The New Roaratoria: Carlos Giffoni
Carlos Giffoni
Carlos Giffoni is a Venezuelan electronic musician who resides in the New York City area since the year 2000. Currently using modular synthesizers, hand made custom instruments, and various types of analog and digital synthesis in the composition of electronic music pieces, as well as improvising live with local and international musicians. His recent solo work has focused in live analog synthesizer pieces that put his style in a line with early techno and cosmic electronic music while maintaining the harsher edge of his previous noise works. Along his solo work he is also working on a new ‘acid music’ project called No Fun Acid.
Carlos remains a major figure in the US and international experimental music scene, performing live in New York and in a number of tours and festivals in the US, South America, Europe and Japan. He is the curator of the No Fun Fest, a yearly event in Brooklyn bringing together a wide variety of international experimental musicians as well as running the No Fun Productions label. His work has been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Wire, Pitchfork, Art Forum, Tokion, Signal to Noise and many others.
He also holds an MFA in design and technology from Parsons School of Design.
Recent live and recording collaborations include work with:
Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Nels Cline, Chris Corsano, Peter Rehberg, Chuck Bettis, Nautical Almanac, Smegma, Yasunao Tone, Emeralds, Gert-Jan Prins, John Duncan, Rudolf E.ber, Lasse Marhaug, Z. Karkowski, Merzbow, Astro, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori and more.
The New Roaratoria is generously supported by the Greenwall Foundation
Turbulence.org Presents: Stephan Moore + Luke Dubois
New Works commissioned by Turbulence.org
including the premiere of “The Occupants”, a new piece by Stephan Moore, an exploration of multi-user generative composition.
Stephan Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, and sound designer in New York City. His creative work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. Many of his performances and installation artworks make use of large, multi-channel arrays of his Hemisphere speakers. He performs regularly with Scott Smallwood in the electronic duo Evidence, and with a variety of musicians, live-video artists, and dancers. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught college-level courses in composition, sound art and electronic music at several schools. He is currently the Sound Engineer and Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and one of its core musicians.
R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.
Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival.
An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.
DuBois has lived for the last fifteen years in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
FLOATING POINTS Festival 2009
THE FLOATING POINTS FESTIVAL RETURNS
FOR ITS FOURTH YEAR AT ISSUE PROJECT ROOM
July 1, 2009 – Brooklyn, NY – A month-long program experimenting with and utilizing ISSUE Project Room’s custom-built 15 channel hemispherical speaker system, the Floating Points Festival returns this year with a line-up of luminary sound artists including Hisham Bharoocha, Morton Subotnick, Stephen Vitiello, Zeena Parkins, Suzanne Thorpe, C. Spencer Yeh, and Tony Conrad.
Also on display throughout the month, Kaffe Matthews’ multichannel sound installation “Sonic Bed Marfa” will be on display before each performance starting at 7 pm.
All performances begin at 8 pm and are $15 (ISSUE members, $12) unless otherwise noted. Please visit the web site for more information at www.issueprojectroom.org.
WEEK 1
Thurs Jul 2
Hisham Bharoocha w/Ben Vida
+ Ateleia and Sadek Bazaraa
Fri Jul 3
Alan Licht and Loren Connors + Evidence
WEEK 2
Tues Jul 7
Wed Jul 8
See Hear Now (David and Gisele Gamper)
Fri July 10
Lesley Flanigan w/ Luke Dubois
WEEK 3
Wed Jul 15
Mari Kimura
Thurs Jul 16
MV Carbon + Okkyung Lee
WEEK 4
ISSUE Artist-In-Residence: Ha Yang Kim
ISSUE’s AIR program made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation.
Thomas Ankersmit + Tony Conrad
WEEK 5
Wed Jul 29
Suzanne Thorpe + Zeena Parkins
Thurs Jul 30
Dan Senn + Stephen Vitiello with Molly Berg
CLOSING NIGHT!
