Thursday, December 16th, ISSUE is thrilled to commemorate the close of the 2021 season with a special year-end event featuring legendary New York band Gang Gang Dance, and writer/artist Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves. The performances will take place at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights.
Since their inception as an improvisational outfit in the early 2000s, Gang Gang Dance have propelled themselves on an arc that can only be described in terms of evolution. Composed of Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian DeGraw, Josh Diamond and Tim DeWit—four individuals with strong ties to the NYC art community—the band has displayed a boundless experimental energy that has morphed various avant-garde influences into visionary songwriting. The band has released six full length albums on labels such as Warp and 4AD, most recently Kazuashita in 2018. With Bougatsos’s explosive percussion and intangible vocalizations, DeGraw’s soundscapes and production, and Josh Diamond’s ephemeral guitar work—Gang Gang Dance return for their first concert since 2019.
Gang Gang Dance will be composing a new, specific performance for this event.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves will perform a draft portion from the forthcoming Krystal Palais Babylon Cathedral, her Brown University MFA thesis expected Spring 2023. In spring 2020, Greaves presented I Have Been Alive. And I Intend to Live with ISSUE as a part of the Isolated Field Recording Series.
Gang Gang Dance and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves may also collaborate.
Gang Gang Dance is a critically-acclaimed experimental dance band which has been active for more than two decades. The band has released six full length albums on labels such as Warp and 4AD and is comprised of Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian DeGraw, and Josh Diamond. Singer Lizzi Bougatsos is a visual artist and experimental musician known for pairing her unique vocal style with electronics and percussion. Her lyrics often push into the unsayable, evoking out-of-body experiences and sweeping, otherworldly encounters. Combining poetry and melody, her incantatory vocalizations and rhythmic phrasings also activate a space of sonic healing. Bougatsos is also known as half of I.U.D, a percussion-based collaboration with the painter Sadie Laska, who have performed at ISSUE on multiple occasions. In 2019, Lizzi also produced ISSUE’s annual Members Mixtape. Brian DeGraw is an interdisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. In addition to his work with Gang Gang Dance, DeGraw’s past musical collaborations include SAAB Songs with Harmony Korine, and Angelblood with Lizzi Bougatsos and Rita Ackermann—a death metal-inspired band known for their subversive live performances. In 2012, he conducted a series of performances with musician and poet Mykki Blanco in New York and Los Angeles, and with Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip) at the ICA in London. He has recently turned his attention to composing music for films, and has produced scores for films by the artists Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Dara Friedman, director Chloe Sevigny, and a feature length documentary on the life of artist Dash Snow by Cheryl Dunn. Both Bougatsos and DeGraw’s visual art have been widely exhibited and are included in many permanent collections. They are both represented by James Fuentes Gallery. Guitarist and band co-founder Josh Diamond has also recently released his first solo EP, Seek Rips, this past April. The release comprises works from 2006-2021.
Selected collaborative projects by Gang Gang Dance include a score for Deborah Hay’s piece “TEN” (performed at MoMA, NY) and a live performance with the infamous Japanese noise band Boredoms. For the latter, Gang Gang Dance led 88 live drummers in Brooklyn, an event that was synchronized with another live performance happening simultaneously in California. The band also collaborated with The Spiritual Community of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lizzi again at the Knockdown Center. Gang Gang Dance was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2008. The band has toured internationally for more than two decades. Bougatsos and DeGraw recently broadcasted from their home studio in Brooklyn, NY for ODA.
Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (1980, New York City) writes ethnobotanical literary criticism, and collages detritus into heraldic devices engaging ever expanding networks of reference through the granular analytics of poetic inquiry. Her work has been published, anthologized, exhibited, and reviewed by About Place Journal, The Recluse, Belladonna*, Kore Press, Pinsapo Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Ugly Duckling Presse, Artists Space, ISSUE Project Room, Hyperallergic, and 4 Columns. Formerly a Monday Night Reading Series curator at The Poetry Project, site director for Wendy's Subway, and an artist-in-residence at Rauschenberg Residency, Greaves is currently based in Providence, Rhode Island where she is Young Mother of The Florxal Review and a candidate for the MFA in Poetry from the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.
