FIRST PUBLIC CONCERT @ 110 LIVINGSTON – Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet by Ne(x)tworks
ISSUE PROJECT ROOM ANNOUNCES ITS FIRST PUBLIC CONCERT @ 110 LIVINGSTON
11AM Welcome Reception
11:30AM-5:30PM Concert
FREE
Pre-Renovation Candlelit Performance
of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet by Ne(x)tworks
On Sunday, April 11 the public will have a chance to attend a rare performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 in its entirety when ISSUE Project Room opens its doors at 110 Livingston St. for a pre-renovation, inaugural Open House event. Performed by Ne(x)tworks, the six hour-long contemporary masterpiece will be free to the public, commemorating ISSUE’s first concert in their future Downtown Brooklyn home.
String Quartet No. 2 has been performed in its entirety only a few times, the first being in 1999 by the FLUX Quartet at Greenwich Village’s Cooper Union. The Ne(x)tworks quartet (which includes Cornelius Dufallo and Kenji Bunch, formerly of FLUX) will play the entire piece by candlelight in the cloistered hall while audience members are invited to stay for as long as little as they like. The beauty of candlelight is also a necessity as the space is still raw, in need of renovation and lighting.
“Ne(x)tworks is thrilled to present Feldman’s masterful Second String Quartet at ISSUE Project Room as our artistic endorsement of their fabulous new concert venue [at 110 Livingston],” says Ne(x)tworks’ Director, Cornelius Dufallo. “The musical community of New York City has been eagerly awaiting the opening of this performance space.”
Called his “most extreme” composition, Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983) is a collective paragon encompassing Feldman’s signature free rhythms, muted pitches, quiet and slowly unfolding music, and his experiments with duration.
“The focus at the time [of the premiere in 1999] seemed to be on how we were going to play for six hours without stopping,” Dufallo reflects. “As we immersed ourselves in the music, however, this began to change: we found that duration is by no means the most interesting aspect of this work. The ‘athleticism’ became more of a secondary concern to us. In this work, duration acts as a canvas, on which Feldman paints a stunningly beautiful encomium to the eternal marriage of sound and time. The piece must exist on a large scale in order to portray this relationship.”
In 2008 ISSUE Project Room won the bid for a 20-year, rent-free lease to occupy the landmark theatre at 110 Livingston St., an architecturally significant (McKim, Mead & White, 1926) and stunningly beautiful 4800 square foot performance space located in the former New York City Dept. of Education headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn. Once renovated, this space will offer opportunities to increase ISSUE’s audience, implement new programs and advance Brooklyn’s place as a cultural epicenter.
While this is an extraordinary opportunity, it is also an enormous challenge. ISSUE must still raise well over half a million dollars towards the $2.5 M needed for basic renovations. We hope that the community will join ISSUE on this amazing journey toward building a world-class center for experimental culture.
ISSUE Project Room’s Inaugural Concert @ 110 Livingston
Ne(x)tworks Performs Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2
April 11, 2010
FREE
Reception: 11 am
Performance: 11:30 am – 5:30 pm
110 Livingston St. (Entrance on Boerum Place)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
IN MEMORIAM WITH LOVE
Suzanne Fiol, May 9, 1960 – October 5, 2009
Dear friends,
It is with great heartbreak and sorrow that ISSUE Project Room announces the passing of our founder, artistic director, and driving force, Suzanne Fiol. Born on May 9, 1960, Suzanne died at 1:05 pm on Monday, October 5, 2009, after fighting a courageous and inspiring battle against cancer. Suzanne passed peacefully surrounded by loved ones at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Our hearts go out to her daughter Sarah, her sister Nancy, and her parents Lawrence and Arlene Perlstein and her partner Anthony Coleman.
Anyone who has met Suzanne knows that she devoted her life to creating and sustaining a space where artists — acclaimed and emerging, local and international — could develop and perform new, challenging, and exciting works. Regardless of the different venues we’ve inhabited since our inception in 2003, ISSUE has always been Suzanne’s labor of love, a space that housed and reflected her restless intellect, fiery spirit, and great heart. She would often jokingly refer to herself as “Mama Issue,” a fitting moniker considering the unconditional love she unabashedly showed her friends, family, artists and the steadily growing audiences that have been coming to ISSUE over the years.
We are grief-stricken by Suzanne’s passing, yet inspired by her vision and strength, and will devote ourselves to fulfilling her vision with the strength we draw from our memories of her. Programming will continue this week in honor of Suzanne, and we welcome you all to come to ISSUE and share your memories.
A memorial is currently being planned.
Please stay tuned for information on its time, date and location.
