Akio Suzuki & Aki Onda
Oct 1 and 2, 8pm
Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, #2, NY 10012

Though they differ in generation and performance practice, the NYC-based Onda (b. 1967) and the Kyotango-based Suzuki (b. 1941) share an astonishingly inventive, open-ended, and spontaneous approach to the infinite and variegated possibilities of sound. Since initiating a collaborative relationship in 2005, the duo have embarked on a number of tours in Europe and Asia, exploring site-specific locations ranging from an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Brussels to an underground parking lot in Glasgow. Suzuki and Onda released their first album “ma ta ta bi” on ORAL_records in 2014. This event closes the pair’s “ke i te ki” Fall 2015 US tour, organized by ISSUE Project Room.

Onda and Suzuki perform by utilizing unconventional and self-made instruments including analog cassette Walkmans and radios, found pieces of wood, nails, hammers, buckets, marbles, and glass jars, allowing the individual architecture and acoustics of the various sites to guide the flow and development of the performances. The performance begins with the artists in the middle of the space, surrounded by the audience, before gradually moving throughout the environment as the performance unfolds.

Since the 1960s, sound art pioneer Akio Suzuki has been investigating the acoustic quality of selected locations and creating corresponding topographies. His intensive involvement with the phenomena of pulse and echo led him to develop his own instruments in the 1970s. One of these is the spiral echo instrument Analapos. It consists of a coil spring and two iron cylinders that function as resonating chambers, and is played with the voice or by hand. Starting from the 90s, his soundwalk project,oto-date, which means, respectively, “sound” and “point” in Japanese, finds listening points in the city, and playfully invites the audience to stop and listen carefully at given points on the map. Suzuki has been also active in the improvised music scenes in different continents, and has collaborated with Takehisa Kosugi, Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, David Toop, and John Butcher. He last appeared at ISSUE in 2013 as part of the Voices and Echoes tour, organized by Aki Onda.

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project — works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of more than two decades. Onda’s main instrument is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with other electronic devices in his performances. In recent years, Onda often works in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers and visual artists. His on-going collaborations include “Nervous Magic Lantern” with Ken Jacobs, an improvisational trio with Michael Snow and Alan Licht, and audio-visual installation/performance with Raha Raissnia. Onda was an ISSUE Project Room Artist-In-Residence in 2012.

https://vimeo.com/109687046

http://issueprojectroom.org/event/akio-suzuki-aki-onda

Steele performs Mad Girl, a punk show about hell, feminism, and mental illness. Powell presents new technologically interrupted work about the vertical integration/synergy of the performance art market. Choreographed dance by Bakst is marked by procedural systems and dryly humorous shout-outs to pop culture. Baucom screens video work in which the body can be seen as a series of pathologized impulses, broken narratives, and failed social corrections.

COLLAPSE (or, falling flat), an evening of curated performances at the Knockdown Center onOctober 3rd. The program is inspired by the legacy of failure in contemporary art, dance, and performance, as manifested in physical gestures (falling over, misstepping), unrealizable conceptual frameworks, and frustrated ideological objectives. COLLAPSE adopts failure as an artistic model that is itself past its prime. In a context where corporations can be too big to fail, how do technology and politics affect the possibilities of artistic acts of resistance, of therapeutic engagement? In what new ways can we disappoint each other?

COLLAPSE opens with a looped screening of a new video work by Caitlin Baucom. In Psycho/geographic, Baucom represents the body as a series of pathologized impulses, broken narratives, and failed social corrections. Lauren Bakst follows with a performance that combines elements constantly developing in her work: choreographed movements, procedural systems, and dryly humorous shout-outs to internet and pop culture. Sara Grace Powellpresents a new technologically interrupted work about the vertical integration/synergy of the performance art market. The evening closes with a performance by Max Steeletitled Mad Girl, a punk show about hell and feminism and mental illness.

Lauren Bakst is an artist whose works takes the forms of choreography, writing, video, and performance. A trained dancer, her work places the skilled body and choreographic form in conversation with questions around subjectivity, affect, memory, and history. She regularly collaborates with Yuri Masnyj—their works have been presented at Pioneer Works and The Drawing Center. Her previous works have been seen at Pieter (LA), CATCH, Center for Performance Research, Dixon Place, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Abrons Arts Center, Draftwork at Danspace Project, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. Lauren was a 2014 danceWEB fellow at ImpulsTanz, the Fall 2014 Research & Development Fellow at the New Museum, and is a 2014-16 Open Sessions artist at The Drawing Center. Lauren is the Managing Editor of the Movement Research Performance Journal and a Contributing Editor to BOMB Magazine. She teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA where she also curates Knowing Dance More, an artist-driven lecture series. As a performer, Lauren has most recently worked with Gerard & Kelly and Michelle Boulé.

