Posts Tagged ‘minimalism’

David Borden and the Mother Mallard Ensemble + David First and Kid Millions duo

David Borden founded Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Co. in 1969 with the generous support of Robert Moog. The group is credited as the world’s first synthesizer ensemble and received praise from the New York Times at the time: “Mother Mallard turns out some of the best synthesizer music around.”  His major work, The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, a twelve-part cycle of pieces for synthesizers, acoustic instruments and voice has been called the “Goldberg Variations of minimalism.” His first composition teachers were jazz musicians Jimmy Giuffre and Jaki Byard.  He is the retired founder and Director of the Digital Music Program at Cornell University.

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Frank Bretschneider + Yannick Franck

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythmic structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Described as abstract analogue pointillism, ambience for spaceports, or hypnotic echochamber pulsebeat, Bretschneider’s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfectly translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.

Yannick Franck (b. 1981, Liège, Belgium) is a sound and visual artist. He lives and works in Gent, Belgium. He runs the independent label Idiosyncratics Records. He is the founder of electroacoustic project Y.E.R.M.O. (Venice Biennial 2009, Pavilion of Luxembourg) in which he’s active since 2005 with guitarist Xavier Dubois and drummer Jason Van Gulick.

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Joshua Abrams Natural Information Society + C. Spencer Yeh

Josh AbramsBassist & 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.

csy-smallC. 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.

Columbus Ohio’s Ryan Jewell lends his percussive skills to a vast and wide variety of settings, from holding down the drum chairs in the Siltbreeze bands Psychedelic Horseshit and Pink Reason to improvised explorations with C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core), Nate Wooley (Melee), and Jack Wright, not to mention his much regarded electro-acoustic solo sets. He has played throughout the United States, Canada and Europe and has recorded for Chocolate Monk, Teen Action, and Dreamship Records.

http://www.myspace.com/ryanxing
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/ryan+jewell.html

Trumpeter Greg Kelley has performed experimental music, free jazz and noise w/ musicians throughout the globe {Keiji Haino, Kevin Drumm, Jandek}, releasing a number of recordings in the process {RRR, Twisted Village, Freedom From, No Fun, Erstwhile}. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of ‘music’.

http://ordinaryfanfares.blogspot.com/
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/greg+kelley.html

Vic Rawlings (prepared amplified cello, surface electronics) is active in the Boston improvised music community. His performances focus on the metamusical potential of unstable sounds and silences. He is an instrument builder specializing in modifications of existing instruments. In addition to his extensive cello preparations, he continually develops an electronic instrument from extant analog circuitry, producing, in effect, an analog synthesizer with a highly unstable interface.

He performs regularly as a soloist and as a member of undr quartet, The BSC, and in duo and trio ensembles with Michael Bullock, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Sean Meehan, Jason Lescalleet, James Coleman, Tatsuya Nakatani, and Howard Stelzer. Collaborators have included Eddie Prevost (AMM), Donald Miller (Borbetomagus), Daniel Carter (Other Dimensions in Music), Laurence Cook, Jaap Blonk, Masashi Harada, and Stephen Drury.

Rawlings appears on the record labels Audio Dispatch, Grob, Sedimental, Emanem, Boxmedia, Chloe, Absurd, and Rykodisc. He has performed as a soloist/ composer with Nicola Hawkins Dance Company and has composed scores for films by Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva. He has toured throughout the US and in France.

http://www.vicrawlings.com/vicrawlings.com/Improvised_Music.html
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/vic+rawlings.html


PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak performed @ 110 Livingston by Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson & Bruno Martinez

**At ISSUE Project Room @ 110 Livingston (entrance on 22 Boerum Place)**

Co-presented by Crossing the Line, the fall festival of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) Crossing the Line is the fall festival of the French Institute Alliance Franyaise (FIAF), conceived as a platform to present vibrant new works by a diverse range of transdisciplinary attists working in France and New York City. Crossing the Line 2010 takes place September 10-27.

Eliane Radigue will introduce the New York 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.

0926 Eliane RadigueNaldjorlak - 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.

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PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Laurie Spiegel With Joseph Kubera

In celebration of Laurie Spiegel’s 65th Birthday ISSUE Project Room is pleased to host a reception and piano concert of her work.  The evening will begin with a 45-minute informal gallery show featuring slideshows of photographic documentation of Spiegel’s computer-generated art created at Bell Labs, personal photographs, hand made art and other selected visuals while we hear selected music from the greatly expanded double-cd re-release of her seminal 1980 LP “The Expanding Universe” forthcoming on Unseen Worlds Records. Following the exhibition, Spiegel will give a brief comments on her work and the evening will conclude with a rare performance of some of Spiegel’s rarely-heard very personal solo piano pieces performed by Joseph Kubera.

