ISSUE Project Room presents Dutch lutanist Jozef van Wissem in a two-day residency including collaborations with Jim Jarmusch, Susan Alcorn, Richard Bishop, Gregg Kowalsky, Paul Metzger, Loren Connors, and Heresy of the Free Spirit (Che Chen and Robbie Lee).
8:30 - 9:15: Paul Metzger
9:25 - 10:00: Susan Alcorn solo, Susan Alcorn/Paul Metzger duo
10:10 - 10:40: Gregg Kowalsky solo, processed Jozef van Wissem piece
10:50 - 11:30: Heresy of the Free Spirit (Che Chen, Robbie Lee, Jozef van Wissem)
New Music For Early Instruments sees van Wissem collaborating with several American artists, all adding essential elements to an ongoing dialogue between the music of our time and early music, when there were fewer written compositions and no recordings. Van Wissem has written that:
"In order to update the instrument, to make it mature and give it the recognition it deserves one needs to put it in an entirely different and contemporary context. Early instruments can be processed on laptop in many different ways, field recordings can be added, lute tablature can be performed backwards, baroque themes can be repeated without end — the freeing of these constraints seems endless. The idea behind New Music for Early Instruments is to drag the lute out of the museum, out of the safe hands of a small group of specialists and give it back to the people. The lute used to be omnipresent before it disappeared: in all layers of society, at court, in bars, in rich and poor families. It traveled well on horseback, so Italian, French, lowland, and German styles were mixed. So why hide it now?"
Jozef van Wissem builds music with the sonorities of his unusual instrument: a 24-string Baroque lute. Much of the work of van Wissem is based on the application of mirror images to lute composition. The work is idiomatic to lute tablature around 1600. Through study in New York City with Patrick O'Brien, he discovered that beginning in the Middle Ages, one of the variations on the cantus firmus (the given melody) is the backwards performance of the melody. As a result, he used this on his first group of compositions, released as the CD Retrograde. On A Classical Deconstruction (Persephone 002), van Wissem wrote out mirror images of hundreds of classical lute pieces, copying them out from the bottom right to the top left corner. To these inversions he added new themes, accents and rhythms. He then applied the "cut up" technique of writer William S. Burroughs and cut, shifted, mixed and pasted the parts together to create new works.One critic has compared van Wissem's work to that of German painter Georg Baselitz, who painted upside down. More recently his lute compositions consist of trance-inducing layered palindromes.
Van Wissem is renowned for his ability to appropriate the Renaissance and Baroque lute in the context of contemporary experimental music. By cutting and pasting classical pieces, reversing melodies, and adding electronics and processed field recordings, he is able to bridge the language of 17th century music with that of the 21st century without compromising the timbre and resonance of traditional lute playing techniques.
Susan Alcornstarted out playing guitar at the age of twelve, quickly immersing herself in folk music, blues, and the pop music of the 1960s. A chance encounter with blues musician Muddy Waters steered her toward playing slide guitar. By the time she was twenty-one, she had immersed herself in the pedal steel guitar, playing in country and western swing bands in Texas. Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world. By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist “deep listening” philosophies of Pauline Oliveros. Though mostly a solo performer, Alcorn has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne, Peter Kowald, Chris Cutler, Joe Giardullo, Caroline Kraabel, Le Quan Ninh, Sean Meehan, Joe McPhee, LaDonna Smith, Mike Cooper, Walter Daniels, Jandek, and Johanna Varner. She has written on the subject of music for the UK magazine Resonance and CounterPunch. Her article “The Road the Radio, and the Full Moon” was included in “The Best Music Writing of 2006” published by Da Capo Press. Recordings include Uma, Curandera, Concentration, and "And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar."
