The New York Review of Cocksucking

Friday, November 1st, ISSUE presents an expansive gathering of NYC artists working across disciplines. Cellist/composer Leila Bordreuil and guitarist/composer Lee Ranaldo debut an improvised duet, and are then joined by sound artist Stephan Moore, presenting a new collaboration that embarks from their previous trio performance at ISSUE in 2016. Artist Asha Sheshadri stages a new iteration of her essayistic performance practice -- a hybrid process that commingles memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and lost or silenced histories and diasporas. The New York Review of Cocksucking, the ecstatic duo of Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman (members of 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Queer Trash), also perform.

The New York Review of Cocksucking was formed by Richard Kamerman & Michael Foster via Tinder and by way of Luxury Lounge, where after finally meeting at a noise show in someone's house they promptly decided to forgo all formalities associated with online dating and start a noise duo together instead. Writing for Jazz Right Now, critic Clifford Allen describes the duo as belonging “in a tradition somewhere between John Duncan and Alfred 23 Harth, a path that will continue to fascinate and upend and which is absolutely necessary in this darkly draconian age.”

Richard Kamerman has been breaking electronics and crashing computers while trying to coax interesting and unpredictable sounds out of them for over a decade. Occasionally, he has also presented himself as a more serious composer of re-performable written music. Keywords: amplification, magnification, obfuscation, systems design, game theory, patterns, human error, accident, failure. Although a firm believer in the axiom that "one man's trash is another man's treasure," he ceased collecting his instruments from piles of junk left on the curb several years ago, fearing he might bring home bedbugs. Recordings of his solo or collaborative works have been released by Erstwhile Records, Pilgrim Talk, Contour Editions, RRRecords, and Engraved Glass, among others. Kamerman has performed throughout the US as well as internationally in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Michael Foster is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist working in the fields of improvisation, noise, jazz, experimental composition, performance art, and other forms of weird music. Foster utilizes extensive instrumental preparations, augmenting his saxophone with amplification, objects, balloons, drum heads, vibrators, tapes, and samples as a method of subverting and queering the instrument’s history and traditional roles. In addition to his work as a performer he is also active as a curator throughout New York City, co-founding "Queer Trash," a curatorial collective focusing on providing visibility to LGBTQIA+ performers engaged in experimental performance practices. His current ensembles include duos with cellist Leila Bordreuil, percussionist Ben Bennett, poet/vocalist Lydia Lunch, Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking), Ted Byrnes, Claire Rousay, Barker Trio (with Tim Dahl, & Andrew Barker), While We Still Have Bodies (with Sean Ali, Ben Gerstein, & Flin van Hemmen), and many others. In addition to these longstanding projects he often collaborates with Sarah Hennies, Marina Rosenfeld, Weasel Walter, Han Bennink, Joe McPhee, William Parker, Luke Stewart, Brandon Lopez, Dave Rempis, Katherine Young, Michael Zerang, James Ilgenfritz, Pascal Niggenkemper, Mette Rasmussen, Psychic TV, and many others.