Reception 7:30 pm
Performance 8:30 pm
Tickets $15
Available at Door
Purchase in advance online
Morton Subotnick
Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. The work which brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon [1966-7], was commissioned by Nonesuch Records, marking the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium – a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system constituted a present-day form of chamber music. He is also pioneering works to offer musical creative tools to young children. He is the author of a series of CDROMS for children, a children’s website [www.creatingmusic.com] and developing a program for classroom and after school programs that will soon become available internationally.
He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.
Lavalier
Lavalier is in indie-experimental group that formed in NYC in late 2008. With a penchant for vocal harmonies, fuzz/slide guitar, harpsichord, and accordion, the group creates cinematic music that is both psychedelic and fantastical. Lavalier was created by two longtime friends and musical
collaborators, Steve Milton, and Dave Horowitz. Having met in high school, Milton & Horowitz have played in various bands together, and spent 2005-2007 on tour with NYC indie band, The Cloud Room. Heavily inspired by Tom Waits’ occasional DIY-low-fi sound, Beach Boys harmonies, and various forms of cinematic music, Milton & Horowitz began recording the first Lavalier tracks in the Spring of 2008.
In a live setting, the group is interested in a variety of improvisational techniques, one such technique employs a process known as “spatitalization.” At various points during the show, different instruments and vocals are sampled in real-time using a custom-designed interface, and played over a ring of loudspeakers installed around the audience area. The group attempts to create a dimensional element that sometimes serves as the back drop or the center piece of the music.
Lavalier is:
Steve Milton – Vox and Various stuff
Dave Horowitz – Guitars
Terence Caulkins – Glockenspiel, DSP
Yasmin Reshamwala – Keytar and Vox
Melati Melay – Guitar and Vox
Nathan Hasalby – Bass
Jason Pharr – Percussion
Ha Yang Kim
Artist In Residence: Ha-Yang Kim
Admission: $15
Cellist, composer and improviser Ha-Yang Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. Ha-Yang made her professional solo debut at age 16 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Hailed as “phenomenal” and playing with “brilliant technique full of energy, concentration, musicality and expression” (Mainpost, Germany), she performs new music as a soloist and with ensembles and artists in festivals and concert venues throughout the world. She is the founder of Odd Appetite, a cello-percussion duo which performs and commissions new contemporary works alongside original works and improvisations. Ms. Kim has developed a unique language of extended string techniques and has created her own music based on this work, as well as collaborating on new pieces from other composers. Her musical influences draw equally from a range of western classical music, American experimentalism, rock, jazz, and improvised music, to non-western musical sources from Bali, Korea and South Indian classical music (Karnatic). Her music has been performed in the US, Turkey, The Netherlands, Belgium, Korea, and Germany. In seeking new musical experiences, Ha-Yang has performed traditional and new Balinese music as a member of Gamelan Galak Tika, and has collaborated/ performed with many diverse musicians such as Evan Ziporyn, Cecil Taylor, John Zorn, Christian Wolff, Lee Hyla, Louis Andriessen, Lukas Ligeti, Larry Polansky, and Stefan Poetzsch, with whom she has presented original compositions incorporating electronics, dance, theatre, and multi-media.
Past performances include as soloist at Carnegie Hall, touring and playing at festivals in the US, Europe, Cuba and Bali, Indonesia, performing at the Bang on a Can Marathon with both her duo and the All-Stars, composing for and performing at the Kwacheon International Theatre Festival in Seoul, Korea, a solo recital at the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg, Germany, and broadcast recordings for the Bavarian Radio Network. Upcoming performances of her music include at festivals in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, Holland, Belgium and in the US. Ama, a CD of her own compositions, is released on Tzadik. Ms. Kim has also recorded for New World, Cold Blue, New Albion, Karnatic Lab and Bridge Records.
