Thursday, April 20th at 8pm, ISSUE is pleased to present new works from longtime friends Lili Schulder and Luke Wyatt, known through their far-reaching releases under the monikers 51717 and Torn Hawk, respectively. Despite each navigating singular pathways through underground electronic music, this presentation will feature new works expanding on and departing from their best known practices. The performances will take place at The Emily Harvey Foundation’s space in SoHo, Manhattan.
Genizah, גְנִיזָה, the Hebrew for “hiding place,” commonly refers to a repository where Jewish sacred books and ritual objects are kept before burial in a cemetery. The structure of the Genizah provides a protective way station, or a meeting point, for text and memory on their journey from life to dust—from legibility to obscurity. 51717’s music is the sonification of, and secure structure for, an investigation of name and nothingness, the gross and the subtle, the lived and the inherited, the conscious and unconscious, informed by her psychotherapeutic work with patients and the transference/countertransference which is experienced.
Over the past few years, Torn Hawk has made a progressive pivot from romantic, vulnerable instrumental music and video works toward an equally vulnerable word-focused spoken word practice. His regular personal updates and character studies on Instagram, his NTS residency radio show, and most recently his releases on Nina Protocol have served as developing grounds for this evolving work. For this presentation, Torn Hawk will debut “Trustfall,” a culminating outgrowth of his recent explorations that hybridize stream-of-consciousness spoken word, stand-up candor, and emotional sincerity through his voice only. Recently, Torn Hawk has released the album “Toxic Sincerity” co-released by Valcrond Video and new music label FLEA. Taken from the maligned premise of toxic masculinity and featuring much of the iconography therein—leisure suits, Ramada hotels, and weightlifting programs—the album compellingly integrates Torn Hawk’s past and present music, combining a media haze of crystalline synths, brass swells, e-piano, and guitar with the exposed earnestness of his recent spoken word skits.
51717 and Torn Hawk have recently been featured on the 400 Floor Podcast by Nina Protocol, hosted by Jack Callahan. The episode focuses on the artists' mutual experiences growing up on the East Coast in the ‘90s before eventually crossing paths in NYC in the mid ‘00s, their association with Ron Morelli's L.I.E.S. label, and more.
51717 is a psychospiritual communication channel of Lili Schulder, an artist and psychotherapist based in New York City. Known for a heavy and minimalist sound design, 51717 is an intensely intimate medium initially compelled by her Orthodox Jewish background. Schulder’s work is ingrained with a burden of memory; through processes of decay and dissolution, gross themes and ritual actions are rendered into minor forms. The work embraces tensions between noise and silence, language and sound, immanence and transcendence, and a cyclical process of binding and deconstruction via meditative and ritual practice. Using analog and digital sound technology, 51717 has performed at Atonal Festival (Berlin), Hospital Fest (NYC), ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Fylkingen (Stockholm), Soup (Tokyo), M.A.P.S. Festival (San Francisco) as well as many other events and venues worldwide. Recordings have been released on cult underground labels such as L.I.E.S., Jealous God, Total Black, Opal Tapes, and Royal Sperm. The debut LP “Paranoia Star” (L.I.E.S.) was described by The Wire magazine as being “remarkably restrained while maintaining a sense of peril.”
Torn Hawk is the primary alias for Luke Wyatt, a sound and image artist who has released over 20 records on labels including L.I.E.S., Mexican Summer, Not Not Fun, Unknown To The Unknown, and his own label Valcrond Video. Luke first gained notice creating video works for other musical artists, and then his own music, and his visual mission continues to manifest in the many videos online and elsewhere that adhere to a form he calls “video mulch.” Making almost exclusively instrumental music before 2019, from the textural blown-out guitar works of his early LIES releases, to the glistening fake orchestral music of his second Mexican Summer record, Wyatt’s own spoken voice made its first significant appearance on “Here Comes Language” in 2020 and emerged with more aggressive focus on “Toxic Sincerity,” his most recent album. His ongoing NTS Radio residency serves as a development space for his deceptively radical vocalized works. Most recently, key contributions to Nina Protocol have allowed Wyatt to deliver his most evolved spoken word pieces to date.
