Saturday, February 1st, ISSUE presents an evening of audio/visual collaboration with interdisciplinary artists and curators Funneled Smoke, prolific composer Vito Ricci with vocalist Lise Vachon, and Philadelphia-based experimental duo Pontiac Streator & Ulla Straus.
Funneled Smoke is a multimedia art and curatorial project which attempts to create a cross-convergence between varied audiences, promote diversity, and integrate experimental electronic music, visual art, and rave culture. Founded by Yiyang Cao and George de Moura in 2018, Funneled Smoke has since presented work from both established and under-represented artists in underground spaces across Brooklyn and recently contributed live video installations for Interzone Festival and Unsound (NYC). For this event they will be installing an immersive 3-channel rear projection rig with live video and large scale paintings.
Vito Ricci is a composer from the 1980’s downtown New York scene whose work was revived in 2015 with a retrospective double LP on the Belgian label Music From Memory. Vito has been composing work for decades working in genres that include punk, modern classical, jazz, and ambient electronic and has created scores for theatre and modern dance productions. Some of his collaborations have included work with Rashied Ali, Peter Zummo, Byard Lancaster, Blue Gene Tyranny, and the Flux Quartet. He will perform alongside Lise Vachon, singer-songwriter born and raised in Montreal. She spent years in New Orleans singing jazz and contemporary music. A resident of New York City for many years, she has been performing with Vito Ricci. Vocalise is her latest recording, produced by Ricci. The two perform an electronic meditation on “the world we are leaving our children.”
Philadelphia-based experimental duo Pontiac Streator & Ulla Straus also present new work. Having recently released full-length LP 11 Items and their debut collaborative release Chat on Huerco S.’s West Mineral Ltd imprint, the duo demonstrate a highly-developed sensibility for producing ambient interzones that transmute fleeting, everyday feels into ephemeral and organically unresolved compositions. Their recent work reveals a greater variegation of their overgrown, verdant electronics -- an ambiguous style that has become key to West Mineral Ltd.'s aesthetic. The music is neither gloomy nor ecstatic but full of transitory sensations somewhere in between those poles -- pulled in multiple directions at once, resulting in a sublime schism between true experimentalism and heavy-rhythm.
Yiyang Cao (b. 1991, China) is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist and designer born and raised in Hangzhou, China. She received her BFA in Film/Animation/Video at Rhode Island School of Design. Through moving image, participatory sculptural environments, and live video performances, Yiyang’s work investigates the rhetorics of time in new media; exploring the cross-pollination between out-of-screen and in-screen time, she attempts to provoke dimensional thought on perception and our collective states of being. She utilizes a wide range of video sources in her work including analog modular synthesizers, computer-based generative programs, recorded camera footage, and motion-graphics. She has exhibited and performed in US, Japan, Mexico, Germany, Netherlands and Denmark.
George de Moura (b. 1986, New York City) is a Columbian-American artist working in painting, animation, and experimental electronic music. de Moura’s painting explores figuration in dark environments, drawing parallels between the work of Caravaggio and contemporary nightlife culture. As a musician under the moniker “Serpent in a Straight Line” de Moura uses synthesizers, field recordings, turntables, and computer software to create work that draws influence from avant-garde tape music, cyberpunk, and left-field techno. He is a frequent collaborator of the feminist performance artist Narcissister and has performed at spaces such Studio for Art and Architecture, Envoy Enterprises. He was a 2017 resident at EMS in Stockholm, and was included in A.L. Steiner’s collaborative installation in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Vito Ricci's leading edge instinct and creativity have made him a vital and prolific composer of illuminating and compelling works. Infused with poignancy and honesty, his music has the power to linger in the listener's memory. An artist who has been called " composer of wide ranging and obsessively fascinating collection of works" by the Wire, and his soundtracks compared to "heirloom seeds put back in circulation" by Pitchfork and "elegant and snappy" by the New York Times. Vito Ricci has been on the leading edge of the downtown music scene since 1979. During his thirty-year-plus career, Mr. Ricci has scored over fifty productions including concert music, theater, dance, performance, film and video. His collaborative works include partnerships with Bob Holman, Martin Goldray, Rashied Ali, Flux Quartet, Jacob Burkhardt, Lise Vachon, and The Wooster Group. Performances of his works have been presented at The Skyball Theater, The Public Theater, La MaMa Theater, Greenwich Music House, Cooper Union, Roulette, The Knitting Factory, St. Marks Church, The Performing Garage, the Walker Arts Center and the Southern Theater, both in Minneapolis. Recent accomplishments include a performance at MOMA/PS1 with Bob Holman in November 2017, one with Lise Vachon at Pacific Rhythm in Vancouver in August 2017, a residency at Sisters, Brooklyn in 2016 with Lise Vachon, a performance at ISSUE, August 2015 with Lise and the late Steve Dalachinsky, scoring "Philosophies" for the Complexions Contemporary Ballet who went on to tour the world in 2007. Recent recordings are "My Little Life", a book/cassette published by séance-centre in 2017, "Symphony for Amiga ", a vinyl commissioned by Intelligent Instruments in 2016, a double vinyl, "I was Crossing a Bridge", a collection of his works by Music from Memory in 2015, the recording of a CD of his string quartets "I Don't Know Who I Am" by the Flux Quartet in 2009, and producing, composing and playing on Lise Vachon's CD "Vocalise" in 2006 with stellar musicians, Rashied Ali, Peter Zummo, Byard Lancaster and Blue Gene Tyranny.
Lise Vachon was born in Montreal where she grew up singing with her family. She studied piano and oboe. Always interested in songs whether in the French tradition or from other countries and time, Lise was always into the human voice. Her early work with Luc Cousineau, a singer/songwriter with whom she recorded and toured, was followed with an association with the Ville Emard Blues Band. She then created Toubabou with Michel Seguin, a percussionist, playing in concert and recording. She then ventured solo, writing. Always moving further musically and vocally she traveled in South America, the Caribbean Islands, Western Europe, Mali, Senegal, Togo, Ivory Coast, and the American Deep South. During her years in New Orleans, Lise continued her vocal explorations and song writing. She collaborated with new music composers and taught at Loyola University. Currently living in New York City, Lise has been working with Vito Ricci, an American composer and her partner in life. Commitment to exploration, influences, travels and an abiding interest in experimentation has taken her from her early singer/songwriter tradition to art songs, jazz, to contemporary music, electronic ambient, genre crossing to a spontaneous vocabulary of her own.