Caitlin Baucom is a Brooklyn based performer and composer, invested in parsing fear and making a mess. Her interdisciplinary works have been presented at Defibrillator Gallery, High Concept Laboratories, MDW Fair, Southside Hub of Production, Mana Contemporary, and Cock & Bull Theater (Chicago), Stockholm Fringe Festival (Stockholm), Dimanche Rouge Festival (Paris), Naherholung Sternchen (Berlin), Galerie KUB (Leipzig), Verge Fair (Miami), and ABC No Rio, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Fountain Art Fair, LUMEN Festival, The Slipper Room, Performance Mix Festival, HERE Arts, Good Work Gallery, and Dixon Place (NYC). She has work and writing published in Emergency INDEX: Volume 3, Bad at Sports, and Incident Magazine, and been in residence at Contemporary Artists Center and SOHO20 Chelsea in New York, and the ACC-Galerie in Weimar, Germany. In 2015 she is performing as French poet Renée Vivien in The Ladies Almanack, a feature film by Daviel Shy, and was shortlisted for the Artslant’s Georgia Fee residency in Paris. She works as a performer for the Museum of Modern Art, and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from Evergreen.

Sara Grace Powell is a multimedia artist, recalcitrant, and a virgo. In 2008, she abandoned a New Age Cult in Los Angeles and went on to receive her BFA from Barnard in 2014. And here is one other possibly pseudo-biographical sentence written for virtual publication 2015.

Max Steele is a performer and writer based in Brooklyn. He has presented work at the New Museum, Deitch Projects, BAM, Joe’s Pub, La MAMA, Envoy Enterprises, PPOW Gallery, The Afterglow Festival in Provincetown and the Queens Museum of Art. He writes the psychedelic porno poetry zine Scorcher, and his writing has been featured in Dossier Journal, Spunk [arts] Magazine, East Village Boys, Birdsong, Vice and Best Gay Stories 2014. He was an Artist in Residence at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange from 2012-2014.

NYPAC, the New York Performance Artists Collective, is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the production, accessibility, and scholarship of performative and intermedia art. NYPAC is made possible with the generous support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. COLLAPSE is kindly hosted by the Knockdown Center.

http://knockdown.center/event/collapse/

Mark Fell, David Bird, Sam Pluta

YARN/WIRE/CURRENTS

Artists Space Books & Talks: 55 Walker St., NYC 10013

Yarn/Wire celebrate the opening of their 10th anniversary season as well as their recent release with Pete Swanson, Eliminated Artist, on ISSUE Project Room’s Distributed Objects imprint. The program includes three world premieres written specifically for the event, including works by experimental NYC musician and video artist David Bird, a new Fromm Foundation commission by composer/improviser Sam Pluta (Peter Evans Quintet / Wet Ink), and a new piece by electronics visionary Mark Fell (UK). This concert marks the fourth installment of Yarn/Wire/Currents, an ongoing collaboration between ISSUE and Yarn/Wire exploring the boundaries of contemporary music performance.

Doors open at 7pm with a public reception and DJ sets TBA, to continue throughout the evening.

David Bird is a composer and producer from Laguna Beach, California. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and currently studies composition at Columbia University. His work frequently employs the use of live electronics with aims to strengthen the relationships between acoustic and electronic instruments. His work has been performed internationally, at venues and festivals such as the MATA festival in New York City; the Wien Modern Festival in Vienna, Austria; the SPOR festival in Aarhus, Denmark; the IRCAM Manifeste Festival in Paris, France; the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.; the Bodo Sinfonietta in Bodo, Norway; the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) in Indianapolis, Indiana; and the SEAMUS electroacoustic music festival in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). After studying experimental film and video art at the local polytechnic he reverted to earlier interests in computational technology, music and synthetic sound. In 1998 he initiated a series of critically acclaimed record releases, featuring both collaborative and solo works, on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego, Raster Noton and Alku. Fell is widely known for combining popular music styles, such as electronica and techno, with more academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. His recent musical practice has become increasingly informed by non-Western musics. Fell’s work has been presented in diverse venues and international institutions including super clubs such as Berghain (Berlin), to Hong Kong National Film archive and many others. Fell has received commissions including Francesca Von Habsburg’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) with a premiere at Seville Biennale of Art, and the National Ballet of Madrid. He has been recognised by ARS Electronica (Linz) with an Honorary mention in the digital musics category, and was shortlisted for the Quartz award for his contribution to research in digital music.

