In conjunction with Erstwhile Records, Fridman Gallery and Shared Shapes, ISSUE Project Room presents AMPLIFY 2015: exploratory. Spanning three evenings, the ninth edition of this international series features three duo sets each night. The festival opening includes first-time collaboration by Chicago-based composer Olivia Block with NYC turntablist Maria Chavez. Exploratory percussionist Sean Meehan with Tokyo-based composer Taku Unami, Los Angeles-based composer/guitarist Michael Pisaro and sound artist Graham Lambkin reprise their collaboration; the pair released Schwarze Riesenfalter, on Erstwhile Records in 2015.
Taku Unami: Performer of multi-instrumental, improvised, or unclassifiable (non-)music. Composer of film scores for directors including Isao Okishima and Takeshi Furusawa. Founder of hibari music, an experimental music record label and distributor. Work influenced by cosmic-pessimism, science-fiction, supernatural-horror, and weird-fiction. Proficient in string instruments, piano, synthesizers, recording hardware and software, and “obfuscated everyday, non-musical objects”. Collaborators include Evan Calder Williams, Rhodri Davies, Masafumi Ezaki, Klaus Filip, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Kazushige Kinoshita, Radu Malfatti, Masahiko Okura, Keith Rowe, Eugene Thacker, Nikos Veliotis, Taku Sugimoto … Recorded or mastered numerous records for labels such as Erstwhile Records, skiti, slub music … Published more than 30 solo or collaborative records and performed in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and United States.
Initially enlisted as a calypso drummer in his teens, Sean Meehan later began performing more exploratory music in New York City in the late 1980s at the A Mica Bunker series for improvised music, located at the Anarchist’s Switchboard, and later at ABC No Rio. For nearly twenty years he and Tamio Shiraishi have collaborated on their annual summer concert, always in different playful and devious locations throughout New York City. Meehan recently released an audio book of Hermann von Helmholtz’s classic text from 1863, On the Sensations of Tone, and collaborated with Michelle Ellsworth on a series of concocted, self-help sets of keys to be intentionally lost, and hopefully found.
Olivia Block creates original sound compositions for concerts, site-specific multi-speaker installations, live cinema, and performance. Her compositions include field recordings, chamber instruments and electronic textures. In addition to her recorded and solo performance pieces, she creates scores for large ensemble, string quartet, and orchestra. Her solo performances include partially improvised pieces for inside piano, electronics, and amplified objects. Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals including Incubate (Tilburg), Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, and The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia and ISSUE Project Room (NYC).
Born in Lima, Peru, Maria Chavez is mainly known as an abstract turntablist & sound artist. Influenced by improvisation in contemporary art, her sound installations, visual objects and live turntable performances focus on the values of accidents and chance. Chavez DJs regularly for museums (MoMA, MoMA PS1, Haus für elektronische Künste- Basel), arts organizations (Van Alen Institute, El Museo del Barrio), various fashion houses (SunheeNY, BeBe, Bimba y Lola), radio (NTS, Concepto Radio, Radio Comeme) and clubs (Hott Club- Zurich, Bei Ruth- Berlin). She was recently awarded the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble commission for 2015 and is currently a research fellow for the Sound Arts department at Goldsmith’s University of London. She was an artist in residence at INKONST Arts in Malmö, Sweden, curator in residence with Cafe OTO, OTO Projects & Electra Productions in London, UK.
Graham Lambkin (b. 1973 in Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist, currently based in Upstate New York, who first came to prominence in the early 90’s through the formation of his music group The Shadow Ring. Combining a D.I.Y. postpunk ethic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay, The Shadow Ring created a unique hybrid sound that set them apart from their peers and continues to show as an influence today. Following the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a series of striking and highly original solo releases, including ‘Salmon Run’ (2007) and ‘Amateur Doubles’ (2012), a critically acclaimed trilogy with experimental tape musician Jason Lescalleet: ’The Breadwinner’ (2007), ‘Air Supply’ (2010) and ‘Photographs’ (2013), and ‘Making A’ (2013) a collaboration with legendary tabletop guitarist and founding member of AMM, Keith Rowe. His latest release, 'Schwarze Riesenfalter' sees Lambkin paired with renowed Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro in a musical reimagining for the texts of Georg Trakl.
Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. A member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, he has composed works for a great variety of instrumental combinations. Since 2010 portrait concerts of his music have been given in London, Paris, New York, Santiago, Tel Aviv, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Oxford, Glasgow, Moscow, Chicago, Munich, Huddersfield, Madrid, Brussels, Montpelier, Boston, Berlin, Houston, Düsseldorf, Trondheim, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Nantes, Mexico City, Seattle, Linz, San Diego and elsewhere. Recordings of his work (solo and collaborative) have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records, erstwhile records, New World Records, another timbre, slubmusic, Cathnor, Senufo Editions, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro's own imprint, Gravity Wave. Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (where he is located presently), he taught music composition and theory at Northwestern University from 1986 to 2000. In 2005/6 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He was Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor of Music Composition in the Department of Music at Harvard in the fall of 2014.
