repository of the guilt-haunted twisted history of the American soul. My current work draws from this perspective and personal experience to address issues such as Methamphetamine use, environmental catastrophes, and man’s relationship to nature.

Robot Movie

Directed by Jim Sharpe
Soundtrack by Lary Seven
Directart Productions Ltd.
2005
2:30 Min.
16mm

This film originally started production in the spring of 1986. For various reasons, it remained uncompleted for nearly 20 years: its attributes were deliberate, yet seemed banal. In 2005, the producers at Directart Ltd. decided to revisit this peculiar document to see what had happened. To everyone’s amusement, the raw film contained information which had previously gone undetected. After extensive restoration and a new soundtrack, the film was deemed ready for public scrutiny.

Jim Sharpe: Director

Jim Sharpe was born in Bar Harbor, Maine and raised in New York City. Primarily self-taught, Sharpe’s early work was in promotion and public relations. He later worked closely with the various participants of the Directart group to produce, direct, promote and distribute a number of audio and film/video shorts. Sharpe was co-director and advisor on the original production for “Robot Movie” in 1986, but left the film uncompleted due to artistic differences with his collaborators. Since then, Sharpe has been living on a dairy farm in Manitoba, Canada. He periodically produces audio and film documents whenever the mood strikes him and remains in contact with the Directart.

MV Carbon

M.V. Carbon uses fragmented field recordings, analog synthesizers, samplers, tape manipulations, and photosensitive oscillators to assimilate structural chaos and decomposition. She creates eerie and unsettling compositions using her voice as an instrument and processing it through tape machines. She plays cello through tape loops and guitar pedals and uses 16mm film imagery as a backdrop for her performances. She is interested in the structural decomposition and fragmentation that occurs within architecture, landscape, human physiology, and perception.

M.V. Carbon is a Brooklyn based musician and composer who sometimes incorporates film into live performances. She studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has displayed her paintings and installations in galleries and sites in Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh.

She has collaborated with an array of amazing musicians and is a member of Metalux, Bad Faces, Foamula and the now defunct Bride of No No. She has work released on labels such as 5RC, Load, Hanson, Veglia, No Fun Productions, Nihilist, and Atavistic. Upcoming Release of he new solo album, Sidewalk Scrape, will be coming out on Shinkoyo Records this winter.

SETH meets SSPSS (members of excepter)

Excepter members JFR and Porkchop join forces for a rare twin exploration of infinity and mystery through electronics and voice. For those who expect the unexpected, don’t expect even that. The sun stays down all night long.

Mountains

Mountains is Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, friends since their middle school days. The duo were brought together by mutual artistic and musical interests, and both ended up at the School of the Art Institute 
of Chicago. It was during this time that they began exchanging musical ideas and compositions which led to them founding the Apestaartje label in 1999. As 
their collaborations and individual projects blossomed, they decided to create Mountains as a vehicle for live performance. 

A love of sculpting sound in front of an audience is at the heart of Mountains. The group’s third album, Choral, (their first self-titled release and second album Sewn were both on Apestaartje), is the culmination of their work to date and a balanced mix of the first two efforts. Mountains is often compared to artists such as Brian Eno and Fennesz citing their extended melodies and their 
unique broad guitar work. Mountains seamlessly blend pastoral electronic sounds with both field recordings and a plethora of acoustic instruments. The resulting soundscapes are broad in scope and rich in detail. The effect is incredibly sublime and hypnotic as the sounds slowly wrap themselves around each other and alter themselves in the mind of the listener. Choral is a uniquely soothing and addicting listening experience and an aural crazy quilt: warm and inviting with many details to discover and explore. 

Recorded by the duo entirely in the winter and spring of 2008 at home in Brooklyn, Choral is largely live and performed in real time, with only a few overdubs to create a more “choral” effect. The opening title-track carries the weight of a full orchestra gradually drawing their bows across a field 
of strings. The subtle undulations produce a warm blank canvas and create an impending sense of what’s to come. As the percolating electronic melodies creep into the track, they’re soon joined by field recordings, organ, electric piano, synthesizer, accordion and then later by the gentle strum of a guitar. This densely layered and textured song contains over 30 tracks of material. On the quiet and more guitar oriented “Map Table”, the band ‘play’ ice water and books by recording the sounds of them flipping through the pages. The calming “Telescope” actually features the sound of an intense thunderstorm recorded in the desert in Arizona. Guiding us through sonic peaks and valleys, the 
band takes us on a journey through their realm of experimentation, occasionally crossing over into psychedelic and kosmiche (Harmonia, Cluster, Popol Vuh) territory. Choral is the sound of an adventuresome duo, who is equally invested in melody and discovery.

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