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Jul 05

MAMI Market

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The MAMI MARKET is an all-day marketplace featuring goods for sale by local womxn-identified//qtpoc artists and entrepreneurs, a lineup of DJ sets, discussions, and workshops. Organized with love by BALTI GURLS, Browntourage, Ladin Awad, Top Rank Magazine, POWRPLNT, and the MAMI Curatorial Team. For*Us*By*Us* This event is presented as part of MAMI, on view at Knockdown Center from August 6 – September 4, 2016.

ALL DAY:
**LEVEL UP YOUR 2-STEP: Aural blessings by DJ Trillnatured, DJ Selam and Jaqi Sparro
**BE THE STAR OF YOUR OWN LIFE: Green Screen photo opp, courtesy of POWRPLNT

1:15-2:15PM:
BALTI GURLS in Conversation- An open discussion facilitated by Baltimore-based WOC arts collective Balti Gurls, in collaboration with Mami Market vendors, collectives, and guests about the politics of “safe space.” Does it exist?//How can it function?//Can it be achieved?

2:30-5:30PM:
SMART GIRL CLUB presents: “A Miidnight Summer’s Dream: Goddess, Siren, Nymph”, a healing workshop. Smart Girl Club is an urban feminist collective based in the arts and community outreach. Founded by Destiny Frasqueri and Milah Libin, Smart Girl Club aims to empower women of all shapes, sizes, colors, sexualities, and orientations by focusing on creative collaboration and celebration between women. For it’s third time, SGC will host a healing workshop led by Destiny and Milah. This workshop will be a light, sweet & intoxicating afternoon of activities such as elemental magic healing, Fairy Magick, Goddess Worship, Self Love, Color & Sound Therapy. Ethereal, Goddess, Witchy Attire is encouraged.
**$5 suggested donation. RSVP AT witchesofhealingrsvp@gmail.com with your name, age, and why you want to participate in the workshop.**

3:45-4:45PM:
TOP RANK MAGAZINE Live Podcast Episode: A conversation with writer Doreen St. Felix, Arianna Gil (brujas) + Ryann Holmes (bklyn boihood), hosted by Isabel Flower and Marcel Rosa-Salas.

5-6PM:
Soul line dance workshop taught by the one and only Empire City Line Dancers. You will learn the latest line dances from around the US, danced to current and classic R&B music. Great introductory workshop for first timers!

7PM:
Performance by Shea Boogie Mizrahi

Jun 20

Long Term Exposure: Transaction closing peformance

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Pat Noecker will set up 10 amps in a circle and execute his tonal sound work called “Long Term Exposure” for the closing of Transaction, an exhibition of 23 suspended personal artifacts organized by Elijah Wheat Showroom. A floor rug and pillow will be positioned in front of each amp in order to provide listeners with an immersive experience where they will be bathed in sustained sine waves over a period of 30 minutes. Long Term Exposure was designed using tone-generating apps with the aim to positively alter the physical body through protracted sound.  The piece grew from Noecker’s experiments playing tone-generating apps, most recently for Hopes And Fears Magazine and at Trans-Pecos.

BIO
RAFT is the sound and music exploration of Pat Noecker. He has been exploring composition through IOS apps and the potentiality of crowd-sourced collage since 2012. Noecker’s projects have received critical acclaim from Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Wire, Spin, and numerous other publications and he has performed for MoMA, the Whitney, PS1, the Kennedy Center, the Getty Museum, London ICA, and the San Francisco Fillmore, among many other cultural and underground venues.
Jun 02

You Are Here (Trouble Maze) Music Festival

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Knockdown Center presents the infamous You Are Here (Trouble Maze) Music Festival: a series of live concerts inside a giant string maze.  2016’s incarnation will bring a new design, and a much larger maze than previous installations. Co-presented by Trans-Pecos. Trouble is Sam Hillmer, Laura Paris, and Lawrence Mesich. They are devoted to creating extreme environments that have no exterior, public art both condoned and illegal, and other kinds of visual/sound art.

