Alvin Lucier "Hard Wood" - performed by The Daxophone Consort

Saturday, March 30th, ISSUE presents composers and instrumentalists Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom -- the U.S.'s only extant daxophone consort. The daxophone is a thin wooden strip played with a bow, which was created by the German improviser/inventor Hans Reichel in 1987. The instrument’s sound, somewhere between a cello and badger, ranges from furtive gurgles and delicate whistles to wild screams.

Drawing on backgrounds in instrument building, theater, costume, and traditional music, the trio develops realizations of historical experimental music and creates new compositions out of a shared improvisational grammar. Past collaborators have included Ellen Fullman, music theorist Mack Hagood, and the LeStrange Viols. In 2015 they performed at Dublin’s Science Gallery as part of Trauma: Built to Break, an exhibition on art and trauma. In 2016 they participated in Fishkin’s ambitious series of concerts in Philadelphia, supported by The Pew Center, which posed the question “What is Tinnitus Music?”

At ISSUE, the group presents a varied program including an open improvisation, a new collaboration with NYC experimental vocalist and composer Judith Berkson, and the premiere of a new commission, HARD WOOD, for daxophones by the esteemed experimental composer Alvin Lucier (performed as a quartet with Trevor Saint)

Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. Composer, sound artist, and instrument builder. Completely ambivalent about music. Daniel studied with composer Maryanne Amacher and with multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart. He has performed as a soloist on modular synthesizer with the American Symphony Orchestra, developed sound installations in abandoned concert halls, and played innumerable basement punk shows. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press (Nature Journal, 2014); as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung. Recent activities include Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2016, taking place in Philadelphia, PA, supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Daniel received his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan University, has taught analog synthesis at Bard College. After a stint working toward his PhD at University of California, San Diego, Daniel returned to the East Coast, and now lives in Queens, NY.

Cleek Schrey is fiddler, improviser, and composer from Virginia, now based in NYC. Recent engagements include the Big Ears Festival (TN), the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IR), SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic (Aus). Frequent collaborators include the electronic music pioneer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, and the traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. The journal Sound Post has noted that Cleek “possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound”. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Music Composition at Princeton University.

Ron Shalom is a producer, composer, instrumentalist and theater maker. Minivan is his electropop project featuring custom lights, instructional dance and disintegrating drag. Fers Yn Ri is the ensemble dedicated to his baroque death pop. He studied music and linguistics at Oberlin College and Conservatory and completed his master’s in composition at Wesleyan University, where he also directed the erstwhile Cult of the Illuminated Orifice, an amateur performance troupe that probed public life with theatrical interventions such as the Mobile Colonoscopy Clinic. Solo artist residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts and Rhizome DC. As part of a composer's collective with Daniel Fishkin and Cleek Schrey, residencies include Harvestworks, Princeton University, with support from The Pew Center at The Rotunda, and forthcoming at the Watermill Center.

Composer Judith Berkson uses voice along with digital and analog keyboards to create work that cross the boundaries of classical, electronic, and experimental music. She has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet, City Opera, Laurie Anderson and has worked with new music ensembles including Mivos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire, Experiments in Opera and the Boston Microtonal Society. As a vocalist, she has premiered works by Chaya Czernowin, Enno Poppe, Mick Barr, Joe Maneri, Rick Burkhardt, Gerard Pape, Alvin Lucier, Julia Werntz and Aleksandra Vrebalov. Her solo album Oylam on ECM Records was called "Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record. I can't get enough of it” (New York Times). She has collaborated on Yiddish folk music with Theodore Bikel and has presented solo works at the Picasso Museum Malaga, Le Poisson Rouge, National Sawdust and the Jewish Museum. In 2012, she completed The Vienna Rite a chamber opera based on the friendship between composer Franz Schubert and the Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer during the 19th century which premiered at Roulette Intermedium with costume and set design by Audrey Robinson. Her current work focuses on microtonal writing for acoustic instruments, especially the voice.