Austin Sley Julian: Helio-Grave with Riley, Carolyn Hietter & Gabby Fluke-Mogul
Wednesday, June 16th at 8pm EST, sound/visual artist, improviser, and performer Austin Sley Julian presents Helio-Grave, his second commissioned work as an ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. This piece is performed as a quartet with sound artist/engineer Riley, vocalist/saxophonist Carolyn Hietter, and improviser/composer Gabby Fluke-Mogul, performed at The Mark O'Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center in Downtown Brooklyn.
Notes from Austin Sley Julian on Helio-Grave:
Facing uncertainty, the crescent abyss of the structures
you have built off of steadily coming undone
You are forced to view our macro fate as a constant.
Our comfort in distant oblivion
Planet a golden mirage, dead ahead
Through a sparse sonic landscape this distance is brought closer to you, our planet's fate engulfed in the sun. Impulse, frequencies, controlled by a pull. Red light rains.
Austin Sley Julian is a visual and sound artist, improviser, and performer born in Brooklyn, NY. Julian has worked in many visual and aural media, making countless pieces through the years, touring nationally with several music projects that he has founded, namely Sediment club, Sunk Heaven, and Signal Break. Using prepared guitar, handmade instruments, discarded artifacts and debris, Austin Sley Julian creates moving, physically jagged, harsh gestures that hurl at their audiences. Through these kinetic sounds and sculptures Julian strives to convey a physically unstable energy in his work that reflects the technological society in which it was created. In Julian’s work, structures are constructing and deconstructing in the same gesture. Sounds float and sink in the same note. Image is viscerally close and encompassing, all in the same moment. Julian’s work shows an attraction to the aesthetic that is created by this dichotomy between rhythm, structure, and total collapse. His work strives to keep the audience in a constant conflict between these polar extremes. Austin Sley Julian as an artist is aiming to evoke feelings of anguish, frustration, and inherent conflict to confront the ugly instability of this condition with realism and “pessimistic optimism.”
Riley (they/them) is a sound artist/engineer doing work primarily with inexpensive audio systems made of few component parts. In performance they aim to complete simple processes in which the relationship between the performer's body-movement and the resulting sound is emphasized.
Carolyn Hietter deals primarily with saxophones and vocals. She has been living in Brooklyn, NY for five years, performing in a variety of musical and theatrical configurations. Collaboration within and with members of Brooklyn's DIY music community is the primary way Carolyn engages with music in the city. The resonance and animation of space are her main focus in regards to performance. She is presently interpreting disparity in systems of financial and linguistic exchange, and its relationship to the hoarding of potential energy and resonant metals.
Gabby Fluke-Mogul is an improviser/composer living in New York. They exist within the threads of improvisation, the jazz continuum, noise, & experimental music. Their playing has been described as “embodied, visceral, & virtuosic.” Gabby is humbled to have collaborated with Nava Dunkelman, Joanna Mattrey, Fred Frith, Daniel Carter, Ava Mendoza, Matteo Liberatore, Phillip Greenlief, Jacob Felix Heule, Brandon Lopez, Lisa Mezzacappa, Pauline Oliveros, Danishta Rivero, among many other musicians, poets, dancers, and visual artists.