Sam Pluta is a New York-based composer, improviser, electronics performer, and sound artist fusing sound worlds of acoustic instruments and electronics. He has composed instrumental works for Wet Ink Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Timetable Percussion, Mivos Quartet, RIOT Trio, Ensemble Dal Niente, Jessie Marino, Mantra Percussion, TAK, Dave Eggar, and Prism Saxophone Quartet. His compositions range from solo instrumental works to pieces for ensemble with electronics to compositions for large ensemble and orchestra. As an improviser, he has collaborated with Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Jim Black, Anne La Berge, and George Lewis. He is a member of multiple improvisation-based ensembles, the Peter Evans Quintet, Rocket Science, exclusiveOr, Sonic Overload and others.

Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, percussion / Laura Barger and Ning Yu, pianos). Noted for their “spellbinding virtuosity” and “restlessly curious” programming (TimeOut NY), the ensemble is admired for the energy and precision it brings to performances of today’s most adventurous music. Founded in 2005, Yarn/Wire is dedicated to expanding the repertoire written for its instrumentation, through commissions and collaborative initiatives that aim to build a new and lasting body of work. Influenced by its members’ experiences with classical music, avant-garde theatre, and rock music, the ensemble champions a varied and probing repertoire.

Yarn/Wire has commissioned many American and International composers including Raphaël Cendo, Peter Evans Alex Mincek, Thomas Meadowcroft, Misato Mochizuki, Tristan Murail, Sam Pluta, Kate Soper, and Øyvind Torvund. The group has given the United States premieres of works by Enno Poppe, Stefano Gervasoni, and Georg Friedrich Haas, among others. As well, the ensemble enjoys collaborations with genre-bending artists such as Tristan Perich, David Bithell, Sufjan Stevens, and Pete Swanson. Yarn/Wire appears internationally at prominent festivals and venues including the Lincoln Center Festival, BAM, New York’s Miller Theatre, River-to-River Festival, La MaMa Theatre, Festival of New American Music, London’s Barbican, the Edinburgh International Festival, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall, and Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. Their new and ongoing series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, NY.

Black Spirituals

Tue, Sep 22 – 8pm
The Sump / Poppers Locarno:
1563 Decatur St., Ridgewood, NY

Oakland electro-acoustic unit Black Spirituals make their NY debut. At the ecstatic intersection of rich harmonic tones and heart-thumping percussion, Black Spirituals transform performance sites with ritualistic communication, and manipulate temporal experience with their “Multi-Aesthetic Approach to Improvisation.”

A duo of Zachary James Watkins (electronics) and Marshall Trammell (percussion), the group borrows the alias Black Spirituals from a found cassette documenting a lecture given by Bernice Reagon on the roots music of American Black Slaves. These stories form a sonic resonance that speaks of rich relationships to one’s surroundings, memories, profound feelings, dreams, and the experiences that inspire human expression. Forging a new tradition in conversant, duo vernacular dynamics, Black Spirituals compose live on stage, exchanging ideas in an ever-evolving dialogue between their individual musical narratives. For this performance they perform in duo and solo formations, bringing their transformative work to New York “craving new circuits of communication, new music halls and host bodies to possess.”

Zachary James Watkins is a sound artist who has earned degrees in composition from The Cornish School and Mills College. He has received numerous grants and commissions and presented works in festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe. He releases music on the labels Important Records, Cassauna, Touch, The Tapeworm, Confront, Land & Sea and Sige. Watkins has been awarded residencies at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Raised in Hawaii, Marshall Trammell is a percussionist and interdisciplinary cultural producer devoted to social issues. His unique training includes apprenticeships with Improvising and Folkloric masters, 20+ years as a Creative Music professional in the Bay Area, and MFA studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Integrated Electronic Arts. Currently, Trammell sits on the Executive Committee of the Merced County Arts Council in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he spearheads an independent music festival.

SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/sige-1/black-spirituals-radiant 
http://issueprojectroom.org/event/black-spirituals

M. Lamar: DESTRUCTION

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2015 – 8:00PM
First Unitarian Congregational Society: 116 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn 11201

M. Lamar works across opera, metal, performance art, and video to craft sprawling narratives of radical racial and sexual transformation. The New York-based composer’s newest music theater piece, DESTRUCTION, for male soprano and piano with projections, is a song of mourning for “the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation and neo-segregation”. Drawing on themes of apocalypse, end times, and rapture found in Negro Spirituals, the work explores radical historical expressions, and invoked long held and continued calls to end our current world order, synonymous with white supremacy. DESTRUCTION is a futuristic salvaging of the negro spirit in a destroyed western world in flames.

“Slavery to segregation to neosegregation is not progress, it is not even movement. Slavery is death and death is the end. But the motionless movement of death through slavery, segregation and neosegregation is not the end of death. The cycle of repetition, slavery-to-segregation-to-neosegregation, white-over-black to white-over-black to white-over-black, is not living; it is not life, it is only the imitation of life.”
— Anthony Paul Farley

M. Lamar, referring to himself as a “devil worshipping free black man in the blues tradition,” holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at Participant Inc., New York; New Museum, New York; Södra Teatern, Stockholm; Warehouse9, Copenhagen; WWDIS Fest, Gothenburg and Stockholm; The International Theater Festival, Donzdorf, Germany; Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York; Performance Space 122, New York; and African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco; among others. Lamar has had many years of classical vocal study with Ira Siff, among others; and is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant 2013–14 and a Harpo Foundation grant 2014-15.

Soundcloud link: https://soundcloud.com/m-lamar/oh-graveyard-bootleg-recorded-live-at-601-artspace 

http://issueprojectroom.org/event/m-lamar-destruction

Groundswell 2015

Saturday September 19, 1 – 5 p.m.
Olana State Historic Site
5720 Route 9G, Hudson, NY

The Olana Partnership and Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM are pleased to co-present a third iteration of their award-winning exhibition event Groundswell. Hundreds will converge for site-specific performance and works in sound, installation, broadcast, and movement with:

John Cage Trust with Seth Chrisman
John Cleater
Brian Dewan
Gambletron
Tyson Hauf
Bernd Klug
LoVid
Douglas Irving Repetto
Quintron

Olana’s 250-acre landscape was originally designed in response to its essential and spectacular views the “Olana Viewshed”–by Hudson River School artist Frederic Church. On September 19, during this one-day exhibition event, audiences will explore the property’s undiscovered roads and naturalistic scenes as they encounter each Groundswell artist’s installation and performance. Picnicking (available from Daughters Fare and Ale of Red Hook, NY) will take place at a breathtaking clearing, which overlooks the Hudson River, the Catskill Mountains and beyond. The event will culminate with a performance by the renowned performing artist and inventor Quintron.

Tickets: groundswell2015.brownpapertickets.com

Drawing Sound Part II: String Noise

Sept 11-13
Drawing Center

DOORS WILL OPEN AT 7PM. Performances will begin at 7:30pm and end approx. 9pm. First come, first serve. Standing only, no seating.

For its 2015–16 season, The Drawing Center has developed two multi-evening events for its newly renovated galleries that demonstrate the institution’s increased focus on the intersections between drawing, sound, and performance-based art. Interspersed between major exhibitions,Drawing Sound will bring commissions of new work to The Drawing Center’s space and will build upon the institution’s recent explorations of drawing and music in the work of Iannis Xenakis and William Engelen. Billy Martin and String Noise (Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris) will curate the two Drawing Sound performances in July and September of 2015, respectively.

Produced by Brett Littman, Executive Director.

Part II: String Noise
For the second part of Drawing Sound this fall, String Noise are curating a three-night event, featuring different performers each night.

Night 1 – September 11, 7:30pm | Online tickets are SOLD OUT. Limited number available at the door on the performance night.
Alvin Lucier (composer)
Ben Manley (sound engineer)
Performing BIRD AND PERSON DYNING (1975) and Music for Snar Drum, Pure Wave Oscillator and One or More Reflective Surfaces (1990)

Conrad Harris (violin, from String Noise)
Performing TAPPER (2004)

NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS, a documentary by Viola Rusche & Hauke Harder on
Lucier, will be playing in The Lab gallery.

Night 2 – September 12, 7:30pm | Go here to buy tickets.
Greg Saunier (composer)
Curt Sydnor (pianist)
Performing the US premiere of Opera, Quasi Fortississimo, and a new hour-long work for piano, composed by Greg Saunier, performed by Curt Sydnor.

