11AM Welcome Reception
11:30AM-5:30PM Concert
FREE

Pre-Renovation Candlelit Performance
of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet by Ne(x)tworks

On Sunday, April 11 the public will have a chance to attend a rare performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 in its entirety when ISSUE Project Room opens its doors at 110 Livingston St. for a pre-renovation, inaugural Open House event. Performed by Ne(x)tworks, the six hour-long contemporary masterpiece will be free to the public, commemorating ISSUE’s first concert in their future Downtown Brooklyn home.

String Quartet No. 2 has been performed in its entirety only a few times, the first being in 1999 by the FLUX Quartet at Greenwich Village’s Cooper Union. The Ne(x)tworks quartet (which includes Cornelius Dufallo and Kenji Bunch, formerly of FLUX) will play the entire piece by candlelight in the cloistered hall while audience members are invited to stay for as long as little as they like. The beauty of candlelight is also a necessity as the space is still raw, in need of renovation and lighting.

“Ne(x)tworks is thrilled to present Feldman’s masterful Second String Quartet at ISSUE Project Room as our artistic endorsement of their fabulous new concert venue [at 110 Livingston],” says Ne(x)tworks’ Director, Cornelius Dufallo. “The musical community of New York City has been eagerly awaiting the opening of this performance space.”

Called his “most extreme” composition, Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (1983) is a collective paragon encompassing Feldman’s signature free rhythms, muted pitches, quiet and slowly unfolding music, and his experiments with duration.

“The focus at the time [of the premiere in 1999] seemed to be on how we were going to play for six hours without stopping,” Dufallo reflects. “As we immersed ourselves in the music, however, this began to change: we found that duration is by no means the most interesting aspect of this work. The ‘athleticism’ became more of a secondary concern to us. In this work, duration acts as a canvas, on which Feldman paints a stunningly beautiful encomium to the eternal marriage of sound and time. The piece must exist on a large scale in order to portray this relationship.”

In 2008 ISSUE Project Room won the bid for a 20-year, rent-free lease to occupy the landmark theatre at 110 Livingston St., an architecturally significant (McKim, Mead & White, 1926) and stunningly beautiful 4800 square foot performance space located in the former New York City Dept. of Education headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn. Once renovated, this space will offer opportunities to increase ISSUE’s audience, implement new programs and advance Brooklyn’s place as a cultural epicenter.

While this is an extraordinary opportunity, it is also an enormous challenge. ISSUE must still raise well over half a million dollars towards the $2.5 M needed for basic renovations. We hope that the community will join ISSUE on this amazing journey toward building a world-class center for experimental culture.

ISSUE Project Room’s Inaugural Concert @ 110 Livingston
Ne(x)tworks Performs Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2
April 11, 2010
FREE
Reception: 11 am
Performance: 11:30 am – 5:30 pm
110 Livingston St. (Entrance on Boerum Place)
Brooklyn, NY  11201

{A performance series of alternative and collaborative electro-acoustic music and video}

THURSDAY APRIL 22

8pm

THIS MONTH’S A/V

Details TBA

THIS MONTH’S MESSAGE

{R}ake is a performance series of alternative and collaborative electro-acoustic music and video. Performances range from pure improvisation to more structured pieces, with video-artists and musicians working together in exploratory ways.

Laetitia Sonami

Composer, performer, and sound installation artist Laetitia Sonami was born in France and settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the emerging field of electronic music. She studied with Eliane Radigue, Joel Chadabe, Robert Ashley and David Behrman.

Sonami’s work combines text, music and “found sound” from the world, in compositions which have been described as “performance novels. Her signature instrument, the Lady’s Glove, is fitted with a vast array of sensors which track the slightest motion of her enigmatic dance: with it Sonami can create performances where her movements can shape the music and in some instances visual environments. The lady’s glove has become a fine instrument which challenges notions of technology and virtuosity.

Sonami’s sound installations combine audio and kinetic elements embedded in ubiquitous objects such as light bulbs, rubber gloves, bags and more recently toilet plungers. She collects electrical wire and embroids them in walls.