Laurie SpiegelLaurie 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.

Joseph KuberaPianist 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.

The Propensity of Sound festival is presented, in part, through generous support from The Barbara Lee Family Foundation and from CHORA, a project of the Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation led by Artist and Foundation Director Lauren Bon. CHORA aims to support the intangibles that precede creativity.

The Wire


PROPENSITY OF SOUND: Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial/Lift + Carol Robinson’s Billows

The second public performance and NYC premiere of Pauline Oliveros’ 1998 work Primordial/Lift, featuring many performers from the original studio recording: Pauline Oliveros – accordion & electronics, voice; Andrew Deutsch – electronics & toy piano; Anne Bourne – cello & voice; David Grubbs – electric guitar. The work is “based on information concerning the shift in the resonant frequency of the earth”.

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Jason Huang – violin
Anne Bourne – cello/voice
David Grubbs – harmonium
Pauline Oliveros – V accordion
Miguel Frasconi – glass harmonica
Suzanne Thorpe – oscillator
Andrew Deutsch – sampler

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.

Jason Kao Hwang (violin) leads his quartet, EDGE, quintet, Local Lingo, octet, Burning Bridge, and improvising string orchestra, Spontaneous River. He has performed with William Parker, the Rova Sax Quartet, Henry Threadgill and received grants from Chamber Music America, the NEA, NJSCA, and Meet the Composer.

Miguel Frasconi is a composer and improvisor who uses electronics and a menagerie of glass objects to create his sound world. He has worked closely with many esteemed composers and choreographers. He presently teaches electronic music at Bard College and is director of the new music ensemble Ne(x)tworks.

Suzanne Thorpe is an electro-acoustic flautist, composer and sound artist.  Her fixed compositions tend to be site-specific multichannel works that employ psycho-acoustic phenomena and tuned filtering techniques, and in performance she extends her instrument with an ever-evolving set-up of analogue and real-time software components. As an improviser she has performed with Chris Brown, Annette Krebs, Maggie Nicols, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Gino Robair, Zeena Parkins, and Ulrich Krieger among others. Thorpe is a founding member of the alternative rock group Mercury Rev, with whom she worked from 1989 – 2001, earning numerous critical accolades, and from time to time she can be heard mucking it up with J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. She has a discography of over 20 recordings released on Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, with a most recent release with feedback artist Philip White as the duo thenumber46. Coming up she can be heard with a newly formed quartet, Volume, with Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez and Stephan Moore, among other configurations.

Deutsch received his BFA in Video Art and Printmaking from Alfred University in 1990. He obtained his MFA in Integrated Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. Since 1998 Deutsch has released over 14 CDRs of solo electronic music on his Magic If Recordings.

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.

The Propensity of Sound festival is presented, in part, through generous support from The Barbara Lee Family Foundation and from CHORA, a project of the Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation led by Artist and Foundation Director Lauren Bon. CHORA aims to support the intangibles that precede creativity.

Special thanks to the Electronic Music Foundation for their technical support for this concert.

The Wire


Merzbow + MV Carbon and Philip White (First Set)

Merzbow

Masami Akita, born in Tokyo in 1956, performs under the name Merzbow. Taken from Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, or “Merz building,” the name refers to a building created with rubbish. Merzbow made his earliest music from tape loops, combined with creatively recorded percussion and metal, after which he began cutting up his old recordings in search of new methods of creation. He released his music on cassettes through his own label, Lowest Music & Arts, which was founded in 1979.

ISSUE Artist-in-Residence MV Carbon and Philip White will be opening for Merzbow before both performances.
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A BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION FOR SUZANNE FIOL: Jonathan Kane’s February + Audrey Chen

Join us as we celebrate the birthday of our beloved founder, Suzanne Fiol, with some of her favorite musicians.

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Before creating February in 2005, drummer Jonathan Kane was a co-founder of the No Wave legends, Swans and instigated their half time, slow rhythmic crawl. He played in LaMonte Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band, and is the only drummer in Rhys Chatham’s 100 electric guitar orchestra. He plays with a galaxy of downtown luminaries including Kropotkins, Transmission, and Elliott Sharp. As teenagers in the 70s, Jonathan and his brother Anthony took their freshly inked fake IDs to Chicago where they ended up opening for the likes of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and James Cotton.

Come dance, trance, and (most importantly) make some NOISE for the band that WFMU describes as “Avant Roadhouse, the music that makes me proud to be human”.

‘Wedding the brutal severity of Delta country boogie and Seventies German pulse rock – all dead-ahead motion and mounting detail…Epic.” – Rolling Stone

“Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. Interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock, he has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic.” – New York Times

“Intensely propulsive motorik blues…its muscularity and greased relentlessness is never less than exhilarating.” – Uncut

AUDREY CHEN is a Chinese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.

