CAROLINE PARTAMIAN
Thursday, September 30th at 8pm ET, ISSUE is pleased to present acclaimed poet Anne Waldman joined by bassist William Parker and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis as part of the 2021 Brooklyn Book Festival. Together, they will perform from Waldman's album Sciamachy and other recent works making use of melodic themes, improvisations, earth strings, woodwind, and throat. The program also features sound and visual artist Caroline Partamian, performing an original composition based on research and her own interpretation of Khaz, an ancient notation system of Armenian musical neumes.
In the spring of 2020, Anne Waldman released her latest tour-de-force, Sciamachy on her New York label, Fast Speaking Music. Derived from Greek, sciamachy means “shadow war,” and as such the album contains a formidable political message—dealing with subjects such as ecological ruin and war-mongering. In keeping with Waldman’s life-long ethos of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Sciamachy featured Laurie Anderson on electric violin, Deb Googe (of My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream) on baritone bass, free jazz legend William Parker on n’goni, Guro Moe and Hävard Skaset (of the Norweigan hardcore group MoE) on electric bass and guitar, Waldman’s son Ambrose Bye on synthesizer, and her nephew Devin Brahja Waldman on saxophone, drums and production. Sciamachy finds Anne at the height of her luminary power, and further solidifies her position as cult literary hero for multiple generations.
Over the last year Caroline Partamian has been researching and experimenting with Khaz, an ancient notation system of Armenian musical neumes used to transcribe religious Armenian music since the 8th century, which has since been replaced by Hamparsum notation and later Western musical notation. Scholars have studied Khaz, but it's incredibly difficult to determine one right way of interpreting these figures. This is because monks and priests across various townships (up to present day) have relied on their own individual oral traditions to interpret these sonic expressions. Partamian describes being drawn to this because “there is no right or wrong way in interpreting these figures, which ties back to my practice of graphic notation and curiosities in translation of both text and sound.”
For this performance, Partamian will create and perform an original composition based on her research and her own interpretation of Khaz, the individual neumes themselves as well as some of the manuscripts on which they appear. With an artistic practice deeply tied to kinetics and somatics, Partamian’s process of transcribing Khaz neumes for this sonic performance will reveal itself through direct dialogue with these sonic expressions. The performance utilizes an analog KORG MS-20 Synthesizer along with an acoustic instrument to bridge these notions of ancient and modern interpretation.
Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist. Her work is influenced by her training in dance as she integrates the concept of abreaction into her work – the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware; these memories can take many forms – traumatic, erotic, comforting, etc. By focusing on the process rather than the anticipated result, her work encourages what can be revealed when one becomes conscious of their kinetic movement in the process of creation. Her work has taken on the form of compositions, graphic notations, sound environments, books, video, and more. She has shown work at BoxoPROJECTS, Marfa Open, Wassaic Project, Otion Front, Flux Factory, Anthology Film Archives, Babycastles, Compound Yucca Valley, and has recently collaborated with Julia Santoli as part of ISSUE's 'With Womens Work' commissions during Winter 2021. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists' and her own works-in-progress and experiments.