Sonami gives extensive workshops and classes. She tries to familiarize and enthuse students to adapting old technologies and new media to the creative process and thus expand their field of imagination and play.

Sonami has been performing in numerous festivals across the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan and China, among which the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, the Bourges Music Festival in France, the Sonambiente Festival in Berlin, the Interlink festival in Japan, Bang-on-a Can, The Kitchen and Other Minds, S.F.

Awards include the Alpert Award in the Arts (2002), Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts Award (2000), the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2000), Studio Pass-Harvestworks residency (2001) and a Creative Work Fund award (2000) for a collaboration with Nick Bertoni and the Tinkers Workshop.

Sonami lives in Oakland, California and is guest lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Milton Avery MFA program at Bard College.

“.. Sonami sometimes looked like a human antenna searching the air for sounds, or like a deity summoning earth-shaking rumbles with a brusque gesture.” – New York Times

“…sultry and magical” -Village Voice

ANALOGOUS PROJECTS:

Complexity theory is not new to art or to our culture. It migrated from computer science and biology to economics and art and, with the advent of the world wide web, it invaded our collective subconscious. Analogous seeks to support complexity-driven art and artists playing under this conceptual umbrella of “Interaction Art”. Progress occurs by metaphor and analogy: Their hope is (by bringing together people and projects irrespective of media and genre) to enable philosophical crosstalk.

Complexity theory centers around the concept of emergence, which refers to the observation that individuals acting within a shared context will create something greater than the sum of its parts. Since this principle explains the richness of biology — from molecule to ecology — it is able to lend an organic nature to highly-technical projects and to guide the logistics of elaborate social experiments.

We believe an emergence-based perspective can serve as both (1) a catalyst for new and progressive works, and as (2) a way to view existing works and practices from a new light.

Our objectives:
(1) to support artist-led, complexity-driven projects technically, financially, and administratively.
(2) to develop a cross-genre community of artists and philosophers in order to facilitate new works and novel collaborations.

http://www.analogousprojects.org/

Matthew Mottel (synthesizer) has been a voice in contemporary music for the past ten years. He was an invited member of Bard College’s Electronic Music Ensemble, which was led by the eminent Richard Teitelbaum. At the same time, he was apprenticing in New York with seminal free jazz musicians Tom Bruno (TEST!), Cooper-Moore, Butch Morris and many others. He formed his own band EYE-DOOR that toured nationally in 2000, and started to collaborate with other musicians such as Chris Corsano, Sean Meehan, Daniel Carter, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear) and Kenny Wolleson.  Since 2003, he has led his own band Shadowmaps (a synth/bass/drum power trio), been the versatile keyboardist for many acclaimed New York’s rock n’ roll groups such as Awesome Color, Akron Family and Jeffrey Lewis, and now is part of a 12 piece minimalist funk collective with Colin from USAISAMONSTER.

