Tonight as part of Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, ISSUE presents the debut live performance of Pitreleh— a new collaboration of Duane Pitre and Eleh. Both acclaimed in their own right, these two American electronic musicians come together to excavate shrouded nuances of sound, using precision tunings to uncover the depths of the harmonic series. San Francisco composer Tashi Wada presents a new piece written for and performed by the esteemed cellist Charles Curtis.
Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain– a two-month festival celebrating ISSUE Project Room's 10th anniversary– revisits seminal past projects and initiates new relationships with over 60 artists working across disciplines of sound, dance, performance, and literature. Presented as a series of 24 evenings of provocative double billings, Ten Years Alive blurs the boundaries between divergent disciplines and practices and celebrating the vibrancy of the Brooklyn experimental arts community.
Duane Pitre is an American avant-garde composer, performer, and sound artist. His work often focuses on the interaction between electronic sound and acoustic instrumentation, chaos and discipline, as well as site-specificity. The composer also utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonality, enabling him to explore unaccustomed intervallic relationships. He has created works for various instrumentation configurations such as string orchestra, his own bowed harmonic-guitar ensemble, string/wind ensembles, as well as solo works (including for himself). He has presented and performed his live works across the U.S., U.K., and Europe at spaces such as Café OTO, Roulette, The Stone, Muziekhuis Utrecht, MoMA’s P.S.1, Les Ateliers Claus, St. Ann’s Cathedral, and ISSUE (where the Jerome Foundation provided funding for his spring 2009 Artist in Residency). He has received commissions for new works by ISSUE Project Room, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and Roulette, among others. More than 100 unique musicians from around the world have taken part in the performances of his works.
Eleh was formed in 1999 as an exploration of analog synthesis. Eleh creates highly minimal and deeply spiritual pure analog electroacoustic music with emphasis on tonal juxtapositions, bass tones and various acoustic phenomenon. Eleh’s work emphasizes the physical presence of sound as it has been inspired by the physical world, with a nod to early electronic minimalist pioneers such as Pauline Oliveros and Charlemagne Palestine. Numerous LPs have been released on Important and Taiga, and a CD on Touch. Eleh’s US debut took place in November 2012 at ISSUE.
Tashi Wada was born in New York and lives in California. He received a degree in music composition from California Institute of the Arts following his studies with James Tenney. Wada’s compositions use apparently simple structures to generate rich and unanticipated perceptual effects. He performs regularly in the United States and Europe, often in collaboration with other artists including Charles Curtis, Stephan Mathieu and his father, Fluxus pioneer Yoshi Wada. Recordings of Wada’s music have been released by record labels Yik Yak and De Stijl.
Called by ArtForum "one of the great cellists" as well as "spellbinding and minimal," Charles Curtis has woven a unique career through the worlds of classical performance and musical experimentation. Curtis is an internationally acclaimed cellist of new and experimental music, with a special emphasis on the interpretation of the post-John Cage American avant-garde. He has worked extensively with pioneers of new music La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and Éliane Radigue in collaborations which straddle the boundaries between concert performance, installation and sound art. Curtis has commissioned and premiered works that re-define the cello, re-frame its basic acoustics, and place the fundamental physics of instrument and performance space in a new light.
