Brandon Lopez’s “Mess” with Chris Corsano & Sam Yulsman

Friday, May 18th, improviser, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Brandon Lopez continues his 2018 residency with the ISSUE debut of his piano trio, dubbed "Mess," with pianist Sam Yulsman and drummer Chris Corsano. Lopez has, in his own words, “spent some time attempting to hammer another nail in the coffin for the American thing.” With Mess, he attempts to dismember the notion of the piano trio to create a counterpart where each instrument functions outside of their supposed traditional roles. A sprawling thing devoid of harmony or melody, the trio insists giving violence and silence equivalent weight.

Known for a performative style of intense physicality, Lopez works between boundaries of improvisation and composition generally, often blurring the lines between harmony and percussion in his instrumental technique. His second residency presentation, ALLS WELL THAT ENDS is situated in a series of works in development that use idiosyncratic improvisational techniques within forms of traditional and graphic notation, as well as aural development, to approach broader themes of catharsis and ritual religiosity.

Brandon Lopez is a Puerto Rican/American Musician who works primarily in the field of far left music. He was raised in the wilds of Northwestern New Jersey, a place where suburban sprawl meets appalachian splendor, and worked summers as a gravedigger in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. He’s maintained an obsessive study of noise, free improvisation, non-western art musics, western art musics, new music, and early western art musics. All of the mentioned inform the work, as with everything else. He’s had the pleasure of working with some great noisemakers: He’s a current member of Nate Wooley’s knknighgh quartet and works regularly with William Parker, Paul Lytton, Jooklo Duo, Leila Bordreuil, Mette Rasmussen, Justice Yeldham, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Gerald Cleaver, Man Forever, Joe Morris and many others. He currently leads his own ensemble, The Mess with Chris Corsano and Sam Yulsman, and works extensively as a soloist.

Chris Corsano is a drummer who has been working at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and noise music since the late 1990's. He began a long-standing, high-energy musical partnership with saxophonist Paul Flaherty in 1998. Their style, which they occasionally refer to with (semi-)tongue-in-cheek humor as "The Hated Music", infuses modern free-jazz's ecstatic collectivism with the urgency and intensity ofhardcore punk. A move from western Massachusetts to the UK in 2005 led Corsano to concentrate on his solo music, an always-spontaneously-composed amalgam of extended techniques for drum set and non-percussion instruments of his own making incorporated into his kit: e.g. violin strings stretched across drum heads, modified reed instruments that transform the drums into resonators which can, in turn, be used to incite strips of metal to react to the drum membranes' Chladni-plate-like modes of vibration, etc. In February 2006, Corsano released his first solo recording, The Young Cricketer, and toured extensively throughout Europe, USA, and Japan. He spent 2007 and '08 as the drummer on Björk's Volta world tour, all the while weaving in shows and recordings on his days off with the likes of Evan Parker, Virginia Genta, C. Spencer Yeh, and Jandek. Moving back to the U.S. in 2009, Corsano returned focus to his own projects, including a duo with Michael Flower, Vampire Belt (with Bill Nace), Rangda (with Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny) and his solo work, further expanded in its use of contact microphones and synthesizers. In 2017, he received the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist Award.

Sam Yulsman is a composer, pianist, and multimedia artist whose work spans a wide range of musical idioms. As a pianist he has collaborated closely with composers as an interpreter of new works, and with improvisers in contexts where the boundaries between composed and improvised music are porous and easily traversed. Yulsman has performed and/or recorded in the United States and Europe with artists including Joe Morris, Ryan Muncy, Bill Frisell, Biliana Voutchkova, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Pheeroan akLaff, Cyrus McGoldrick (aka The Raskol Khan), CJ Camerieri, Art Lande, John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions), Chris Corsano, Nicola Hein, Brandon Lopez, Chris Heenan, Mark Miller and Weston Olencki. Recent performances of new works include premieres of Kenji Sakai’s Fanfare Towards the Dusk at the Music From Japan Festival 2017, and Chris Pitsiokos’ Working from Postcards is Good Enough If You Are Francis Picabia at Art for Art’s 2017 festival. His work has been performed by ensembles including JACK Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, loadbang, counter)induction and the Westerlies Brass Quartet. Other important collaborators include Anaïse Maviel, Roman Filiu, Collin Stranahan, Jean-Lou Treboux, Kent McKlagan, Lika Pailodze, Greg Gisbert, and Paul Romaine. In 2016 Yulsman was selected for the 1st annual Wet Ink Large Ensemble Readings Project. He is currently working on a new piece for Ensemble Korea, premiering at the Pacific Rim Music Festival in October 2017. Yulsman is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at Columbia University where he studies with George Lewis, Georg Haas, and Fred Lerdahl.