Fred Moten, Brandon López & Gerald Cleaver
Saturday, September 10th, at 7:30pm ET ISSUE will open its 2022 Fall season at First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn Heights with an in-person performance from the new improvising group of three singular artists: poet, theorist, critic Fred Moten (voice), improviser, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Brandon López (double bass), and Detroit-born jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver (drums). The evening also features composer/performer and media artist Pamela Z presenting solo works for voice, real-time electronic processing, sampled sounds, and wireless gesture controllers, plus sound artist, producer and DJ SYANIDE performing a new improvisation piece titled “8.”
Join as an ISSUE Project Room Member at any level and receive a free ticket to the performance.
The trio of Fred Moten, Brandon López, and Gerald Cleaver comes to ISSUE after having released their acclaimed eponymous album on Derek Baron’s Reading Group label earlier in 2022. López and Cleaver have been improvising together as a duo for a number of years, over which they’ve developed a secret, unspoken language of organically growing repetitive figures in a wide range of sonic palettes. López and Cleaver have long been recognized as some of the most vital voices in contemporary experimental improvised music, each with dozens of recordings and frequent performances in New York and abroad. They are joined here by Fred Moten, the inimitable poet, theorist, critic, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Moten’s presence, voicing poetry in an improvisatory syncopation with the instrumentalists, raises the music to third plane, putting the record in a broader collection of legendary spoken-word jazz records from Gil Scott-Heron and Amiri Baraka to the contemporary energies of Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements.
Pamela Z will perform a program of short solo works for voice, real-time electronic processing, sampled sounds, and wireless gesture controllers. The performance will include standalone works from her concert repertoire, excerpts from larger, more theatrical, performance works, and improvised work.
SYANIDE will be performing an improvisation piece titled ‘8’ based. This piece is rooted in an on-going introspection of intuitive ancestral technologies revealed through meditative submission. They will also be performing selections from their upcoming debut EP (exact release dates soon come)
Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside; he previously taught at Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018).[1] He has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges, The Feel Trio, B Jenkins, and Hughson’s Tavern.[2] In 2020, Moten was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for "[c]reating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life.
Brandon López is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). From the New York Philharmonic's David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, Lopez has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music. Lopez was awarded the 2018 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room and 2018 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette Intermedium and 2020 Jerome Residency Roulette. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic in Ashley Fure’s “Filament” and a number of works with John Zorn, including Zorn's 35th anniversary of “Cobra.” He’s had the pleasure of working regularly with Nate Wooley, 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.
Gerald Cleaver was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and is a product of the rich music tradition found there and also in his home. Inspired by his father, John Cleaver, also a drummer, he began playing the drums at an early age. He also played violin in elementary school and switched to trumpet during junior high and high school. While in his teens, he gained early working experience with Ali Muhammad Jackson, Lamont Hamilton, Earl Van Riper, and Pancho Hagood and later with Marcus Belgrave, Donald Walden, Rodney Whitaker, A. Spencer Barefield and Wendell Harrison. Cleaver earned a B.A. in music education from the University of Michigan. During his studies he was awarded an National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Study Fellowship to study with drummer Victor Lewis. After graduating he began teaching in Detroit, and later joined the jazz faculty at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. He relocated to New York in 2002. Cleaver has worked with Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Jacky Terrasson, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Mario Pavone, Charles Gayle, Matthew Shipp, Reggie Workman, Joe Morris, Craig Taborn, Ralph Alessi, Eddie Harris, and Miroslav Vitous, among others. In 2002 “Adjust”, recorded for the Spanish label Fresh Sound New Talent, was nominated in the Best Debut Recording category.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working primarily with voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theater, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Julia Bullock with SF Symphony, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can (NY), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal). She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, United States Artists, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
SYANIDE is a sound artist, producer and DJ born in Jersey and working out of Brooklyn. Since their debut Boiler Room set in 2019 they have quickly gained traction in NYC underground nightlife, developing their use of the CDJ technology to challenge its function as an instrument through auto-physio-psychic improvisation performances based in meditative submission. They have been featured on DISCWOMAN's 'DISCUS' podcast, as a panelist for Dweller Festival's premiere discussion 'Who Does Techno Belong To' and performed for Lubov NYC's program 'Requiems' and ESS Chicago's Quarantine Concert Series. Most recently they hosted an Improvisation Workshop with titled Black Science Fiction titled “Transmolecularization.” SYANIDE was previously commissioned to present online work with ISSUE’s With Womens Work series in Winter 2021.