Now, using the cello, voice and analog electronics, Chen’s work delves deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. A large component of her music is improvised and her approach to this is extremely personal and visceral. Her playing explores the combination and layering of a homemade analog synth, preparations and traditional and extended techniques in both the voice and cello. She works to join these elements into a singular ecstatic personal language.

Recently, her primary focus has been her SOLO project but she is also involved in many various collaborations. Among musicians, she has worked with Phil Minton, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Elliott Sharp, Aki Onda, Phill Niblock, Frederic Blondy, Jerome Noetinger, C. Spencer Yeh, Alessandro Bosetti, Mats Gustafsson, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Tatsuya Nakatani, Le Quan Ninh, Joe Mcphee, Susan Alcorn, Michele Doneda, Paolo Angeli, Gianni Gebbia, plus many more. Some current projects include: duos with Phil Minton, Frederic Blondy, Robert van Heumen, Katt Hernandez, Nate Wooley, and Id M Theft Able. Trio with Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh. Plus three new quartet projects with Jeff Carey/Morten J. Olsen/Raed Yassin, Miya Masaoka/Hans Grusel/Kenta Nagai and also with Frederic Blondy/Michael Johnsen/Jerome Noetinger.

Chen has performed in Europe, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Canada and the USA. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD USA but primarily maintains an active touring schedule throughout Europe.

www.myspace.com/audreychen


CSC Funk Band with Artist in Residence: Matt Mottel + Greg Ginn and the Taylor Texas Corrugators

tour poster-low-res

The CSC Funk Band is Minimalist Funk. Repetition experiments. Improvisation exercises. Family fun. All star band killing it featuring Colin L (usaisamonster), Matt Mottel (talibam), Matt Clarke (Ostinato), Jimmy Thomson (Gwar), Jesse Lent (Monte Vista), Jonny Matteo(La Fundacion), Dave Kadden (Invisible Circle), Wes Buckley (Dick Heaven), a horn section. bongos. solos. psychadelic. myspace.com/cscfunkband

–for the first performance of Matthew Mottel’s Artist in Residency he brings to issue the CSC FUNK Band. In existence for over 2 years, they have been a happening vibe at parties/lofts/warehouses and clubs. Already out is a 45 rpm 7″ on Electric Cowbell with a split single to follow. In October they toured 8 men in one van up to Montreal and back on a 9 day sojourn. This gig on the 19th finds them at the home strectch of a 7 day tour where they will share the stage with the founder of BlackFlag ‘the greatest punk band ever’ who now leads an improvisational unit called ‘Greg Ginn and the Texas Corrugators’

Greg Ginn and the Taylor Texas Corrugators are an instumental group that incorporate many styles into their music. Rock/jazz/country/blues/latin/psychedelia all find their way into the mix. On the two studio recordings (Bent Edge released in 2007, and Goof Off Experts released in 2008), Greg plays all of the instruments except drums. We offer these recordings as free downloads. If you like them and feel they are worthwhile to pay for, we suggest making a donation to kittenrescue.org. These people do great work with cats. Live, the Corrugators are quite a different proposition. Playing about 150 shows (most of them opening for JAMBANG) in the last year, the group played 100% improvised sets. On the next tour, look for the Corrugators to introduce some sound loops into a portion of the set at times. For the tours, Greg has enlisted the JAMBANG members for the Corrugators as well, with Ginn playing bass/guitar, Gary Piazza on guitar, and Sean Hutchinson (borrowed from the New Moonson) on drums. http://www.myspace.com/txcorrugators


Jonathan Kane’s February LIVE RECORDING PROJECT

JKFeb�Bridget.Barrett_72dpi

Acclaimed Ensemble to Record First Live Album
@ ISSUE Project Room

Proceeds of Both Performances to Benefit the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund

Table of the Elements/Radium Records and ISSUE Project Room present an unprecedented live recording project with Jonathan Kane’s February.  The result of this two day affair will be a first-ever live LP by the band that takes minimalism and blues to the crossroads with “the unadulterated thunder of a parched desert.” (Time Out NY, 2009.) All proceeds from both concerts will benefit the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, which supports the future of experimental arts in honor of ISSUE’s Founder and Artistic Director, Suzanne Fiol.

Before creating February in 2005, drummer Jonathan Kane was a co-founder of the No Wave legends, Swans and instigated their half time, slow rhythmic crawl. He played in LaMonte Young‘s Forever Bad Blues Band, and is the only drummer in Rhys Chatham‘s 100 electric guitar orchestra. He plays with a galaxy of downtown luminaries including Kropotkins, Transmission, and Elliott Sharp. As teenagers in the 70s, Jonathan and his brother Anthony took their freshly inked fake IDs to Chicago where they ended up opening for the likes of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and James Cotton.