Tim Hodgkinson: Started on alto saxophone with free-jazz and happenings group at school. Then from 68 to 78 full-time member of /Henry Cow/ on alto, clarinet, electric organ. This band played both fully scored compositions and free collective improvisations in concert. First solo improv gig 79 at /London Musicians’ Collective/, playing a set-up with varied sound sources and processors such as ring modulators, tape delay etc. Released /Splutter/, album of solo improvisations in 85, and first tour of USA in duo with Fred Frith in same year; also played with Zorn, Sharp, Staley and toured with a trio with Chris Cochrane and Pippin Barnett. Gave up improvising on keyboards in early 90’s, when I began to focus exclusively on reeds and lap steel guitar. Around the same time began a series of study trips to Siberia, playing with Siberian musicians,working with percussionist Ken Hyder. Toured and recorded with /Ossatura/ electro-acoustic improvising group in late 90’s. Current ongoing projects include: /K-Space/ with Hyder and Tuvan musician Gendos Chamzyryn. /Konk Pack /with Roger Turner and Thomas Lehn, many tours and festivals, fourth CD soon on Grob. /ZINC/ trio with Roger and Hannah Marshall. /Le Pecore di Dante/, duo with Elio Martusciello. /DACH/ quartet with Anna Maria Avram, Iancu Dumitrescu, Chris Cutler. /Black/ /Paintings/ with vocalist Nick Hobbs. /RAZ-3/ with Lu Edmunds (currently with PIL) and Ken Hyder. I’m also a member of the /Hyperion Ensemble/ in which I play bass clarinet. And of course all kinds of occasional duos and larger groups, clarinet solo gigs, improvising workshops, site-specific performances etc. In addition there is my work as a composer, and also as a part-time anthropologist, all of which feeds into my improvisation.Latest recordings:/Teshuvah/ – Milo Fine + Tim Hodgkinson (2009, Rossbin) RS028 – Italy/Klarnt/ – Tim Hodgkinson clarinet solos – (2009, ZR Records) ZRTH3, ReR – UK/Hums/ – AMP2 (Domenico Sciajno et al) + Tim Hodgkinson – (2009, Bowindo) bw13 – Italy

Chris Cochrane: has performed regularly in bands and improvised with hundreds of players. In addition to his rare solo recordings and work with a number of bands, including the legendary, groundbreaking unit No Safety, which he co-founded with harpist Zeena Parkins and Curlew he has played live and/or recorded with an array of musicians (John Zorn, Fred Frith, Mike Patton, Marc Ribot, Eszter Balint, Kato Hideki, Ikue Mori, Roy Campbell, JD Foster…) visual artists, and choreographers. He is currently working with writer,  Dennis Cooper and Choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones to re-work a theater/dance piece entitled “Them” from the mid 80’s

Jim Pugliese:  a recognized unrepentant shaker of the conventional. His artistic approach hovers between rhythmic cataclysm and spiritual inoculation. His latest, exceedingly riotous CD PHASE III Live @ Issue Project Room won Best New Release of 2008 in All About Jazz New York.

ANDREA PARKINS is a sound artist, composer and electro multi-instrumentalist who also makes/arranges objects, images and (sometimes) words. Known for her dynamic timberal explorations on the electric accordion and inventive use of generative sound processing, Andrea has appeared on more than 40 recordings on labels including Hatology, Atavistic, Knitting Factory, and Creative Sources. She has performed worldwide as a soloist, and with artists such as Nels Cline, Thomas Lehn, Fred Frith, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Otomo Yoshihide. She has also presented her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen and Experimental Intermedia, among other NYC venues. Currently, Andrea continues to develop and perform a series of Max/MSP-based audio/visual works inspired by Rube Goldberg’s circuitous contraptions, a project realized during artist’s residencies sponsored by the Hamburg Cultural Board in Germany; at Harvestworks in New York City and CESTA in the Czech Republic. For more information:

www.myspace.com/andreaparkins

Vocalist, electronic musician, composer and songwriter Christina Wheeler’s musical explorations have included forays in techno, house, 2-step, drum and bass, breakbeat, soul, dance hall, dub, world music, ambient, free jazz and improvisational forms. A native of Los Angeles, California, Ms. Wheeler graduated from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Manhattan School of Music. She has performed and recorded internationally in collaboration with a variety of artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vernon Reid, John Cale, Chaka Khan, PM Dawn, Ravi Coltrane Talvin Singh, Mocky, Jamie Lidell, Swayzak, Jan Jelinek, Modeselektor, Priest (Anti-Pop Consortium, Airborn Audio), DJ Olive, Marc Ribot, Chris Whitley, Zeena Parkins, John Carter, Fred Hopkins, Andrea Parkins, Yappac, Dolibox and Ripperton. Her work with David Byrne included international tours and television appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, and  PBS’s Sessions at West 54th Street series, and her own music was featured on MTV’s electronic music program AMP. At Lincoln Center, Ms. Wheeler premiered Randall Woolf’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing, a composition for voice, string quartet, tape and turntables with custom acetates, and the New York Underground Film Festival commissioned a new score from her and DJ Olive for the 1927 Japanese silent classic, A Page of Madness. She was featured on the New York episode of Tvframes, produced by Citytv, Toronto, Canada, and currently resides in Berlin, Germany.

