Saturday, June 20th, ISSUE presents an expansive program at the Flamboyán Theater at The Clemente in the Lower East Side featuring American composer and musician Kali Malone, the ISSUE return of Puce Mary (Frederikke Hoffmeier) performing solo work, as well as Tongue Depressor, the New Haven-based duo project of multi-instrumentalists Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey.
Kali Malone performs music from her as-yet unannounced upcoming record, which is a series of pieces in septimal just intonation for electronics, cello, and double bass. The pieces are a combination of canons and textural masses that utilize rational harmony to achieve dense yet calculated beatings in the critical band area. The record features Zach Rowden (contrabass) and Lucy Railton (cello) as the recorded musicians. Malone is known for using analog and digital synthesis within compositional frameworks that utilize unique tunings and psycho-acoustic phenomena. A recent string of albums explore this interplay within electroacoustic instrumentation: woodwinds with Buchla 200 synthesiser, strings quartets with sine waves, and – most notably – the pipe organ close mic’d and spatialized. These methods culminated in the major work The Sacrificial Code, which was Boomkat's album of the year for 2019. In the live context, Malone plays both organ-based and purely electronic shows.
Puce Mary returns to ISSUE for the first time since her appearance during 2014’s Swedish Energies festival. In 2018, Hoffmeier released a standout LP The Drought on PAN. Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases, Hoffmeier broke new ground with The Drought, evolving the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge an expanded vocabulary where space, harmony, and lyricism surface into a complex sonic and literary narrative. Her working methods have often been diverse, with a sound incorporating everything from concrete sound-poetry, first person narrative, and deliberate collages of field recordings and sound sources into ominous drone and dense feedback.
Tongue Depressor, the experimental instrumental duo of Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey, work with various instrumental arrangements, but most often with fiddles. Inviting a vague narrative around Appalachian Pentecostalism, the duo has released five volumes of ecstatic, trance-inducing fiddle music, with pieces dedicated to figures such as the late snake-handling pastor Jamie Coots, French pharmacist Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, and other obscure Appalachian names such as Darlene Summerford, Maudie Lankford, and more. At ISSUE, the duo performs their singular fiddle duo alongside orchestra bells and aluminum nesting dolls.
Headquartered in Stockholm, Kali Malone is an American composer and musician who creates sonic monoliths that tug at the very material of listening. Employing acoustic and synthetic instrumentation in repetitive and extended durations, Malone’s rich harmonic textures emit a distinct emotive hue serving to generate a captivating and uncanny depth of focus. Malone has performed extensively throughout Europe and North America, with notable features at Berlin Atonal, Moogfest, Cafe Oto, Le Guess Who?, and Ina GRM. She has collaborated and performed with a variety of artists including Caterina Barbieri, Ellen Arkbro, Sorrowing Christ, Puce Mary, Free The Land, Zach Rowden, Leila Bordreuil and Lucy Railton. In 2016 she co-founded the record label XKatedral together with Maria W Horn. She holds both a BFA and MFA in electro-acoustic composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.
Puce Mary is the solo moniker of Danish born experimental artist, Frederikke Hoffmeier. Since her first LP released in 2013, the project has explored the fields of industrial noise and experimental music with a vast number of releases on labels such as PAN, Posh Isolation, iDEAL Recordings, and Ascetic House. Often identified with the now-generation of power electronics, Puce Mary has a reputation for intense live-performances that span from gripping renditions of fresh material to the the full-on fury of off-the-cuff harsh noise. Her working methods are diverse, with a sound that is constantly evolving through her latest live sets and releases, to recent collaborative work with Francesco Leali, Heith, and Alessandro Branca.
Tongue Depressor (New Haven, CT) is the duo of Henry Birdsey (fiddle, lap steel) and Zach Rowden (fiddle, upright bass, microtonal organ). They write, improvise, and perform music that draws from the fields of drone, harsh noise, and church music, often using microtonal tunings. Recent projects and releases include the the ongoing Fiddle Music series (currently 5 volumes), Dregs (December 2019/ Thalamos), Broad Is The Road That Leads To Death (2018 C/Site Recordings), and To See Not, a trio recording with percussionist Trevor Saint (Glockenspiel) released via Obsolete Staircases (Kentucky).
Henry Birdsey is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and recording engineer from Vermont, working primarily with pedal steel + lap steel, microtonal organ, violin, and homemade instruments. His music is often drone-based and involves microtonal tunings, the amplification of metal, and fragments of church music.
Zach Rowden is a American multi-instrumentalist that deals with the in-between of music and perception. The music he makes occupies genres such as spectral music, drone, folk & religious musics as well as harsh noise. He is currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. Current project and collaborators include Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble as a member and soloist, Tongue Depressor with Henry Birdsey, Figured with Ian McColm, Arien Wilkerson (TMNT AZTRO), Leila Bordreuil, Tyshawn Sorey, Robert Black, Charmaine Lee, Paul Flaherty, Austin Larkin, Chris Cretella, Matt Sargent and Wendy Eisenberg.