Come dance, trance, and (most importantly) make some NOISE for the band that WFMU describes as “Avant Roadhouse, the music that makes me proud to be human”.

‘Wedding the brutal severity of Delta country boogie and Seventies German pulse rock – all dead-ahead motion and mounting detail…Epic.” – Rolling Stone

“Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. Interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock, he has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic.” – New York Times

“Intensely propulsive motorik blues…its muscularity and greased relentlessness is never less than exhilarating.” – Uncut

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFmsPcbb0xU&fmt=18

http://www.myspace.com/jonathankane


Alvin Lucier, Marina Rosenfeld, Jarrod Fowler, Seth Kim-Cohen and the New York Miniaturist Ensemble

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A concert organized in honor of the publication of Seth Kim-Cohen’s new book, In The Blink Of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Practice (Continuum)

 

“Polemical, revisionist, prescriptive: In The Blink of an Ear argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting the tendency toward sound-in-itself in favour of a reading of sound s expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality.
It has been nearly a century since Marcel Duchamp famously proposed a non-retinal visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In The Blink of an Ear asks why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp s conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself, or as the unwanted child of music, In The Blink of an Ear relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts.

Key ideas from art history, poststructuralism and deconstruction are leveraged to suggest that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped the most important post-war movements in the gallery arts: Minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed or, in many cases, completely rejected the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm. John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer s predilection for sound-in-itself fuses Greenbergian media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception, and this tendency has established itself as the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. In The Blink of an Ear dismantles this history, excavating the conceptual implications of important instances of the sonic arts of the past six decades, and establishing the principles for contemporary non-cochlear sonic practice.” – Amazon.com

Embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political and the technological, In The Blink of an Ear announces a turning point in the theorization of the sonic arts.


SOLD OUT! Glenn Branca Ensemble – THE ASCENSION: THE SEQUEL

SOLD OUT

 

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From left to right, guitars: Evelyne Buhler, Eric Hubel, Reg Bloor and Greg McMullen, conductor: Glenn Branca, drummer: Libby Fab, bass: Ryan Walsh (photo by Tony Cenicola)

The new Glenn Branca Ensemble will be performing the entirety of the soon to be recorded album ”The Ascension: The Sequel” at Issue Project Room on Oct. 17th.

 

The set will be about an hour and will include three world premieres***:

 

 

1. “The Tone Row That Ruled The World”***

2. “Carbon Monoxide”***

3. “Quadratonic”***

4. “The Blood”

5. “Lesson No. 3 (tribute to Steve Reich, 2006)”

 

The show will open with excerpts from the Ericka Beckman film

“135 Grand Street 1979″

including the only known footage of No Wave bands: Theoretical Girls, The Static, Ut and Youth In Asia.


 

For more info or photos contact: glenn@glennbranca.com



Thomas Ankersmit + Tony Conrad

ankersmit_01

Thomas Ankersmit (born 1979, Leiden, The Netherlands) is a musician and artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. His main instruments are a Serge analogue modular synthesizer, computer and alto saxophone.
His music and installation work have been presented at Hamburger Bahnhof, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Podewil, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Kunsthalle Basel; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York as well as at festivals across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

“Jump-starting his performance on the intimidating Serge modular synthesizer, Ankersmit created a fractured, tension-filled stream of electric sound. Flicking switches and pulling at patchcords at breakneck speed, he shaped his swarm of synthesized blips and metallic jabs into a very deliberate, beautifully coherent composition. Constantly reconfiguring his electroacoustic pinpricks and distorted crackle, microscopic but detail-rich and intensely vibrant, sonic fragments skittered across the stereo spectrum like fireflies.

Continuing on acoustic alto saxophone, he slowed down the event density but maintained the heat, pairing intensely focussed energy and sonic determination with a delicate sensitivity to texture. Ankersmit’s saxophone voice is an entrancing, violent mass of multiphonic, shapeshifting sound, oscillating endlessly through circular breathing, penetrating every corner of the room. Far removed from the syntax of jazz or improv, his was a spectacular recontextualisation of the instrument’s possibilities, forcing it into uncharted sonic territory.” – VPRO

This concert is supported by the Netherlands Fund for Performing Arts+ and DNK Amsterdam

22

Tony Conrad (b. 1940) teaches on the media study faculty of SUNY at Buffalo.   Over the last twenty years he has been especially active in video.   His work with music composition and performance started while he was a mathematics student, after which he was associated with the founding of “minimal” music and “underground” film.   His movie The Flicker is one of the key early works of the “structural” film movement.   His art videotapes are widely seen, and he has produced more than 250 programs for public access cable in Buffalo.   Conrad performs his recent music regularly at festivals, clubs and new music venues in the US and Europe.

“Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman, one of those really savvy Old Guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible.”  - Steve Dollar


Phill Niblock

pnhead

Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968′s barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock is the forgotten Minimalist. That’s as maybe: no one ever said the history books were infallible anyway.

His influence has had more impact on younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V Vierk, David First, and Glenn Branca. He’s even worked with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo on “Guitar two, for four” which is actually for five guitarists. This is Minimalism in the classic sense of the word, if that makes sense. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones. The result is sound without melody or rhythm. Movement is slow, geologically slow. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you. The vocal pieces are like some of Ligeti’s choral works, but a little more phased. And this isn’t choral work. “A Y U (as yet untitled)” is sampled from just one voice, the baritone Thomas Buckner. The results are pitch shifted and processed intense drones, one live and one studio edited. Unlike Ligeti, this isn’t just for voice or hurdy gurdy. Like Stockhausen’s electronic pieces, Musique Concrete, or even Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting, the role of the producer/composer in “Hurdy Hurry” and “A Y U” is just as important as the role of the performer. He says: “What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.” The stills in the booklet are from slides taken in China, while Niblock was making films which are painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O’Rourke.


Jonathan Kane’s February


February

Jonathan Kane is a Downtown NYC legend — as co-founder of the no-wave behemoth Swans, and the rhythmic thunder behind the massed-guitar armies of Rhys Chatham and the rock excursions of La Monte Young and one of the hardest-hitting drummers on the planet.

“Wedding the brutal severity of Delta country boogie and Seventies German pulse rock – all dead-ahead motion and mounting detail…Epic.”
Rolling Stone

“Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. Interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock, he has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic”
New York Times

“Intensely propulsive motorik blues, its muscularity and greased relentlessness is never less than exhilarating”
Uncut


Glenn Branca + Neg-Fi + Paranoid Critical Revolution

glenn




GLENN BRANCA

“Lesson No. 3 (A Tribute to Steve Reich)”
commissioned by The Barbican Center London in 2006 for Steve Reich’s 70th birthday celebration.

The musicians for this performance are: Reg Bloor, Ryan Walsh, Evelyne Buhler and Glenn Branca on guitars and Libby Fab on drums.
Circa 1980: “Lesson No. 1″ was released, a friend of mine knew someone who knew Steve Reich. My friend told me that Steve had heard the record and commented about “Lesson No. 1″, he said: “Oh…..that sounds like Phil” but he also mentioned that he had liked the piece on the flip side, “Dissonance”. I was thrilled.
I should mention that I was a serious fan of Steve’s work having heard “Music for Mallet Instruments”, “4 Organs” and “Come Out” while I was living in Boston in the mid-70′s (I didn’t move to NYC until late ’76). All of his pieces were incredibly important to me. At the time I was writing a lot of music for my theater group “The Bastard Theatre”, and both process and repetition among other things: Penderecki style clusters and thick beautiful Messiaen chords were all right in the groove with what I was thinking about.
This year when I was talking to Bryn Ormrod about doing something as part of the Reich festival I mentioned this story to him and suggested that maybe I should write a “Lesson” for Steve. There had been a Lesson No. 2 on my album The Ascension so I suggested it be called Lesson No. 3 (a tribute to Steve Reich). The piece, as it is now written, is probably as close as I will ever get to a classic 70′s Reichian Minimalism (except for maybe “The Temple Of Venus” from “The World Upside Down”), at least without doing a direct imitation of Steve himself, something I’m sure that he would cringe to hear.

NEG-FI

Brooklyn-based duo Neg-Fi debuted as a band in 2003 with a home-made cassette release for the annual DIY holiday art event La Superette. Incorporating drastically detuned guitars, bass, walkie-talkies and handmade devices, Neg-Fi creates short, minimalist compositions with maximum impact. Following the self-released LP Listen-OK in 2005, they have just pressed a new EP, a split release with Atlanta-based noise artist Eiliyas.
Both members have performed in Glenn Branca’s Symphony No.13 in New Jersey, Belgium, London, Rome, and St. Louis.


photo by Tony Cenicola


PARANOID CRITICAL REVOLUTION

THE PARANOID CRITICAL REVOLUTION have been playing the NYC club scene since 2006. Their self-released debut CD “Death of the Cool” came out in December 2007 just in time for the band to play ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES, “A Nightmare Before Christmas” in Minehead, England. PCR is currently mixing their second CD, “Euphobia” to be released by the fall. The band recently played at the South By Southwest Music Festival in March 2009. Their sound could be described as Post-Neo-No Wave Oddcore Punk.

