David Linton + Bruce Tovsky
Visual and sound artist Bruce Tovsky presents a new work entitled “Methe.” Bruce creates live video and sound improvisations, often in collaborations with other artists and musicians. He studied with Fluxus greats Bob Watts, Geoff Hendricks and Daniel Goode, and showed his video work across the USA, Europe and Japan. His most recent project was the samsh LOWLAND show at a secret New York location, exploring the subsonic potential of a monster club sound system with a premier group of improvisers.
With his “Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System” (2004) David Linton aims to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest by deploying interconnected measures of electric sound & pulsing light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space. He employs an integrated recursive analog audio-video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention to deliver vigorous eye, ear, and – sometimes – body-shaking realtime audio visual performances from which a kind of retro-tech animist ritual “medicine show” emerges where subject and object blur.
Gordon Monahan
Gordon Monahan’s works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.Esther Venrooy + Pygmy Jerboa
Esther Venrooy (b. 1974, Rosmalen, The Netherlands) is a composer working in the field of audio art.Esther Venrooy has performed her music and presented her sound installations extensively in cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Washington DC, New York, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. She collaborated with visual artists Hans Demeulenaere and Lieve D’hondt, with architect Ema Bonifacic and with musicans Min Xiao-Fen (pipa), Wu Na (guqin) and Heleen Van Haegenborgh (piano). Apart from her artistic activities, Venrooy is a lecturer on 20th century music and experimental arts at the Ghent school of fine arts, where she also runs the Sound Lab.
pygmy jerboa (b. 2009, usa) is maria stankova (b. 1984, bulgaria) and iván naranjo (b. 1977, mexico) we perform with live electronics the voice gone inhuman homemade/junk instruments surfaces and supercollider our music often transverses composition and improvisation rules and anarchy we’ve hit bulgaria germany mexico the usa and we are currently based in brooklynJason Lescalleet and Graham Lambkin: Air Supply CD Release
Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet released The Breadwinner (Erstwhile) in early 2008. This concert marks the release of their second album, Air Supply. They describe their music as “musical settings for common environments and domestic situations,” and almost all of their source material is taken from field recordings made around Lescalleet’s house. Air Supply is a departure from The Breadwinner, but retains the malevolent undercurrents of their previous album.
Totem: An Installation by Heather Dewey-Hagborg (opens April 24th)
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Totem: Opening April 24th at ISSUE Project Room
Visual artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Totem is a new installation created for Issue Project Room exploring language as an act of power and a force of control. Drawing inspiration from surveillance culture, artificial intelligence, and the research of Julian Jaynes on the origin of consciousness, Totem assumes the form of a ritual icon, eavesdropping on the conversation in its vicinity.
Drawing only on patterns of sound in its immediate environment Totem defines its own language: a grammar and lexicon based on machine intuition, an inductive bias that shapes what is heard. Divorced from their original context words assume new character, meaning and intentionality. Totem transforms overheard conversation and incidental noises into a constantly evolving composition of sound.
Totem is the second in a series of new body of work Dewey-Hagborg has created in the past year dealing with the politics of listening. The first, Listening Post, was installed in downtown Buffalo for five months as part of the Conversation Pieces exhibit at CEPA Gallery.
Totem was made possible by generous contributions from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the support of Issue Project Room.
More information is available on the artist’s website: www.deweyhagborg.com
Daniel Perlin + Christina Wheeler with Vernon Reid, Danny Blume & Benton C Bainbridge
Christina Wheeler
Vocalist, electronic musician, composer and songwriter Christina Wheeler’s musical explorations have included forays in techno, house, 2-step, drum and bass, breakbeat, soul, dance hall, dub, world music, ambient, free jazz and improvisational forms. A native of Los Angeles, California, Ms. Wheeler graduated from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Manhattan School of Music. She has performed and recorded internationally in collaboration with a variety of artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vernon Reid, John Cale, Chaka Khan, PM Dawn, Ravi Coltrane Talvin Singh, Mocky, Jamie Lidell, Swayzak, Jan Jelinek, Modeselektor, Priest (Anti-Pop Consortium, Airborn Audio), DJ Olive, Marc Ribot, Chris Whitley, Zeena Parkins, John Carter, Fred Hopkins, Andrea Parkins, Yappac, Dolibox and Ripperton. Her work with David Byrne included international tours and television appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, and PBS’s Sessions at West 54th Street series, and her own music was featured on MTV’s electronic music program AMP. At Lincoln Center, Ms. Wheeler premiered Randall Woolf’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing, a composition for voice, string quartet, tape and turntables with custom acetates, and the New York Underground Film Festival commissioned a new score from her and DJ Olive for the 1927 Japanese silent classic, A Page of Madness. She was featured on the New York episode of Tvframes, produced by Citytv, Toronto, Canada, and currently resides in Berlin, Germany.
Re: Destruction
Performance by Daniel Perlin
Re:destruction is a sound and video performance created by smashing a computer with a sledge hammer. It is the fourth piece in a series entitled Work by the artist and sound designer Daniel Perlin.
In re:destruction, a computer is smashed, using a sledge hammer, producing a sound as well as video work. The hammer and the computer are microphoned, sampled, amplified and played as instruments in real time.
Like the preceding pieces in the series, re:destruction is created by a single real-time sample of the sound of the act of labor, mixed with the real-time use of the tool upon objects. In re:destruction, there is the addition of projected color video.
The Work series attempts to examine the implications of sound, noise and music in the processes of the building of physical structures. The fourth performance piece in the series, re: destruction will be performed at Issue Project Room, Broolyn, and dovetails with re: drill performed at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council gallery, re:construction 1 performed at Studio X and re:construction 2 P.S.1, New York.
Patrick McGinley Sound Workshop
revenant:sound
In this one-day workshop we will explore sound as a transmitter of nonverbal information. We will focus on sound’s ability to define/describe space, and on our ability to resonate, alter, or create space by using sound.
‘revenant:sound’ is a project that focuses on improvised sonic activities in site specific locations. Voices are given to these spaces by producing sound using only objects found in-situ and the space itself. Participants will focus on a development of attentive listening and the ability to successfully participate in group explorations, while learning to find sonic potentials in everyday materials. Revenant derives its name from a concept of spatial memory, or, more specifically, from the long-term gestural memory of space; the ability of a location to retain an imprint or trace of activity or energy that has been present therein.
Participants are asked to bring one (non-musical) object from their living space, whose sonic potentials we will explore as a group.
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...