Daniel Perlin was born in 1974 in North Adams, Mass.. From the age of 17, he has been traveling between the US and Rio de Janeiro Brazil, where he has worked as a media artist and sound designer. After Graduating from Brown University with degrees in Modern Culture and Media and Electronic Music Composition in 1997, he continued at Brown for his Masters in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies writing on the Brazilian cultural movement Tropicália. After completing his Masters, Daniel worked and lived in Brazil as a sound and media designer at Walter Salles’s Production Company Video Filmes. There, he continued his path begun at Brown as a sound designer, working on numerous feature films as a designer and mixer.

While in Brazil, Daniel was invited to design an installation for the book Mutations by Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Quinter et. al. for the TN Probe gallery in Tokyo Japan. This marked the first of many collaborations to come with other artists and architects. In 2003, Daniel joined the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch school of the Arts, where he continued his work as a digital media designer. In parallel, Perlin Studios was born in New York, as a multi-media design and consulting firm. Daniel worked designing sound and media for various film clients including Errol Morris (Fog of War), Todd Solondz (Palindromes), Phil Morrison (Junebug) and others. The Studio also produced sound design for television (Showtime, HBO, PBS, Discovery etc.), as well as turning its attention towards spatial and media design.

Upon completing his Masters of Fine Arts at NYU in 2005, Daniel was invited for a one-year residency through the Whitney Museum of Arts Independent Study Program in New York. During and after his residency at the Whitney, he collaborated with architects such as Vito Acconci and Steven Holl, as well as showed sound and video work in galleries and museums such as Centre Pompediou, Paris, Guggenheim New York, MOMA , ReijksMuseum Amsterdam, the Whitney Biennial, P.S.1 New York, The New Museum, New York and others. As a digital media design company, Perlin Studios has worked as spatial and sound consultants for The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, the media company Local Projects, New York, and as a social software and media design consultant for L.A.R. studios, Mexico City and Wieden + Kennedy, New York.

Carlos Giffoni

Carlos Giffoni is a Venezuelan electronic musician who resides in the New York City area since the year 2000. Currently using modular synthesizers, hand made custom instruments, and various types of analog and digital synthesis in the composition of electronic music pieces, as well as improvising live with local and international musicians. His recent solo work has focused in live analog synthesizer pieces that put his style in a line with early techno and cosmic electronic music while maintaining the harsher edge of his previous noise works.  Along his solo work he is also working on a new ‘acid music’ project called No Fun Acid.

Carlos remains a major figure in the US and international experimental music scene, performing live in New York and in a number of tours and festivals in the US, South America, Europe and Japan. He is the curator of the No Fun Fest, a yearly event in Brooklyn bringing together a wide variety of international experimental musicians as well as running the No Fun Productions label. His work has been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Wire, Pitchfork, Art Forum, Tokion, Signal to Noise and many others.

He also holds an MFA in design and technology from Parsons School of Design.

Recent live and recording collaborations include work with:

Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Nels Cline, Chris Corsano, Peter Rehberg, Chuck Bettis, Nautical Almanac, Smegma, Yasunao Tone, Emeralds, Gert-Jan Prins, John Duncan, Rudolf E.ber, Lasse Marhaug, Z. Karkowski, Merzbow, Astro, Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori and more.

The New Roaratoria is generously supported by the Greenwall Foundation

including the premiere of “The Occupants”, a new piece by Stephan Moore, an exploration of multi-user generative composition.

Stephan Moore is a composer, performer, audio artist, and sound designer in New York City. His creative work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. Many of his performances and installation artworks make use of large, multi-channel arrays of his Hemisphere speakers. He performs regularly with Scott Smallwood in the electronic duo Evidence, and with a variety of musicians, live-video artists, and dancers. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught college-level courses in composition, sound art and electronic music at several schools. He is currently the Sound Engineer and Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and one of its core musicians.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and was the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season.

Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. Exhibitions of his work include: the Insitut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; 2008 Democratic National Convention, Denver; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; San Jose Museum of Art; National Constitution Center, Philadelphia; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; 2007 Sundance Film Festival; and the Sydney Film Festival.

An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. He currently performs as part of Bioluminescence, a duo with vocalist Lesley Flanigan that explores the modality of the human voice, and in Fair Use, a trio with Zach Layton and Matthew Ostrowski, that looks at our accelerating culture through elecronic performance and remixing of cinema.

DuBois has lived for the last fifteen years in New York City. He teaches at the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. His records are available on Caipirinha/Sire, Liquid Sky, C74, and Cantaloupe Music. His artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.

Marina Rosenfeld

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York City. Her work has deployed both musical and visual media, including a noted series of performance works; sound installation; video; photography and hybrid forms drawing on these. While still a student, in 1994 she created the Sheer Frost Orchestra, a musical performance realized by 17 women on floor-bound electric guitars, deploying nail-polish bottles as sensitive and magical sound-producing implements. Other large-scale works include the performances Emotional Orchestra (Deitch Projects, New York, Tate Modern, London), WHITE LINES (Wien Modern, British School at Rome, Taktlos Bern, Weld/Stockholm and others), and 2008’s Teenage Lontano, a work for 34-voice teenaged choir and suspended speaker installation. Teenage Lontano, Rosenfeld’s “cover version” of Gyorgy Ligeti’s orchestral work Lontano of 1967, was premiered in the vast Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial 2008. “Watching this piece, I felt the opening of a portal between a failed utopian past and the possibility that the more real present is already something to love. I was transported.” (New York Magazine, 2008). The work had its European premiere in Amsterdam in June 2009 as a co-production of the Holland Festival and Stedelijk Museum.

Rosenfeld also performs frequently in the US and Europe as an improviser, playing a distinctive combination of turntables and her own dub plates, for which she composes original music; these records are later remixed, manipulated, and otherwise transformed in live performance, sometimes by other turntablists as well as herself. Rosenfeld’s collaborators have included Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, George Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Nels Cline, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Martin Tétreault, Philip Jeck, Kim Gordon, Christof Kurzmann, Alan Licht, Dieb 13, Raz Mesinai, Anthony Coleman, and many others.

Rosenfeld’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including two Whitney Biennials (2002 and 2008); Creative Time’s project for the World Financial Center site after September 11; survey exhibitions such as “Bitstreams” (Whitney Museum), “Her Noise” (Electra), “Music / Video” (Bronx Museum & Strassbourg Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain), “Electronic Music Archive” (Kunsthalle St. Gallen), and “New Sounds New York” (The Kitchen); and major festivals in North America and Europe including Wein Modern, Donaueschingen, the Holland Festival, Ars Electronica, Musikprotokoll, Pro Musica Nova, Maerz Musik, Mutek, Electronic Music Foundation/Ear to the Earth, and Los Angeles’ CEIAT festival, among others. Rosenfeld has also performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; with the art-band “Text of Light”; with Sonic Youth during their “Good-bye Twentieth Century” tour; and was part of the London Musicians Collective’s “Turntable Hell” project.

Kusum

Focusing on the voice in performance and installation, Kusum Normoyle performs with noise, intervention and the rearrangement of performance structures, utilising site specific locations and high energy physical and vocal output. Her vocal style has formed an alignment with extreme extended vocal techniques, using the microphone and amplification system as an instrument on which the performance is dependant. Pushing the threshold of violence, short in duration and coming up from behind you, Kusums performances are highly specific events that effect through volume and her clipping, broken vocal style. Residing in Sydney, her work has taken her interstate and internationally as a solo and collaborative performer and musician.

www.myspace.com/kusumnormoyle

LoVid

LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.