Saturday, October 6th, ISSUE is pleased to welcome back composer, performer, and 2008 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Ashley Paul, performing alongside longtime mentor and renowned pianist-composer Anthony Coleman. Both artists debut collaborative reinterpretations of songs by Paul, including works from her new album Lost in Shadows, as well as new compositions from Coleman. The evening also features interdisciplinary artist M Lamar presenting American Cuck, a multimedia video, environmental installation, and musical performance exploring the maintenance of white supremacy in the pornographic imagination and psyche of the U.S. nation-state. The piece follows M Lamar’s premiere of music theater piece DESTRUCTION at ISSUE In 2015.
Ashley Paul’s new album Lost In Shadows is an expansive, deeply personal excavation of recent motherhood, told through songs dissolving and recrystallizing at the threshold of free improvisation. At the album’s heart is Paul's mercurial multi-instrumental style, which renders the primal wails, clunks, and twangs of clarinet, saxophone, percussion, and guitar uncannily melodic, alchemised by frank, vulnerable vocals. Known in experimental circles for balancing delicate textures and pointed instrumental gestures within free-form compositional structures, the album is intuitively transposed into dialogue with Coleman, which is sure to further draw out the album’s unorthodox compositional forms. This performances marks the most recent development in a long lasting history of collaboration and shared aesthetic concerns between the two artists -- a history that has previously included Coleman writing work explicitly for Paul.
M Lamar presents American Cuck, specifically exploring the construction of the white male cuckold, the black male object of his obsession, and the relation of both to a plantation culture of race, desire, and violence. Indeed, it is his argument that the construction of the hyper-sexual black person in the white imagination continues to lead to our death in a white supremacist society. The hyper-sexual, hyper-physical black person in the white supremacist mind offers virtuosic pleasure and threat. On the other side of the fantasy of the “Big Black Cock” is a police officer shooting an unarmed black man or woman.
In recent years, the “Cuck" has become a prevalent pejorative among white nationalist and “alt-right” circles. The obsessive “Cuck” has become their obsession, and with it the phantasm of black male sexual terror follows. Lexically and ideologically smuggled into supposedly novel racial discourse, the old plantation fantasy persists. American Cuck seeks to place this alt-right obsession with cuckolding into historical context and explores the ways in which this newest version of an antique narrative serves as a variation on a formative theme necessary for the country’s self-identity. Any rupture in the dominant masques of the plantation fantasy sends the entire republic into crisis. Such ruptures and crises are the focus -- and the goal -- of the piece. From the plantation, to pornhub, to breitbart.com; American Cuck is a portrait of the psyche of U.S.
Ashley Paul is an American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in London. Her intuitive process integrates free form song structures with a focused approach to sound. Using a complexity of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, prepared guitar and percussion she creates a delicate palette, uniquely her own. Her solo albums have received critical acclaim; featured in The Wire: Top 50 Albums of 2013, Pitchfork’s “The Out Door” best experimental sounds of 2013, number one on Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s “Tongue Top Ten” in Arthur Magazine, and included on NPR’s All Songs Considered “Best of 2010”. Latest recording “Lost in Shadows,” released April, 2018 on Slip, was recorded in Zaragoza, Spain, during a funded residency at FUGA, Etopia. Much of the music was premiered with her quintet (2 electric guitars, tuba, saxophone, clarinet/bass clarinet, double bass, organ, percussion and voice) at Counterflows Festival, 2017, where Ashley was the Featured Artist. Ashley’s composition “The Pace of Time” premiered at Roundhouse (London), August 2013, and was performed with Nik Colk Void and Simon Fisher Turner. Ashley has performed the World and US premieres of Phill Niblock’s Asheli, a piece composed specifically for her and Eli Keszler and performed live with Niblock. She performed the US premiere of Mauricio Kagel’s Der Schall at Merkin Concert Hall (NYC) and premiered Anthony Coleman’s quartet Damaged by Sunlight at Banlieues Bleues Festival (Paris). Ashley received a residency at ISSUE Project Room in 2008 and a Fellowship Grant in composition from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts, 2010. Ashley is currently a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths University, London attached to the Contemporary Music and Popular Music Research Units. She has performed and/ or recorded with Thurston Moore, Rashad Becker, Loren Connors, Gavin Bryars, Roscoe Mitchell, Aki Onda, Greg Kelley, Joe Morris, Seijiro Murayama, Bill Nace and Heatsick. Ashley has designed, created artwork and/or screen printed album covers for labels/ organizations including Ecstatic Peace!, Northern Spy, Non-Event, REL Records, Cinematograph and her own imprint Wagtail. Her song “Leave Mine” was presented in collaboration with animator Gretta Johnson at The Children’s Museum of the Arts (NYC) and was published in the John Cage Centennial edition of the Black Mountain College Journal. Ashley received her BM and MM from New England Conservatory.
Pianist and composer Anthony Coleman has been one of the key figures of New York music for nearly four decades. His work bridges the gap between Composition and Improvisation, Uptown and Downtown, and spans a wide range of genres and practices including Free Improvisation, Jazz, Jewish music (of various types), and Contemporary Chamber Music. At the dawn of the 1980s, after earning a Masters Degree in Composition from the Yale School of Music, Coleman immersed himself in New York City’s forward-thinking circle of genre-confounding composers and improvisers that would come to be known as the Downtown Scene. The first two records Coleman played on, Glenn Branca’s Lesson No.1 and John Zorn’s Archery, are classics of a then-emerging avant garde. Balancing a powerful sense of structural logic and expressionistic color, Coleman has had a prolific career as a composer. His works have been commissioned by the Concert Artist Guild, the Jerome Foundation, the Ruhrtriennale, the Festival Banlieues Blues, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars, among others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, etc. He has presented his own work at the Sarajevo Jazz Festival (Bosnia), North Sea Jazz Festival (Holland), Saalfelden Festival (Austria), and the Krakow and Vienna Jewish Culture Festivals. Ensembles led by Coleman have recorded extensively for Tzadik and include the trio Sephardic Tinge and Selfhaters Orchestra. He has also toured and recorded with John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ribot, Shelley Hirsch, Roy Nathanson, and many others. Coleman has recorded 15 CDs under his own name, and has played on more than 150. His most recent recordings are You (New World) and The End of Summer (Tzadik). His quartet Damaged by Sunlight (2010) was issued on DVD by the French label La Huit. He has been a member of the faculty of the New England Conservatory since 2006 and has also taught at Bennington College, the Bard MFA program, and the Mannes College of Music.
M. Lamar writes songs that are at once a product of his African American heritage drawing heavily from the negro spiritual. Combined with his operatic voice and piano playing that is at once interested in western classical music and dissonant black metal Lamar’s sound makes one think that things are so catastrophic that the world might end at the conclusion of one of his tracks. M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, Funkhaus Berlin, Old First Church San Francisco, TBA21 Art Gallery, Vienna, Austria, The Peabody Museum, Salem Massachusetts, CCA, Glasgow,
