As part of the June PAN_ACT festival, Resident Advisor teams up with ISSUE Project Room and Goethe-Institut New York to present an evening with 2013 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Ben Vida, London-based sound artist Helm, and composer / Root Strata label founder Jefre Cantu-Ledesma in a performance with his longtime collaborator, filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Ben Vida has worked with artists Siebren Versteeg, Meredyth Sparks, Marina Rosenfeld, Luke Fowler, Hisham Bharoocha, Nadia Hironaka, and Mathew Suib and has played in ensembles led by Tony Conrad, Rhys Chattam, and Werner Dafeldecker. He has performed with with David Behrman, Tyondai Braxton, Nate Wooley, Ryan Sawyer, Chad Taylor, Eli Keszler, Yamatsuka Eye, and C. Spencer Yeh, among many others. He has released over twenty records on such labels as Thrill Jockey, Drag City, PAN, Amish, Bottrop-Boy, Hapna, and Kranky. In 2011 Vida was Composer in Residency at Diapason Space, NYC and at EMS Studios, Stockholm and was awarded a Swedish Arts Committee Travel Grant, ISSUE Project Room Emerging Artists Commission and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona "Composing with Process" Exclusive Works Commission. 2012 he premiered a new composition for fixed electronics and small ensemble commissioned by the ACM/Palomar Ensemble in Chicago. In the spring of 2013 he was an Artist in Residence at Clocktower, NYC and is a 2013 resident at ISSUE Project Room. Vida’s first solo exhibition, “Slipping Control” opened at Audio Visual Arts Gallery in Manhattan in April 2013. As both a solo artist and in collaboration Vida has presented his work in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Japan.
Helm is a sound artist and experimental musician based in London, working with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources. Helm's compositions build a dense aural landscape that touches on musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, noise, and hallucinatory drones. His latest LP Cryptography presented a five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study which uses processed piano, Casio MT-40, cymbal, and broken guitar strings. Helm creates a world where these instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation. This sound is steered through a melange of fringe territories: glacial drone meditations, reconfigured gamelan clusters, and howling walls of organized feedback, all coalesced in a post-industrial fashion with a commitment to homemade exploratory zeal. For the past ten years, Helm has also performed extensively in Europe and the US with Steven Warwick as pioneering avant-drone duo Birds of Delay.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma & Paul Clipson have collaborated for over 10 years on live sound / film performances and installations. Their work is intuitive and focuses on a spontaneous coming together of the two mediums. They have performed nationally and internationally at the New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, 25FPS in Zagreb, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts & The San Francisco Exploratorium. They were Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Spring of 2013.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma is a multi-instrumentalist and a founding member of a number of bands in the San Francisco Bay Area including Tarentel, The Alps, and Portraits, as well as the Root Strata label. He has been releasing solo recordings since the early 2000's mostly centered around the electric guitar and finding intuitive ways to process it in both a solo and collaborative setting. He has toured extensively in Europe, as well as select performances in the US, Canada, and Japan.
Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with musicians. His films are largely improvised and edited in-camera on Super8 film. His works have been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