(photos by Joe Holmes)
NY1 Interviews Floating Points curators Suzanne Fiol and Stephan Moore
07/12/2009 02:37 PM
Sound Artists Raise Volume At Brooklyn Exhibit
By: Stephanie Simon
From avante garde music to noise you hear on the street, sound artists are creating new worlds to enjoy in Brooklyn. NY1’s Stephanie Simon filed the following report.
The folks at ISSUE Project Room have made a very sound investment in sound. They’ve created a one of a kind audio immersion room. This month, sound artists from around the world will playing their work inside the space.
“The speakers are overhead here, and you can see them from the audience perspective, they have the sound that goes in all directions as opposed to one direction, so they fill the room in a unique way,” said ISSUE Project Room Co-curator Stephan Moore. “I can show you the software that I use to control the room. I can do circles with it, execute different kinds of curves. So it lets artists work with this dimension, two-dimensional movements of sound.”
The dangling speakers are called “Floating Points” and that’s the name of ISSUE Project Room’s month-long Sound and Music Festival. Founder Suzanne Fiol says the festival gives sound composers a place to create and display work that is really cutting edge.
No doubt many people have heard of surround sound. But the latest installation is taking that idea to the extreme. It actually lets people fall asleep, surrounded by speakers, though not all of the sounds are soothing.
“We really wanted to create a place where composers can come and use this system and learn about it,” said Fiol. “So Stephan and I just put this together and it was easy and fun and a wonderful festival and now we’re on our fourth year.”
The piece, by artist Kaffe Matthews, is called “Sonic Bed Marfa.”
“The bed is eight speakers that surround you as you lay in the bed,” said Moore. “And then six subwoofer speakers that sit under you, these are the ones that do the low frequencies that sort of shake things, like the surround sound on a movie or the explosion that makes a rumble and make the low sounds. She takes advantage of all the things that speakers can do.”
Since it started in the East Village in 2003, ISSUE Project Room has been about giving artists a place to do experimental work. With a grant from the Manhattan Borough President’s office they will be moving to a new space next year. The festival runs through the end of the month, but the bed may stay even longer — allowing more time for a sonic snooze.
NY Times features ISSUE’s new home at 110 Livingston
An Avant-Garde Arts Group Bites Off a Lot to Chew
When it comes to the avant-garde side of the arts, the numbers tend to be pretty small. Record sales of a thousand or two, if you’re lucky; theater audiences in the dozens, not hundreds.
But last year Issue Project Room, a nonprofit arts space that was founded in the East Village and for the last four years has been in Brooklyn, was dealt a dauntingly large number. As part of a city deal, a developer that was converting the former Board of Education building in downtown Brooklyn into condominiums was required to offer 5,000 square feet on its ground floor to a cultural group on a 20-year, rent-free lease.
Issue Project Room won the bid. (Yes!) But then found that the space needed $2.5 million in renovations. (No!)
The organization’s leaders managed to raise about $350,000 but finally were able to exhale when Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, called late last month with the news that he was allocating $1.1 million for Issue Project Room’s renovations, as part of the $37.7 million in capital funds that he has the authority to distribute for the current fiscal year.
The building, at 110 Livingston Street, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1926 as a home for the Elks club. By 1940 the Board of Education had taken it over, and the city sold it six years ago to the Brooklyn developer Two Trees Management for more than $45 million.
With Issue Project Room, whose proposal to Two Trees won over those from more than 100 other organizations, the building will become a home for all kinds of experimental music, theater, dance, literary readings and film. “A Carnegie Hall for the avant-garde,” Suzanne Fiol, the group’s founder and creative director, said.
“I truly believe that this is the work that keeps our culture going forward,” Ms. Fiol said. “We want to be an important space for music and film and literature and poetry and video and sound art. And a little bit of dance.”
Most of the space is a wide, marble-lined room somewhere between a courtroom and a dance hall, said Sarah Garvey, an Issue Project Room spokeswoman. In addition, there is room for offices and an additional space that could be used for a library.
Ms. Fiol opened the first Issue Project Room in 2003 in a former garage on Sixth Street in the East Village and two years later moved to a former oil silo on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where she put on shows like an extremely rare visit by the reclusive Texas musician Jandek.
In 2007 Issue Project Room had to move again, to the former Old American Can Factory, nearby in Carroll Gardens. This month that space has its Floating Points Festival, with experimental musicians like Alan Licht and Tony Conrad (who is an Issue Project Room board member) making use of a custom-built hemispherical speaker system that hangs from the ceiling.
Whether the idea of a big, official institution like Carnegie Hall is antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde is an open question. But with Manhattan rapidly losing performance spaces devoted to experimental arts — like Tonic on the Lower East Side, which closed in 2007 — some kind of home is necessary, and Mr. Markowitz believes that Brooklyn is the perfect place for it.