In addition to PCR, Guitarist Reg Bloor has been playing with Glenn Branca (to whom she is married) since 2000. She played in Branca’s Symphony No. 12, Lesson No. 3, his rock band Branca/Bloor, in his trio, eventually becoming Concertmaster for his Symphony No. 13 for 100 Guitars. In the late 90′s she was a founding member of the Boston-based band TWITCHER, who released the self-produced CD “Leg of Lamb of God” in 1999 and appeared on the soundtrack for the Troma film “Terror Firmer”.

Prior to joining PCR, drummer Libby Fab studied electro-acoustic music and music composition at Trinity College Dublin, where she completed an M.Phil in Music and Media Technology. Libby became part of the Glenn Branca crew in 2006 as technical director, rehearsal drummer and assistant engineer for Symphony No. 13. She has worked on Branca’s shows in Montclair (New Jersey), Ghent, Dublin, London, Minehead, Rome, Seattle and St. Louis. She also performed in Branca’s Lesson No. 3 in London and Minehead.

http://www.theparanoidcriticalrevolution.com/

http://www.myspace.com/theparanoidcriticalrevolution


the-paranoid-critical-revol



Duane Pitre with special guest Tony Conrad

ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence: Duane Pitre *

Admission: $10

duane pitre

Duane Pitre (originally from New Orleans) is a Brooklyn-based, avant-garde composer and performer. His current works explore both chaos and discipline—and the relationship that exists between the two. Pitre primarily works with long-tones and utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonally, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships.

 

Composing primarily for acoustic and electro-acoustic instrumentation, Pitre has scored works for large String/Wind Ensembles, String Quintet, his own Bowed Harmonic-Guitar Ensemble, solo performers, among other instrument configurations. In 2008 Pitre started exploring simple electronic sounds and their role in a dualistic relationship with acoustic instruments, as well as utilizing them in his recent “tape” pieces.

Pitre has releases on Important Records, Trome Records, NNA, and Quiet Design, among others. He has appeared on compilations with artists such as Keith Rowe (AMM), Sir Richard Bishop, Tetuzi Akiyama, Jandek, Sebastien Roux, and Thierry Muller/Ilitch. He recently curated and contributed a track to an upcoming Just Intonation compilation (Important Records), alongside Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Michael Harrison, Greg Davis, Charles Curtis, and others.

 

Pitre has presented his works in NYC at such spaces as Roulette, The Stone, Phillips de Pury & Co., St. Marks Church, The Knitting Factory, and ISSUE Project Room (where he will be Artist in Resident for spring 2009). He has also performed in other cities across the U.S., as well as in Europe at Les Voûtes (Paris), St. Giles-in-the-Fields Church (London), and in Bristol, U.K.

In 2009, Pitre is planning more performances (national and abroad), a variety of releases, recording sessions, new works, and further exploration of electronic sound material.

 

22

Tony Conrad (b. 1940) teaches on the media study faculty of SUNY at Buffalo.   Over the last twenty years he has been especially active in video.   His work with music composition and performance started while he was a mathematics student, after which he was associated with the founding of “minimal” music and “underground” film.   His movie The Flicker is one of the key early works of the “structural” film movement.   His art videotapes are widely seen, and he has produced more than 250 programs for public access cable in Buffalo.   Conrad performs his recent music regularly at festivals, clubs and new music venues in the US and Europe.

“Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman, one of those really savvy Old Guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible.”  - Steve Dollar

 

 

*ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence is made possible through the generous support of the Jerome Foundation


Duane Pitre

duane pitre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence Duane Pitre presents Perfect/Imperfect, for Amplified String Quintet and Sine Tones.

Perfect/Imperfect (x5)

For Amplified String Quintet & Electronic Sine Tones

A new work by Duane Pitre

March 8, 2009 • ISSUE Project Room • Brooklyn, NY

(The artist’s first of four presentations as Spring 2009 Artist in Residence)

Duane Pitre – composition

Damon Holzborn – programming

Jesse Peterson – violin

Chris Otto – violin

Frantz Loriot – viola

Chris Welcome – cello

Emily Dufour – cello

———————————————————————————————————–

Bow a violin (or instrument from the violin family) to match a predetermined electronic sine tone pitch as closely and steadily as possible, without vibrato.

This “pairing process” can be carried out once or multiple times, by a solo performer or by multiple performers, in the same pitch or in different pitches, and arranged however one chooses.

The amount of times that this process is carried out within a recording or live performance determines the (x numeral) in its title

———————————————————————————————————–

The three paragraphs above comprise the score for Perfect/Imperfect, a composition with simplicity at its core. The score does not address a specific arrangement, performance length, or pitch choices, as these aesthetic-based decisions are not at the core of the piece; they are secondary and can be changed from performance to performance.