Sir Richard Bishopis a composer, improviser, and explorer on acoustic and electric guitar whose work often reflects the shadow worlds of India, the Middle East, North Africa, and other points along the Gypsy trail. This is combined with a singular, experimental approach to the guitar that takes the guitarist's art into audio realms that are rarely visited. Attentive listeners may hear shades of Les Paul, Django Reinhardt, Sonny Sharrock, and Ravi Shankar in his playing. Bishop has fused these and many other elements to forge a unique and inventive style all his own. In 2005 Bishop began performing as a solo artist, playing throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States. He has done extensive touring with Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy), Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart, Bill Callahan, and many others.Bishop's first official solo record, Salvador Kali, was released by John Fahey’s esteemed Revenant Records label in 1998. The album showcases Bishop's own particular obsessions and roots, drawing from a variety of worldwide sources. Richard is well known as a founding member (along with brother Alan Bishop) of ethnic-improv pioneers and underground tricksters Sun City Girls, who during their 26 years (1981–2007), produced an extensive discography of over 50 full length albums, 20 one-hour cassettes and a dozen 7” records. In the early 1980s he was also a member of the group Paris 1942 which included Alan Bishop, J. Akkari and former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker.
Gregg Kowalsky resides in Oakland, California where he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College. Kowalsky’s compositions range from drone and noise pieces to meditative psychedelia. After his debut album, Through the Cardial Window (Kranky), Gregg started working with cassette tapes, sine oscillators, mixer feedback and contact mics. His recent series of Tape Chants explores the acoustics where the performances occur by setting up cassette players around the space, using only the cassette players’ speakers for amplification. Throughout the piece, Gregg moves around the space adjusting the amplitude of the players as a live mix. The first incarnation of Tape Chants was released in 2007 titled Tape Chants A Million (Rootstrata). Kowalsky has had the opportunity to perform throughout Europe and the United States; participating in festivals such as WDR’s SoundArt-Köln Festival, Sonar, ERTZ Festival and the Ideal Festival among others. His recordings have released on Kranky, Rootstrata, Arbor and Important Records. He has composed for dance, sound installations, film and acoustic ensembles.
In 1979, Paul Metzger drilled a few innocent holes into a Yamaha acoustic guitar. A self taught musician with 5 years of playing behind him, Metzger was growing tired of the conventions of the instrument. This lobotomy was the first of many surgeries that would follow in years to come. Strings were added, subtracted, added again; the frets of the neck were disemboweled and retrofitted with a sarong like metal fingerboard plate; paint was splattered over it, a rejigged music box was affixed to the guitar’s belly, a crash cymbal mounted to its bottom. On the face of it, the instrument took on the look of a piece of tramp art. Thirty years on, Metzger plays the same guitar in rotation with a heavily modified 23 string banjo in a tireless – often isolated – search for a musical style of his own which he finally took public for the first time in 2002. His sonic vocabulary ranges from deeply satisfying & impulsive outer cosmos ragadelia to clangorous, rapidly punctuated percussive workouts. Metzger has been described as a virtuoso and a visionary whose live performances are vital, deeply visceral and simply breathtaking. Metzger has played more than 500 shows worldwide on bills with a diverse array of artists including blues legends Spider John Koerner & Tony Glover, Japanese metal act Boris, new wave revivalists Gang Gang Dance, psych acts Amen Dunes and Six Organs of Admittance, moperockers Low and fellow string journeymen Sir Richard Bishop and Jack Rose. Notable festival appearances include the Festival Météo (France), Suoni per il Popolo (Montreal, Canada), Two Rivers (Portland, Maine) and events sponsored by WFMU and The Wire magazine.
Heresy of the Free Spirit is a trio comprised of Dutch lute player Jozef Van Wissem and Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalists, Che Chen (of True Primes) on violin, bowed rawap, bass recorder, percussion and tape machines, and Robbie Lee (of Howling Hex, Baby Dee, Brightblack Morning Light) on portative organ, bass recorder, guitar, banjo and electronics. Using early European as well as non-western instruments and electronics, the trio plays arrangements of Van Wissem's lute compositions as well as free improvisations that draw on early music, folk traditions, minimalism and noise. Fully utilizing the extended techniques, unique textures and tuning possibilities of their unusual instruments, the trio use both repetition and silence as ways of entering trance-like states. Their forthcoming record, "A Prayer for Light" is a radical re-imagining of early European and American primitive music in which the sources are stretched and re-purposed to accommodate free improvisation, extended, repetitive song forms, and tape manipulations.