“Issue Project Room is well respected, avant-garde, cutting-edge, in-your-face — you know what? That’s Brooklyn too,” Mr. Markowitz said. “I don’t understand half the things they do, and when they tell me about them, they lose me. But that’s not the point.” The point, he added, was that “the arts create jobs.”
His contribution brings the renovation budget to within about $300,000 of what it needs for the nuts-and-bolts first phase.
Ms. Fiol said she was at first reluctant to apply for the new space because at the time her organization had no money. But having three homes in six years taught her to keep an open mind.
“Everybody gets kicked out of their space, or they end up shutting down,” Ms. Fiol said. “But instead of getting all flipped out about that, I took the road of just finding a new space. And I’ve been really lucky.”
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
ISSUE Soundwalk-a-thon in the New Yorker
Two Sundays before Make Music New York, the Brooklyn-based venue Issue Project Room, an indispensable site of offbeat programming, organized its own sonic jamboree. Twenty-one musicians led groups on “soundwalks” around Brooklyn and other boroughs, treating the city either as an audio source or as a stage for their work. (The term “soundwalk” was popularized by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who, in the spirit of Ives and John Cage, has long blurred distinctions between composed music and ambient sounds.) Two dozen people signed up for a soundwalk with Betsey Biggs, a young Princeton-trained composer and interdisciplinary artist who often creates site-specific performances. Beforehand, Biggs directed participants to a Web site where they could download “Detox Project,” an electronic piece that she had assembled for the occasion. It consisted largely of sounds recorded in and around the murky old Gowanus Canal, in Brooklyn: machine noises, trucks backing up, the bell of a rising drawbridge, sirens, pedestrian chatter, and, for a long while, a voice softly humming a childlike, three-note melody.
Late in the afternoon, we met at a boarded-up house at the corner of Third Street and Third Avenue and began following Biggs’s lead, listening to “Detox Project” on earphones. The streets were deserted, except for a few hipsters pushing strollers. It was unsettling to hear loud sounds without seeing their source. Conversely, certain noises that seemed to emanate from the soundtrack actually came from real life: I was surprised to see live birds in a dead tree. The experience proved to be psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears. And, as Biggs notes in her Princeton dissertation, this kind of work plays off Internet-era listening habits—the use of manicured playlists to create what she calls a “cinematic lull,” a “solitary dream state.” When the walk curled through the quiet streets of Carroll Gardens, the collage of noises subsided and the human voice took over. Biggs began banging on a tin drum that she’d brought along, and a friend played an accordion. An electronically mediated experience veered toward old-time music-making. At the end, we stood on the Third Street drawbridge and applauded the composer, who smiled bashfully, nodding toward the strangely beautiful ruined landscape behind her. ♦
Darmstadt “Institute” in June @ ISSUE Project Room
Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant Garde” presents:
A Month-Long Festival of Concerts, Workshops, Film Screenings, Conversations and World Premieres at ISSUE Project Room Featuring:
Susie Ibarra, Elliot Sharp, Tony Oursler, Anthony Coleman, Tony Conrad, David Grubbs, Joan La Barbara, Luke Dubois, Tom Hamilton, Ha-Yang Kim, Branden W. Joseph, Stephan Moore, John King, Dan Joseph, Ne(x)tworks, Matthew Welch, Elodie Lauten, Bing and Ruth, TILT, Either/Or, Climax Golden Twins, Connie Beckley, Ensemble Pamplemousse and much more!
Darmstadt ”Classics of the Avant-Garde” music series is proud to announce its first ever Institute, a month-long festival at ISSUE Project Room dedicated to exploring the connection between live performance and pedagogical practice. This month of interdisciplinary programming includes concerts, lectures, workshops, film screenings, and talkbacks which celebrate and critically examine the continuum of the experimental tradition in music and related media. It is the hope ofDarmstadt’s curators that its Institute will deepen the understanding and appreciation of experimental work, both within the New York music community and the general public.
This month of dynamic programming involves both established composers and performers, alongside emerging artists. In addition to countless concerts of premieres and cherished repertoire, highlights of the festival include workshops led by Joan LaBarbara and Susie Ibarra, conversations between David Grubbs and Branden W. Joseph and Tony Conrad and Luke Dubois, a lecture-performance by Merce Cunningham Dance Company musicians Stephan Moore and John King featuring a live rendering of John Cage’s “Fontana Mix,” film presentations by Tony Oursler and Bradley Eros, in addition to “sectional” events—a program of guitar music with Dan Joseph and Elliot Sharp and an evening connecting the voice to visual art, with Connie Beckley and Lesley Flanigan. There will also be post-performance talkbacks with performers and composers.