Followed by Les Bon Hommes: William Kuehn of Rainer Maria (drums), Deron Pulley (bass), and Greg Saunier (guitar & vocals)

Night 3 – September 13, 7:30pm | Go here to buy tickets.
Jad Fair (guitar)
Lumberob (aka Rob Erickson)
Performing a series of songs and vocal electronics, alongside projections of Fair’s paper cuttings

Throughout the three-day event, Echoic Memory, a site-specific sound piece by artist and composer Spencer Topel, will be installed in the Drawing Room.

An episode on Jad Fair, by Hardly Sound, a documentary TV series focusing on Texas
underground music and artists, will be playing in The Lab gallery.

http://www.drawingcenter.org/en/drawingcenter/5/exhibitions/9/upcoming/1122/drawing-sound-part-ii-string-noise/

TAKEHISA KOSUGI: MUSIC EXPANDED September 12, 8 pm Micro 1 (1961); Organic Music (1962); South, e. v. #2 (1962/2014); Film & Film #4 (1965); Op. Music (2001) Tickets September 13, 4 pm Walking (1983); Anima 7 (1964); Anima 2 / Chamber Music (1962); Mano-Dharma, Electronic (1967); Music for Nearly Ninety, Part A (2009); Catch-Wave (1967) Tickets Born in Tokyo in 1938, Takehisa Kosugi is a legendary figure in Japanese and American avant-garde music. His seminal Group Ongaku, co-founded in 1960 with Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone, and others, was famously the first ensemble in Japan to explore collective group improvisation and multi-media Happenings. He was closely aligned with Fluxus, and in 1964 its founder George Maciunas published Kosugi’s Events, an 18-card set of text-based instruction works (it is included in the Whitney’s permanent collection). Kosugi’s Events encouraged audiences to rethink the nature of music—proposing that it could be visual, highly performative, and could even consist of everyday actions that had been greatly slowed down or electronically amplified. For Kosugi, music understood in this way could instigate a philosophical reconsideration of the boundaries of art, music, and life. His approach exemplifies an aesthetic shared by other radical artists of the time including John Cage and La Monte Young. In 1967, Kosugi presented Music Expanded, an evening-length concert of his work at New York’s Town Hall, assisted by artists Charlotte Moorman and Nam Jun Paik. Thereafter he co-formed Taj Mahal Travellers, a group which toured extensively in Europe in the early 1970s, conducting freeform improvisations in various environments. Kosugi began a long collaborative relationship with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and was its musical director from 1995–2011. In his current work, he further explores the interplay between sound, objects, time, environment, and electronics in his mixed-media installations and live performances. At the Whitney, Kosugi revisits the concept of Music Expanded, presenting a two-day retrospective spanning over fifty years of his work, comprised of both his seminal Events of the 1960s and his iconoclastic live electronic works from the 1980s through the 2000s. He is joined for these performances by collaborators Kiyoshi Izumi and Ken Hamazaki. http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/TakehisaKosugi

Interference Archive
Thursday, September 3, 2015
7–9pm

We’ve got two things to celebrate! if a song could be freedom . . . Organized Sounds of Resistance has had a great run, but is closing on Sept. 6th, so this will be one of the last chances to see it!

In addition, we pressed a limited edition 7” vinyl record in collaboration with Textual Records to go with the show!! We’ve been hard at work on it for months, and we’ll finally be releasing it tonight.

The 7″ record features a booklet about music and politics, as well as five international political songs which have fallen out of circulation:

— “The Internationale” (rendition from Kurdistan)
—”Pfumo Nya Ku Pele” by Coral das Forças Populares de Libertaçåo de Moçambique (a revolutionary Mozambican call and response)
—”Workers–Get Ready” (a 1970s soul send-up from the Progressive Labor Party)
—”Bambini Pianificanti” by the Gruppo Musicle de Comitato per il Saleario al Lavoro Domestico di Padova (a song from the Italian Wages for Housework movement)
—”Got a Union in this Town” by the Mountain Musicians Cooperative and June Appal Recordings (a pro-union folk ballad from Appalachia)

Come on out and celebrate the release of the record and the closing of if a song could be freedom… with a party! If you pre-ordered a record you can pick up your copy, and everyone else will be able to purchase one at the event. There will be beer, socializing, and, of course, music.

http://interferencearchive.org/limited-edition-7-release-exhibition-closing-party/