The Steve Circuit by Yuko Otomo & Matt Mottel: Spring Street with Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon

This Summer, 2020, ISSUE and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council present The Steve Circuit, an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist Matt Mottel. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Dalachinsky was an unforgettable fixture within particular strains of experimental music, poetry, and art—and at cultural happenings and gatherings of all kinds in Lower Manhattan and beyond. Dalachinsky was an important figure to many. He passed away September 16th, 2019.

Steve’s art was created in tandem with the public life he lived. The places he inhabited—arts venues, community gardens, the New York Public Library neighborhood branch, his Spring Street sidewalk store—were all part of his daily routine. He was influenced by the culture he witnessed. He created his art both in public and at home. Late at night, in his apartment, after returning from film screenings, art openings, and multiple concerts, he returned to his collage artwork and to type up the poems he had written by hand during the day out in the world.

Over the course of six events throughout the Summer, 2020, these historical sites will be revealed in a weekly online presentation. Each week, videos made by Otomo & Mottel will be streamed pairing Dalachinsky text, recordings, and artwork, with additional artistic collaborators who were part of the Dalachinsky orbit. The online cultural map and presentation will provide a “virtual polaroid snapshot” of Downtown New York’s cultural history.

In addition to Otomo and Mottel, the series will feature contributions from Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon, Andrew Lampert, Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, Tom Surgal & Lin Culbertson, William Parker & Matthew Shipp, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer, and Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille.

Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual poet of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays, travelogues, translates and keeps her cultural journal. She showed her visual work at Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128 and Vision Festival etc. She read at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Bowery Poetry Club, The Stone, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Cornelia St. Café, NYU, and NYPL in NYC and in France, Germany and Japan. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Small Poems (Ugly Ducking Press), The Hand of the Poet (UDP), Cornell Box Poems (Sisyphus Press), PINK (Sisyphus Press), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press), FROZEN HEATWAVE: a collaborative linked poem project with Steve Dalachinsky (Luna Bisonte Prods) and the most recent Anonymous Landscape (Lithic Press). She lives in New York City.

Matt Mottel enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures and music. Mottel’s comprehensive artistic foraging stems from his native New York upbringing. ‘Moonlight University’ was in session, with Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo, who he first encountered as a teenager on the downtown new york scene in the late 90’s. In 2010, Mottel was selected by the late ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiole as an Artist in Residence, and it was in this period that he developed an ongoing multimedia project that utilizes the cultural photography of his father, Syeus Mottel. He is currently researching the 18th century era of the keytar and is also inspired by the 24 hour format that was HnH Bagels…. ‘it's everything.’

Vito Ricci's leading edge instinct and creativity have made him a vital and prolific composer of illuminating and compelling works. Infused with poignancy and honesty, his music has the power to linger in the listener's memory. An artist who has been called " composer of wide ranging and obsessively fascinating collection of works" by the Wire, and his soundtracks compared to "heirloom seeds put back in circulation" by Pitchfork and "elegant and snappy" by the New York Times. Vito Ricci has been on the leading edge of the downtown music scene since 1979. During his thirty-year-plus career, Mr. Ricci has scored over fifty productions including concert music, theater, dance, performance, film and video. His collaborative works include partnerships with Bob Holman, Martin Goldray, Rashied Ali, Flux Quartet, Jacob Burkhardt, Lise Vachon, and The Wooster Group. Performances of his works have been presented at The Skyball Theater, The Public Theater, La MaMa Theater, Greenwich Music House, Cooper Union, Roulette, The Knitting Factory, St. Marks Church, The Performing Garage, the Walker Arts Center and the Southern Theater, both in Minneapolis. Recent accomplishments include a performance at MOMA/PS1 with Bob Holman in November 2017, one with Lise Vachon at Pacific Rhythm in Vancouver in August 2017, a residency at Sisters, Brooklyn in 2016 with Lise Vachon, a performance at ISSUE, August 2015 with Lise and the late Steve Dalachinsky, scoring "Philosophies" for the Complexions Contemporary Ballet who went on to tour the world in 2007. Recent recordings are "My Little Life", a book/cassette published by séance-centre in 2017, "Symphony for Amiga ", a vinyl commissioned by Intelligent Instruments in 2016, a double vinyl, "I was Crossing a Bridge", a collection of his works by Music from Memory in 2015, the recording of a CD of his string quartets "I Don't Know Who I Am" by the Flux Quartet in 2009, and producing, composing and playing on Lise Vachon's CD "Vocalise" in 2006 with stellar musicians, Rashied Ali, Peter Zummo, Byard Lancaster and Blue Gene Tyranny.

Lise Vachon was born in Montreal where she grew up singing with her family. She studied piano and oboe. Always interested in songs whether in the French tradition or from other countries and time, Lise was always into the human voice. Her early work with Luc Cousineau, a singer/songwriter with whom she recorded and toured, was followed with an association with the Ville Emard Blues Band. She then created Toubabou with Michel Seguin, a percussionist, playing in concert and recording. She then ventured solo, writing. Always moving further musically and vocally she traveled in South America, the Caribbean Islands, Western Europe, Mali, Senegal, Togo, Ivory Coast, and the American Deep South. During her years in New Orleans, Lise continued her vocal explorations and song writing. She collaborated with new music composers and taught at Loyola University. Currently living in New York City, Lise has been working with Vito Ricci, an American composer and her partner in life. Commitment to exploration, influences, travels and an abiding interest in experimentation has taken her from her early singer/songwriter tradition to art songs, jazz, to contemporary music, electronic ambient, genre crossing to a spontaneous vocabulary of her own.