She has received prizes and awards including a grant from Meet the Composer, Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Argosy Foundation, the Ruth Schwob Foundation, and The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Kim has been an artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Brown University, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Bates College, Brandeis University and at the Walden School for Young Composers. Ha-Yang studied cello, improvisation, and microtonality at the New England Conservatory of Music, Karnatic music concepts at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and was on the faculty at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, USA. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ISSUE Project Room’s Artist In Residence Program is made possible through generous support from the Jerome Foundation
C. Spencer Yeh + John Wiese
C. Spencer Yeh was born in Taipei, Taiwan 1975, moved to the US in 1980; studied radio/television/film at Northwestern University, and is now based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeh is active both as a solo and collaborative artist, as well as with his primary project, Burning Star Core. As an improviser, Yeh is focused on developing a personal vocabulary using violin, voice, and electronics. As a sound artist/composer, Yeh works with all aspects available surrounding a work, aurally and physically, as elements key to the cumulative experience. He is concerned not only with the sensual aspects of ’sound organization,’ but the gestural qualities as well. Yeh has collaborated with a deep and ever-growing list of artists and groups, including Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, Amy Granat with Jutta Koether, Okkyung Lee, John Wiese, Don Dietrich and Ben Hall (as The New Monuments), Prurient, and Jandek. He has performed at festivals and venues such as Sonar, FIMAV at Victoriaville, Frieze Arts Fair, No Fun Fest, NADA Art Fair, High Zero, the 24 Hour Drone People at Fylkingen, The Kitchen, ZKM Karlsruhe, and has also exhibited visual art, sound, and video works internationally. http://www.myspace.com/cspenceryeh
John Wiese is an artist and composer from Los Angeles, California.
His ongoing projects include LHD and Sissy Spacek, with plenty of freelance work
with many artists as diverse as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Evan Parker,
Smegma, Kevin Drumm, Cattle Decapitation, and C. Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core).
He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering Europe, Scandinavia and
Australia as a member of Sunn O))), the UK as part of the Free Noise tour (a tentet
including Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Yellow Swans, etc.), the United States
alongside Wolf Eyes, and recently performed in the 52nd Venice Biennale with artist
Nico Vascellari. More information can be found at www.john-wiese.com.
Betsey Biggs + Shelley Burgon
Betsey Biggs is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work in music, sound, video and installation has been called “psychologically complex” by the New Yorker. Her work aims to expose the beautiful in the mundane, to actively engage the audience, and to transform the city into a creative interface through psychogeographic practice. Recent projects include a theatrical work with flutist and performer Margaret Lancaster, an outdoor mixer powered by people’s shadows and a series of downloadable soundtracks meant for walkers to engage with their surroundings. Betsey recently received her Ph.D. at Princeton University, writing about public sound art, and will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University in the fall of 2009. Biggs will be performing Ton Yam I (For Brian Wilson), a live improvisation deconstructing and reshaping fragments of the Beach Boy’s God Only Knows into a sea of floating harmonies, feedback, and glitch: destruction and reconstruction.
http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~bb/
http://betseybiggs.typepad.com/
Shelley Burgon (harp & computer) is a member of the performing/composer chamber ensemble Ne(x)tworks and the band Stars Like Fleas. She has spent the last seven years improvising as a soloist and with many legendary people associated with the New York downtown avante-garde. She has been hailed by the New York Times as being a “mesmerizing” interpreter of modern music. Shelley has performed her music and the music of contemporary composers for series such as the the MATA Festival, Issue Project Rooms Points in a Circle, free103point9 Wave Farm and Summer Winds, and the Vision Festival among others. In May 2009 she was honored to premiere a new piece for the Merce Cunningham Hudson Valley Project at the Dia:Beacon. She is currently collaborating on an electronic music project with songwriter/vocalist Paul Duncan. Shelley received a BA in Music from SFSU and an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. She can be heard as a collaborator and guest on many labels including Hometapes, Skirl, Tzadik and Ipecac.