The piece came to me while I was walking home from work last summer. When I arrived home I typed out the score on an old typewriter and tucked it away to let it “germinate” (which I find is the best method for my works). After being invited to participate in the ISSUE Project Room Artist in Residence Program, I decided to return to this simple idea and create a special arrangement of it to premiere at ISSUE.

Tonight’s arrangement, titled Perfect/Imperfect (x5), utilizes an amplified string quintet (two violins, two cellos, and viola), is 50 minutes in length, and uses pitches calculated from ratios that adhere to the tuning system known as Just Intonation. These pitch relationships are found in nature’s own Harmonic Series.

It is worth noting that the title of this piece came to me immediately; it may have even started the thought that led to the score. The title possessed a certain strength and made me think about aspects of modern society in which perfection is expected from “imperfect” creatures. This spiraled into me asking myself what “perfect” even means. It is a term relative to the cultural context in which it is used, changing from country to country, village to village. These thoughts made the piece all the more interesting to me.

The most relevant topic, both for me and for the piece, centers on the interaction of computer technology and the human race — and the relationships that exist between the two. As we strive for “perfection” we look for the most efficient (in terms of time, money, etc.) ways to carry out various tasks — important ones, menial ones, and everything in between. Can a computer do the job better or can a human? What about a mixture of both? Automated 1’s and 0’s or human flesh operated? Is the computer output too cold? Does the human touch give, well, life?

As I began writing these program notes, it occurred to me that my initial choice to type out the score for this composition on an old typewriter is significant. It offers a contrast to the 50+ hours a week I spend working with computers, often keying out perfectly rendered typeface characters. It is this contrast between the computer-generated and the handmade that this composition seeks to explore.

My Perfect/Imperfect experiment intends to put its performers in a silent space (a vacuum of sorts) to enable them and the audience to focus on the differences between the tireless stability of pitch offered by the electronic sine tones and the human-generated pitches of the sustained bowed strings, which over time will inevitably fluctuate to some degree. On a theoretical level Perfect/Imperfect is my way of creating a balance within the computer/human relationship. On an aural level it is a focus-piece, a concentration-piece, for both performers and audience.

- Duane Pitre (February 2009)


Duane Pitre (originally from New Orleans) is a Brooklyn-based, avant-garde composer and performer. His current works explore both chaos and discipline—and the relationship that exists between the two. Pitre primarily works with long-tones and utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonally, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships.

Composing primarily for acoustic and electro-acoustic instrumentation, Pitre has scored works for large String/Wind Ensembles, String Quintet, his own Bowed Harmonic-Guitar Ensemble, solo performers, among other instrument configurations. In 2008 Pitre started exploring simple electronic sounds and their role in a dualistic relationship with acoustic instruments, as well as utilizing them in his recent “tape” pieces.

Pitre has releases on Important Records, Trome Records, NNA, and Quiet Design, among others. He has appeared on compilations with artists such as Keith Rowe (AMM), Sir Richard Bishop, Tetuzi Akiyama, Jandek, Sebastien Roux, and Thierry Muller/Ilitch. He recently curated and contributed a track to an upcoming Just Intonation compilation (Important Records), alongside Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Michael Harrison, Greg Davis, Charles Curtis, and others.

Pitre has presented his works in NYC at such spaces as Roulette, The Stone, Phillips de Pury & Co., St. Marks Church, The Knitting Factory, and ISSUE Project Room (where he will be Artist in Resident for spring 2009). He has also performed in other cities across the U.S., as well as in Europe at Les Voûtes (Paris), St. Giles-in-the-Fields Church (London), and in Bristol, U.K.

In 2009, Pitre is planning more performances (national and abroad), a variety of releases, recording sessions, new works, and further exploration of electronic sound material.


Apestaartje / Incunabulum Festival II

February 2 ,2008

*The Apestaartje and Incunabulum labels present 2 nights of music focusing on the use of traditional instrumentation (lute, acoustic guitar etc) and styles (Baroque Music, Folk forms etc) in combination w/ contemporary experimental practices and adaptations.

tetuzi akiyama + jozef van wissem + chris forsyth

Tetuzi Akiyama

Tetuzi Akiyama

Tetuzi Akiyama

Tetuzi Akiyama is a highly unique and experimental guitarist heavily applying free improvisation and noise. Besides guitar, he also plays electronics, viola, and self-made instruments.

