Ariel Kalma’s boundary-blurring music spans free-jazz trips to infinite modular synthesizer and sax meditations. A pioneer in the field of modularly synthesized electronic music, he finds an ideal collaborator in Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, who has gained renown for modular synth and voice improvisations as Lichens.
Incorporating video shot in both a modernist dollhouse and a melting spring forest, this performance and live essay moves widely among sites and texts, ranging from Anna Kavan’s slipstream novels to the nineteenth-century Caribbean and from fascist glacial cosmology to ghost ships allegedly crewed by cannibal rats.
Named for Georgia Hubley’s solo project Little Black Egg, this expanded big band features Hubley and Yo La Tengo compatriots Ira Kaplan and James McNew, joined by bassist Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu), and jazz mainstays Susie Ibarra, Daniel Carter, and Taylor Ho Bynum. Australian improvisor Oren Ambarchi plays solo.
Artist, composer and improvisor C. Spencer Yeh opens his ISSUE residency with a solo performance celebrating the release of his first LP devoted entirely to the voice, "Solo Voice I – X" on Primary Information. Strategies from the recorded document serve as guidelines and a starting point for a new solo improvisation.
Tom Thayer performs accompanied by L. GRAY (aka Keith Connolly of NNCK), an exploratory piece for synthesizer, tape, and electronics dedicated to Gary Wright (author of Dream Weaver) and Italian composer Walter Marchetti. Kyle Eyre Clyd performs with theremin, room feedback, wave generators, and mono speakers.
Few bands exude the DIY ethos more than Dead Moon, one of the most revered underground bands of all time. Formidable guitarist, songwriter and all-around grunge-deity J Mascis plays solo. Borbetomagus take free-improv to the extreme in a mass of relentless noise. Improv quartet Das Audit open with heavy instrumentals.
Sabisha Friedberg presents a live mix of the third and final movement of "The Hant Variance" as a multichannel/quadraphonic piece. This finale, the most symphonic in it construction and melancholic in its tonality, is the resolution to the first two movements, released as a 2xLP on ISSUE's Distributed Objects imprint.
For the last 20 years free jazz drummer Paal Nilssen-Love has built a formidable reputation as one of the world’s most energetic and prolific musicians. His 11-piece band Large Unit is Nordic music at its most powerful, veering between sheer force and more subtle and textural passages.
Felix Bernstein is skewered, roasted, and bloodied as he launches his debut book, Notes on Post-Conceptual Poetry, into the art and poetry world that it viciously deconstructs. Alex Fleming hosts Cecilia Corrigan, Trisha Low, Merrie Cherry, and Adam Fitzgerald, with music by Cammisa Buerhaus.
David Rosenboom's "How Much Better If Plymouth Rock..." is among the composer's most radical works; a stellar ensemble performs with animation and live, light compositions. "Continental Divide" articulates harmonic resonances emerging as an opening tritone slowly finds its path to resolution.
In "Ringing Minds", David Rosenboom and collaborators extend musical interfacing with human nervous systems, detecting resonances among multiple brains. "Choose Your Universe" is an assemblage in time drawing from several major works, highlighting the vast range of musical types Rosenboom has traversed.
The field of Brain-Computer Interfacing has experienced leaps and bounds in technological progress, enabling the pursuit of applications in music and allied arts that could only be imagined before. David Rosenboom, Tim Mullen and Alex Khalil will demonstrate some of these developments first hand.