Harpist Shelley Burgon will perform “Mirrored Ceiling,” a new composition by Stephan Moore for harp and multi-channel audio, in which the harp is fed through a network of shifting delays to create shimmering, meditative sonic patterns.
www.myspace.com/shelleyburgon
www.myspace.com/starslikefleas
www.nextworksmusic.net
www.myspace.com/nacnudluap
Alan Licht and Loren Connors + Evidence
Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who’s who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (Rhys Chatham). Licht is also renown in the indie rock scene as a bandleader (Run On, Love Child) and supporting player to cult legends like Tom Verlaine, Arthur Lee, Arto Lindsay, and Jandek. He has released five albums of compositions for tape and solo guitar, and his sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. With Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, he founded Text of Light, an ongoing ensemble which performs freely improvised concerts alongside screenings of classic avant garde cinema. Licht was curator at the famed New York experimental music venue Tonic from 2000 until its closing in 2007, and has written extensively about the arts for the WIRE, Modern Painters, Art Review, Film Coment, Sight & Sound, Premiere, Purple, Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out New York, and other publications. His first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, was published by Drag City Press in 2003; a second book, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, was published by Rizzoli in fall 2007.
Alan Licht and Loren Connors have been performing improvised guitar duos since 1993. Tonight Licht will add piano to the mix.
Loren Connors has improvised and composed original guitar music for about three decades. His avant music – which combines the aesthetics of blues, Irish airs and other music genres – has been recorded on Family Vineyard, Drag City, Table of the Elements, RoadCone and other labels. He has performed with Alan Licht, John Fahey, Keiji Haino, Jandek, Suzanne Langille, Thurston Moore, Jim O’Rourke, poet Steve Dalachinsky and other artists.
EVIDENCE
Sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood began performing as the duo Evidence in 2001. Focusing on the universe of real-world sound, Evidence pours field recordings like water into their compositional and improvisational process, resulting in music that balances between tight organization and unregulated flow. Using recording equipment, laptops, and other electronic devices, Evidence creates music that deals with gradual change, improvised over time, sometimes atmospheric, sometimes pulsating, always texturally striking and unique. Resisting classification into a single genre, Evidence is equally at home performing in experimental venues, clubs, galleries, planetariums, and rooftops.
Hisham Bharoocha w/Ben Vida + Ateleia w/Sadek Bazaraa
+ Ateleia and Sadek Bazaraa
+ Hisham Bharoocha w/ Ben Vida
Issue Project Room
Doors at 8PM
$15
••••••
Tonight’s performance marks a new instance of ‘Archegram’, the ongoing collaboration between musician James Elliott, aka Ateleia, and visual artist Sadek Bazaraa. Combining Ateleia’s pulsing ambient soundscapes and Bazaraa’s deeply atmospheric video art, the two strive to generate a hermetic sensory environment that melds the streamlined focus of classic modern minimalism with the tranced-out spiritualism of sustained tones, slippery loops and hypnotically repeating geometric imagery.
Since 2004 James Elliott has worked under the Ateleia moniker, releasing propulsive, abstractly melodic electronic music on the Table of the Elements label. Elliott reconfigures a variety of source materials – mainly synthesizer, guitar and electronics – via computer processing into a shifting, constantly mutating framework of psychedelic minimalism. The Wire has called Ateleia’s music, “Quietly breathtaking.” Dusted magazine writes, “… the sensual properties of these perpetually flickering micro-melodies and buried, striated rhythms recall the bright eyelid-movie patterning of Man Ray’s ‘Emak Bakia’ film, where spiralling shapes reflect light in abstruse programs.”
http://www.myspace.com/ateleia
Sadek Bazaraa is a multi-media artist working in the realms of fine art, art direction and commercial design as a partner at the design collective GHAVA. Bazaraa’s recent visual acuity draws heavily on associations between objects, shapes, patterns, and textures taken from immediate surroundings to form unexpected narratives. Through recontextualization and careful manipulation, the mundane becomes glorified. Bazaraa’s process-oriented approach is primarily concerned with the subtle manipulation of geometric shapes and textural distortions to create a truly immersive take on the mathematical ratios of sacred geometry.