The Institute kicks off Monday, June 1 with a FREE artist-in-attendance screening of Tony Oursler’s video project, Synesthesia, an oral history of New York’s downtown music and art scenes, and concludes on Saturday, June 27th with performances by Tom Hamilton and David Linton
Darmstadt is describing the artists participating in its June Institute as a “faculty” of sorts, enabling a non-institutional, publicly accessible forum. In the spirit of its namesake’s “holiday course,” Darmstadt aims to provide a vital resource, a venue to connect artists, performers, writers, and educators with each other and, in turn, with audiences…all towards the enrichment of New York’s vibrant new music scene.
Darmstadt ”Classics of the Avant Garde” is the Brooklyn-based contemporary music series led by composer-musicians Zach Layton and Nick Hallett, which presents the best of New York City’s live experimental music, and relevant media. Darmstadt will celebrate its fifth anniversary this November with an annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C, which Alan Kozinn described in the New York TImes as “the most vital, audacious and energizing performance of the score I’ve ever heard.” Darmstadt regularly hosts its concerts and DJ sets at ISSUE Project Room while its founders both create and curate work for such institutions as PS1 and The Kitchen. Darmstadt began as a “listening party” of avant-garde recordings at Galapagos Art Space before quickly evolving into a live performance series, and in 2007 was included in The New York Times ’Best of New Music’ rundown. As DJ’s, Layton and Hallett have delivered memorable sets at Steve Reich 70th birthday celebration at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival.
Darmstadt Institute is sponsored in part by funding from Meet the Composer Creative Connections, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Experimental Television Center (supported by the New York State Council on the Arts)
NOTE: Sunday, 28th with Christy and Emily and Pterodactyl CANCELLED
WFMU Free Music Archive and ISSUE Project Room
We’re pretty excited to be working with WFMU on their new and fantastic Free Music Archive to put up some selected excerpts of performances going on here.
The Free Music Archive is a social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio. Fellow curators include radio stations like KEXP (Seattle) and KBOO (Portland OR), webcasters like DUBLAB (Los Angeles) and Halas Radio (Israel), netlabels (Comfort Stand), and amazing online collectives like CASH Music.
check it out here:
Lethem, Auster and Borough President Markowitz support ISSUE Project Room and Brooklyn Culture
paul auster reading at "grocery"
On Saturday, Feb 7, Authors and ISSUE Project Room Art Advisory Board Members Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster, provided a rare treat for St. Ann’s parents: intimate readings from “The Collector” and “Brooklyn Follies” at Grocery on Smith Street. Marty Markowitz said a few words at the start of the event and we couldn’t have been more pleased to have him join us.
alex waterman performing at 110 Livingston
The lunch was followed by the first public tour of ISSUE’s future home at 110 Livingston with a special performance by Alex Waterman and talk on the unique acoustic characteristics of the room by Raj Patel of one of the world’s leading engineering firms, ARUP.
Interested in seeing the new space? Contact us, we’d love to share it with you!
Eighteen Linear Constructions – Installation by Tristan Perich
Tristan Perich: Eighteen Linear Constructions
For the month of February, Eighteen Linear Constructions, Tristan Perich’s installation for 18-channel 1-bit video is on view in the Chapel in The (OA) Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Individual video-generating circuits (designed and programmed by the artist), are wired into each television, and synthesize rapidly panning low-resolution images. Working with 1-bit data creates a direct connection between logic in code and electrons streaming in a cathode ray tube, making the digital physical.
Tristan Perich: Eighteen Linear Constructions
February 1 to February 28, 2009
On view during performance evenings, 7-10pm (or by appointment)
The Chapel next to Issue Project Room in The (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd St (at 3rd Ave), Brooklyn (map)
232 3rd St (at 3rd Ave), Brooklyn (map)
celebrity t-shirt endorsements
Check out Jonathan Kane sporting the new limited edition ISSUE Project Room T-Shirt designed by Rogues Gallery!
ISSUE Project Room T-Shirts!
This is a very special limited edition Rogues Gallery t-shirt designed specifically for ISSUE Project Room. Rogues Gallery generously designed these one of a kind t-shirts to help us raise money to move into our new space at 110 Livingston. Sizes variable.
available through etsy.com
Welcome to our new website
Thanks for visiting our new site. As we begin 2009, we hope this new site will be a reflection of our new site at 110 Livingston. We have made it easier for you to browse events, and stay updated on the latest Issues at ISSUE Project Room.
Please make sure you join our mailing list.
We’ll be adding many new features in the coming months to help you stay connected, and make sure you know about the events you’re interested in. And as always, please feel free to share your thoughts on our new look by leaving a comment below.
