A limited number of tickets are available at Other Music, 15 E. 4th St. NYC, online pre-sale is SOLD OUT.
Keiji Haino, legend of the Japanese underground, returns to Brooklyn for two nights following up his sold out series at ISSUE in 2013. Tonight he takes the stage in a special duo with Tony Conrad, a luminary of minimalism and the New York avant-garde. These master improvisers of experimental music first joined forces in 2006, this will be their first NY appearance together since 2009. The dynamic cellist Okkyung Lee, celebrated for her raw and deeply tactile solo improvisations, opens the evening.
One of most widely recognized and legendary guitarists to come out of Japanese underground rock scene of the 1970s, Keiji Haino is well known for his harsh blues-inspired solo guitar performances and torrential walls of sound with his band Fushitsusha. Much of his work bears an insular singularity, but his varied output eschews a signature style. Haino cites a broad range of influences, including troubadour music, Marlene Dietrich, Iannis Xenakis, Syd Barrett, and Charlie Parker. He has had a long love affair with early blues music, particularly the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and is heavily inspired by the Japanese musical concept of “Ma,” the silent spaces in music. For the last 40 years Haino has been prolific in his output and collaborations, working with everyone from Faust, Boris, Derek Bailey, Loren Connors, Stephen O'Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke and John Zorn.
Polymath Tony Conrad is known by many names: composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator. Associated with the founding of minimal music and underground film, he is well known for his pivotal role in the formation of the Velvet Underground and as a co-founder The Dream Syndicate— who utilized intonation and sustained sound to produce what the group called "dream music", what we know now as drone. Conrad has composed more than a dozen audio works with special scales and tuning for solo amplified violin with amplified strings. Conrad has played and collaborated with Rhys Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine, Jennifer Walshe, Tony Oursler, Eli Keszler, and many others. In the early 1970s Conrad produced several series of works that severely stretched the limits of “film,” including his cooked and electrocuted films, and the “Yellow Movie” series, and "The Flicker" (1966), which is considered a key early work of the structural film movement. Conrad’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta, Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, LA Museum of Contemporary Art, and many others. He exhibits at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York and Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne. Conrad’s early career is the subject of a study by Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone, 2008). Conrad is a founding member of the ISSUE Project Room Board.
Cellist Okkyung Lee is one of the most dynamic forces in improvised music today, a fearless and compelling musician whose playing incorporates a love of noise, extraordinary technique and elements from the outer fringes of contemporary composition. Originally from South Korea but now based in New York and Berlin, Lee has collaborated with many of the leading figures in creative music today, including Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Wadada Leo Smith, Ikue Mori, Evan Parker, C. Spencer Yeh, Carlos Giffoni and Maja Rajtke. In 2013 she released 'Ghil' an LP of coruscating solo improvisations recorded direct to dictaphone by Lasse Marhaug that has been widely hailed as the 'noise record of the year', and she also curated the 2013 edition of the Music Unlimited festival in Wels. Lee was an ISSUE Artist-In-Residence in 2011.
