Darmstadt presents: Essential Repertoire
Darmstadt “Classics of the Avant Garde” music series is proud to announce its first-ever multi-performance curation at ISSUE Project Room from October 22 through the 26th. Entitled “Essential Repertoire,” its six performances are an initial attempt to accumulate a unique and expanding collection of cherished experimental music: from the New York School through the Minimalists, European approaches, and a number of electronic practices, alongside music’s connectivity to art, performance, and multimedia. Darmstadt’s curators encourage vivid interpretations of their favorite avant-garde works from the city’s liveliest composers and musicians.
Saturday, 25 October 2008
Stars Like Fleas with special guests performing Cornelius Cardew's Treatise.
Stars Like Fleas
Shannon Fields - guitar, electronics, glockenspiel, voice
Ryan Smith - keyboards, electronics, voice
Montgomery Knott - voice, electronics
Laura Ortman - violin, bowed saw, voice
Matt Lavelle - bass clarinet, trumpet, cuica, voice
Shayna Dulberger - bass, voice
Shelley Burgon - harp, electronics, voice
Tianna Kennedy - cello, voice
Cornelius Cardew: Treatise (1963-67)
Begun in the early aughts as a recording project, by 2005 Stars Like Fleas had already gained cultish worldwide attention with a couple of perplexing Internet- and hand-traded releases. Stars Like Fleas emerged physically, unmasked, and began playing shows in unmarked spaces across Brooklyn in 2006 …very soon after they were asked to perform higher profile shows with the likes of Grizzly Bear, Beirut, Dirty Projectors, Deerhoof, Gang Gang Dance, and Akron/Family. The North American release of their new LP, The Ken Burns Effect (mixed in Iceland in late 2007) on Hometapes in June 2008, is causing a slowly-but-surely boiling stir with what the New York Times described as an “eerie power” and Nylon Magazine called “a new kind of energy”. Pitchfork wrote “The Ken Burns Effect is one of the year’s most ambitious and daring records…Sometimes, I think The Ken Burns Effect deserves a 10.0. Sometimes, it feels like a 2.0. You might hate it. You might love it. But you need to hear it.” The live band brings together an average of 8-11 musicians from musical communities diverse and even antagonist toward one another. Stars Like Fleas has no programmatic agenda, no common inspiration, has thrown out the road map, embraces pretension, incoherence, is as conflicted and confused as any teenager’s base emotions and believe that humane music is fraught with contradiction, posturing, sentiment, mistrust and introspection, like believers trying mightily to disbelieve. Stars Like Fleas music makes some giggle nervously, some angry and disgusted, others moved to tears – ordinarily at the same show, sometimes from the kids onstage behind the instruments.
http://slf.praemedia.com/