Akiyama became an enthusiastic hard rock fan when he was eleven years old, and started playing electric guitar at the age of thirteen. Later, he also came to be very interested in free improvisation and classical music. He formed the improvised music band Madhar in 1987. He also started playing classical viola, and formed the Hikyo String Quintet in 1994. The band,
which played avant-garde improvised classical music, consisted of a viola, two cello, and two violin players, and included Taku Sugimoto on cello.
Sugimoto soon left the band, which thus became a quartet. Later that year, Akiyama and Sugimoto launched their guitar duo, Akiyama-Sugimoto. They played gigs in New York in 1995, and in the Midwest (including Chicago and Detroit) in ‘96. For about a year starting in early 1994, Akiyama was also a member of Nijiumu, one of guitarist Keiji Haino’s bands.

Recently Akiyama has two improvised music projects: Sutekina Tea Time, a duo with Takashi Matsuoka (guitar, vocal); and Mongoose, a trio with Sugimoto and Utah Kawasaki (analog synthesizer). Since 1998, together with Sugimoto and Toshimaru Nakamura (no-imput mixing board), he has been organizing an inspiring monthly concert series, The Improvisation Meeting at Bar Aoyama (renamed The Experimental Meeting in ‘99, and Meeting at Off Site in 2000). www.japanimprov.com/takiyama

Jozef Van Wissem

Jozef Van Wissem

Jozef Van Wissem

Composer/lute player Jozef Van Wissem is renowned for his unusual approach of the Renaissance lute. He cuts and pastes classical pieces, reverses melodies, adds electronics and processed field recordings The unusual wedlock of composition and improvisation creates an unheard amalgam of contemporary folk and late Renaissance music Van Wissem probably plays the most unlikely instruments in the world of contemporary improvised music: the Renaissance and Baroque lute and has accomplished the strange feat of bridging the idiom of seventeenth century lute literature and twenty-first century free improv of the silent type. Although he uses subtle electronic sound manipulation, he has largely stayed faithful to the particular timbre, resonance and playing technique of the lute. Van Wissem first came to be noticed a few years ago because of his radical conceptual approach to Renaissance lute music: he deconstructed existing compositions, for instance by playing them backwards. He also composed his own pieces for lute, using palindromes and mirrored structures. His music therefore does not have a traditional linear progression, nor leads to a climax, it rather stays on the same level of intensity. His music is quiet and not so much demands concentrated listening, as it will bring the listener in a state of concentrated listening – an aspect that makes Van Wissem a natural ally of the current post-reductionist improvising musicians. He also runs the Incunabulum label, and performs regularly around the world in duo with guitar-wizard of Captain Beefheart-fame, Gary Lucas. He also works with M.B./ Maurizio Bianchi, James Blackshaw, Chris Forsyth, Tetuzi Akiyama and Elliot Sharp.

www.*jozef**van**wissem*.com
www.myspace.com/ *van**wissem*

Chris Forsyth

Chris Forsyth

Chris Forsyth

Chris Forsyth is perhaps best known as a guitarist and founding member of the group Peeesseye, who have been described in various quarters as “the most remarkable smorgasbord of back porch minimalism, sound poetry and urban decay of recent memory,” “ritual music balanced precariously between the sacred and the profane,” and “Situationist field recording rock.”. Their constantly evolving music has been documented on 6 CDs, and Peeesseye has performed throughout the US and Europe since their formation in 2002.
Forsyth also performs solo, and his first solo CD is forthcoming in 2008 on the Inculcatum label from Holland. Other projects include the electro-acoustic drone/noise quartet Phantom Limb & Bison; the deconstructed cover band Dirty Pool; lead guitar duties for cabaret art rockers Condor Moments; and past collaborations with other artists including Jozef van Wissem (Holland), Alessandro Bosetti (Italy), Chris Heenan (US), Nate Wooley (US), Burkhard Beins (GER), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), and Ernesto Diaz-Infante (US). He is also active as a composer in contemporary dance, having worked with choreographer Miguel Gutierrez at Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Dance Theater Workshop (NYC), the Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), and Springdance Festival (Utrecht, Holland). A forthcoming project with choreographer RoseAnne Spradlin will premiere at the Kitchen in NYC in fall 2008. In addition to composing and performing music, Forsyth has been publishing challenging music on the Evolving Ear label since 2000. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, USA. www.evolvingear.com

8pm $10


tony conrad + m.v. carbon

January 03, 2008

tony conrad

If Tony Conrad’s powerful sound has its roots in “minimalism”, M.V. Carbon’s music introduces a more contemporary but equally aggressive practice. Meeting as they do with violin and cello above a unifying drone, Conrad and Carbon explode the space we normally think of in connection with string quartets, waltz music, and country fiddlin’. Chaotic parameters are bent and rigorously sculpted using techniques that have been revealed through enduring experimentation. Their tangles of sounds incite a tumbling clash of traditions. The interplay of their approaches reflects the split personality of today’s listeners, who want to discover the thrill of music in a rich sonic imbroglio.

mv carbon

mv carbon

8 pm $10