ISSUE Project Room is pleased to present: The Independents
Featuring: Table of the Elements record label, Jonathan Kane’s February, Tony Conrad and Neptune.
The Independents is a music festival that showcases artists from the nation’s most prestigious independent record labels. ISSUE Project Room, “One of the warmest and best sounding spaces in New York City” (Artforum) presents in collaboration with the legendary Table of the Elements record label three of the label’s most adventurous and groundbreaking artists:
JONATHAN KANE’S FEBRUARY
Jonathan Kane is a Downtown NYC legend — as co-founder of the no-wave behemoth Swans, and the rhythmic thunder behind the massed-guitar armies of Rhys Chatham and the rock excursions of La Monte Young — and one of the hardest-hitting drummers on the planet. With his solo work, Kane summons Swans’ concussive wallop, Chatham’s dense guitar strata, and the perpetual propulsion of 70s krautrockers Neu!, then steers it all head-on into… the blues. Make no mistake about it: Kane is a bluesman, and beneath the high-decible bombast, he’s powering guitar-driven minimalism into the blues, and the blues into guitar-driven harmonic maximalism. So roll with Jonathan Kane down his Highway 61 of the mind — it’s the shape of blues to come.
“Paradise between the back porch, the urban jungle and the heavens above … The album’s down-home grooves shine with an orchestral, massed-guitar luster that’s often associated with Glenn Branca and Kane’s frequent collaborator Rhys Chatham. Layered electric and acoustic sounds create overtones that trick the listener into hearing nonexistent organs and harmonicas. In place of the mind-boggling beats for which he’s known, Kane underpins these drones with a deceptively simple, forcefully executed shuffle. His swinging opuses exude bright, earthy euphony instead of dark, cerebral dissonance: Witness the rollicking “Sis” or the luminous version of the traditional “Motherless Child.” Rarely does the avant-garde rock this hard.”
Time Out New York
TONY CONRAD
“Tony Conrad is a pioneer, as seminal in his way to American music as Johnny Cash or Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman. One of those really savvy old guys whom all the kids want to emulate because their ideas, their style are electric and new and somehow indivisible.” - Steve Dollar, The Atlanta Journal Constitution
In 1962 Tony Conrad’s amplified strings introduced the sustained drone of just-intonation into what came to be known as “minimal” music. Utilizing long durations and precise pitch, he and his collaborators forged an aggressively mesmerizing “Dream Music” — denying the activity of composition, elaborating shared ideas of performance, and articulating the Big Bang of “minimalism.” However, the many rehearsal and performance recordings from this period were repressed, inaccessibly buried.
In 1987 Tony Conrad set out on a ten-year return expedition to the site of these entombed fragments to unearth the losses; from them he reconstituted and regenerated the epic EARLY MINIMALISM. Reaching back through time, Tony Conrad weaves a mobile narrative over and under minimalism: making music out of history, and history out of music.
http://tonyconrad.net/
NEPTUNE
Neptune’s origins trace to 1994 as a student art project by sculptor/musician Jason Sanford, who, in order to create a new music medium, forged heavy, menacing-looking guitars and drums out of circular saw blades, gas tanks, oil drums, bike parts, VCR casings and miscellaneous scrap metal found in the trash. Neptune was assembled to showcase these contraptions in the winter of the same year and has evolved into a full time band that traverses the US and Europe several times. The early guitars were haphazard and untunable, resulting in the atonal garage clamor of the early recordings. With several different members and collaborators over the years, the music has evolved with the instruments blending the traditional sounds of Rock & Roll with what sounds like mistake day at the ball bearing factory. The current three-piece lineup relies as heavily on homemade electronics as it does on its signature scrap metal instruments. With less guys and more gear, Neptune rocks like The Fall, clangs like Neubauten and drones like Faust with improvised and not-so-improvised songs that you can almost dance to.
http://www.neptuneband.com
http://www.neptuneband.com/press/press.html
After tirelessly working in the noise underground for more than 10 years, this New England trio has released its most fully realized album with “Gong Lake.” Initially, the rough hewn polyrhythms and clangorous guitars that propel Neptune’s surprisingly melodic songs seem conventional enough. Amazingly, the band constructs their instruments out of circular saw blades, bike parts, gas tanks and miscellaneous scrap metal found in the trash. But make no mistake, Neptune isn’t aping past metal bangers like Test Dept and E. Neubauten. At times the group rocks hard, creating disciplined almost danceable grooves, combining This Heat’s ascetic experimentalism with Cop Shoot Cop’s percussive wallop. Homemade electronics flesh out the sound, ricocheting off complex rhythms, adding texture and dynamics to Neptune’s singular, highly musical approach.
For more more information please check out www.spiegelworld.com.
Directions:
HOW TO GET TO SPIEGELWORLD
By Subway:
2,3,4,5,J,Z or M to Fulton Street; A and C to Broadway-Nassau. Walk east on Fulton Street to East River.
By Bus:
M15 (South Ferry Bound) down 2nd Avenue to Fulton Street. Walk east on Fulton Street to East River.