Brandon Lopez: Malediction with Michael Foster, Nina Dante, and Lucie Vítková

Friday, October 26th, improviser, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Brandon Lopez presents Malediction, his third and final piece as a 2018 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. Malediction is a piece for four players (Michael Foster on Saxophones, Nina Dante voice, Lucie Vítková on accordion and objects, and Lopez on double bass). The piece seeks to be reliant on quiet and violent sounds and to create a space where the incidental is fostered.

The evening opens with Lopez performing solo selections from his album “Quoniam Facta Sum Villis,’ recently released on Austin, Texas-based label Astral Spirits. Created, in part, as an answer to the musical "reason" of Bach cello suites, Lopez seeks to create the inverse of what's hailed as musical logic -- creating something florid and beautiful from the violent and erratic and to deny the supremacy of the written in favor of the intuitive.

Known for a performative style of intense physicality, Lopez works between boundaries of improvisation and composition generally, often blurring the lines between harmony and percussion in his instrumental technique. His final residency presentation, Malediction is situated in a series of works in development that use idiosyncratic improvisational techniques within forms of traditional and graphic notation, as well as aural development, to approach broader themes of catharsis and ritual religiosity.

Brandon Lopez is a Puerto Rican/American Musician who works primarily in the field of far left music. He was raised in the wilds of Northwestern New Jersey, a place where suburban sprawl meets Appalachian splendor, and worked summers as a gravedigger in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. He’s maintained an obsessive study of noise, free improvisation, non-western art musics, western art musics, new music, and early western art musics. All of the mentioned inform the work, as with everything else. He’s had the pleasure of working with some great noisemakers: He’s a current member of Nate Wooley’s knknighgh quartet and works regularly with William Parker, Paul Lytton, Jooklo Duo, Leila Bordreuil, Mette Rasmussen, Justice Yeldham, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Gerald Cleaver, Man Forever, Joe Morris and many others. He currently leads his own ensemble, The Mess with Chris Corsano and Sam Yulsman, and works extensively as a soloist.