For over 20 years, Richard Youngs has been at the forefront of progressive minimalism, leaving a distinctly human fingerprint on even the most far-reaching experimentations. Tonight, as part of Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain, ISSUE brings this Glasgow-based guitarist and multi-instrumentalist to Brooklyn for his first US performance in decades.
Renowned composer and improvising keyboardist Anthony Coleman performs two works for solo piano– Oogenera in memory of Butch Morris (1947 -2013), and Metonymies of Pastness (premiere), written in honor of ISSUE's 10th Anniversary. In these works, Coleman combines his work as improviser and his work as composer to create large structures that he thinks of as Open Form (Quasi -) Sonatas. Coleman was inspired by Butch Morris's work with Conduction to try to create something that operates along similar lines, but for soloist rather than for ensemble. In the second, he looks as the piano as a kind of site of memory. He asks whether, in our current musical climate, acoustic instruments (perhaps particularly the piano) bring something nostalgic to the table even before they begin to be played.
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.
Richard Youngs, a multi-instrumentalist from Glasgow, began releasing albums in the early '90s on various independent labels. His music ranges from pure experimental, instrumental, minimal, and avant-garde through to folk-inspired songwriting and progressive rock. In songwriting mode, he finds counterparts in Robert Wyatt, Anthony Moore, and in particular other fine acts from Glasgow John Martyn and the Incredible String Band. In his more experimental projects with Simon Wickham-Smith and Brian Lavelle, the cacophonous roar is closer in style to '90s noise underground artists such as the Dead C, Sun City Girls, and White Winged Moth. For fans of intimate music, Youngs recorded many of his albums at home on portable recording equipment ranging in quality, but on record achieved beautiful and unique sounds from any range of instruments: kazoo, guitar, Casio organs, clock chimes, synthesizers, kitchen implements, and small percussion.
Anthony Coleman is a composer-pianist who was born in New York City in 1955. He has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory (Contemporary Improvisation, Jazz, Composition) for the last eight years. He divides his time between New York and Boston and touring, both as composer and performer. He has 13 CDs available under his own name, and has played on about 100 others. Relatively recent activity has included a work for quartet, Damaged by Sunlight, issued on DVD in France by La Huit, the CD Freakish: Anthony Coleman plays Jelly Roll Morton (Tzadik); a month – long residency in Venice as a guest of Venetian Heritage, a commission for the Parisian Ensemble Erik Satie: Echoes From Elsewhere; tours of Japan and Europe with guitarist Marc Ribot’s band Los Cubanos Postizos; a lecture/performance as part of the symposium Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert (Neue Perspektiven, Basel, Switzerland).His most recent release is The End of Summer (Tzadik), which features his NEC Ensemble Survivors Breakfast. Coleman has performed at ISSUE numerous times beginning in 2003, and was commissioned by ISSUE to write Empfindsamer, premiered by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn in 2012.