Both artists live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Hisham Akira Bharoocha is an artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He concentrates on creating music, visual art, and photography.
Bharoocha has had solo exhibitions of his work at D’Amelio Terras gallery in New York, as well as Vleeshal, a state run space in The Netherlands. He has been in numerous group exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, John Connelly Presents, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
His work has been published in Art Forum, V, i-D, Flaunt, Tokion, Blend to name a few.
Hisham’s newest works deal with the melting together of images that happens in the mind when one is meditating, dreaming, day dreaming, or going about their daily lives. Bharoocha likes to observe how his visions and feelings all blend together to create a massive medley of images and vibrations that one can feel in the body. Hisham tries to create works that show the absurdity and logic of how each mind works, what kind of relationships it creates between experiences and images that we absorb through our senses moment by moment.
Hisham is well known in the underground music scene for being a founding member of the bands Lightning Bolt and Black Dice. After leaving Black Dice, he created Soft Circle, a solo project that allowed him a more personal exploration of his own musical interests. His first solo album, ‘Full Bloom’ was released in January 2007 on Eastern Developments. Hisham has recently collaborated with the artist Doug Aitken on a sound piece which was performed at the MoMA, as well as musicians such as the experimental rock group Boredoms. Bharoocha is currently working on a new Soft Circle album due to be released sometime in 2009.
Hisham is one of the New York underground community’s creative leaders, continually trying to bring together the visual art, music, and fashion communities for collaboration. Bharoocha was the musical director for the now legendary 77 BOADRUM performance, a musical composition composed by the experimental Japanese music group Boredoms, which involved 77 drummers playing 77 drum kits in a Spiral formation at Empire Fulton Ferry State Park on July 7th, 2007. Bharoocha was also the music director for this year’s 88 Boadrum performance which happened on August 8th, 2008 with 88 drummers playing with Boredoms in Los Angeles, as well as 88 drummers playing with Gang Gang Dance in New York City on the same day.
Keith Fullerton Whitman (CANCELLED)
TONIGHT’S CONCERT IS CANCELLED. MANY APOLOGIES.
Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer/performer obsessed with electronic music; from its mid-century origins in academic studios in Europe straight on through contemporary bedroom “digital music.”
Currently he is working towards implementing a complete system for live performance of improvised electronic music that incorporates elements from nearly every era: a reel-to-reel tape machine, a selection of small “jerry-rigged” / “circuit-bent” battery-powered sound-producing boxes, an analog modular synthesizer, an early “consumer” home-computer, and at the core; a contemporary computer running a custom-built Max-MSP based modular system that both controls these elements and acts as a central conduit into which their sounds are captured/collected, processed, then diffused to up to eight separate channels/speakers/amplifiers.
He is also, at present, composing an as-of-yet untitled piece for Egyptian Oud, Serge and Doepfer Analog Modular Synthesizers, and computer control/processing. It is his first through-composed long-form work.
http://www.myspace.com/keithfullertonwhitman
…
Keith, 33, lives in Somerville, MA, USA with Robyn “Petra-Pixm” Belair and their child; a Korat named “Dribcots.”
He has been known to dabble in “virtuoso” “electronic dance music” under many stage names/pseudonyms, most notably Hrvatski (but also Gai/Jin, ASCIII, Anonymous, Assassassinator X, The Superlatives, etc…).
His current (05/06) favorite albums are ::
Jon Appleton & Don Cherry “Human Music” (Flying Dutchman FDS-121) 1970
Pierre Henry “Mise en Musique du Corticalart de Roger Lafosse” (Philips 6521 022) 1971
Åkos Rozmann “Images of the Dream and Death” (Phono Suecia PS 27) 1974-1977 / 1990
Dariush Dolat-Shahi “Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar” (Folkways FTS 37464) 1985
Pink Floyd “1967: The First 3 Singles” (EMI M31001) 1997
He loves to travel. He hates to cook.