Tickets are $10 in advance / $15 at the door

YAH_all_7

 

ABOUT THE SHOWS:

6/30 show: New York City’s street scenes of skate rap and industrial art-punk meets Abdu Ali’s Balitmore queer afro-futurist noise. Venus X of GHE20G0TH1K mixes international, urban, and Internet-inspired tracks into a distinctly ghetto goth sound.

7/1 show: Intergenerational bill of noise/no wave practitioners converge for an evening of difficult listening.  Arto Lindsay in town from Brazil. Not to be missed!

7/2 daytime show: Pre-apocalyptic grime and drone music meets the DJs from House of Feelings’ obscure disco, house, and techno– plus the occasional dance pop.

7/2 nighttime show: Tryna Function presents an evening of crystallised grime, hip-hop, and ambient sounds. Suicideyear brings Southern trap influences to his deep house tracks, while serpentwithfeet promises a uniquely performative pagan gospel act.

7/3 daytime show: Hip-hop is pushed to the limit by these artists mixing electronic trap with synth, dancehall with queer club music, and soulful house with fuzzy sonic sounds.

7/3 nighttime show: A medley of electronic and techno artists deliver fuzzy synth, delicate nature-inspired sounds, and elegant electroacoustic music.

7/4 show: A high-energy evening with Mister Wallace boldly spitting clever rhymes over solid, bass-thumping beats, and electronic artists bringing raw club music. Dance collective Waffle Crew’s fast footwork is straight from New York City’s streets and subways.

 

May 06

Ende Tymes VI

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Opening night of the Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation will include sound installation works and performances on an arena-sized PA.  The installations will remain in place through the weekend.

Additional performances will take place at Silent Barn, June 3-5. Weekend pass tickets available for $60.

Co-presented by ISSUE Project Room:
Founded in 2003, ISSUE Project Room is a pioneering nonprofit performance center, presenting projects by interdisciplinary artists that expand the boundaries of artistic practice and stimulate critical dialogue in the broader community. ISSUE serves as a leading cultural incubator, facilitating the commission and premiere of innovative new works.

 Additional info: halfnormal.com/endetymes
Mar 24

Beach House

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A series of performances taking place in art spaces and alternative venues during the Beach House North American spring tour. A specially designed room with light installation and projection sets the mood for this intimate set, with the audience seated on the floor (b.y.o. pillow). Maximum attendance of 200 for the two-piece performance, featuring songs from Thank Your Lucky Stars, Devotion and their self titled record.

A note from the band about the concept: It has always been difficult to carry the initial moments of creativity that inspire our music through the process of making and releasing a record. There are many chances along the way for the feeling to get lost. A lot of “bedroom” bands experience this when they get to the studio or the stage. This installation performance is an attempt to elicit this pure, embryonic state of mind for ourselves and our audience.

 

Mar 13

Deaf Club

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Wall, Future Punx and King Pussy Face play a punk show with ASL performers, inspired by a scene from Alison O’Daniel’s film. The scene is a re-enactment (with some fictionalization) of the final punk show hosted by artist Bruce Conner that took place at The Deaf Club in San Francisco in 1979. The Deaf Club was a deaf social club that hosted west coast punk shows for roughly 9 months. The manager of the punk band The Offs approached them, they agreed, and a legendary, though very underground, convergence of two disparate social groups occurred. It is fondly recounted that the union dissipated when the neighbors complained about the noise. The re-enactment was filmed in NYC at PS1’s printshop with more than 60 participants from the larger NYC Deaf community and a whole slew of enthusiastic NYC punks.

Mar 08

Song and Cyclone

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An evening of performances by Morton Subotnick and Joan La Barbara, presented by Harvestworks and Knockdown Center.

CYCLONE (1977)
7pm

Joan La Barbara’s CYCLONE is a quadraphonic sound performance/installation of the newly restored multichannel work  scored for multiple voices, percussion and Arp 2600 synthesizer sounds, for “semi-live” performance on multiple speakers with the original light panning device custom designed by Ralph Jones. The work was last performed in 1977 at PS1 in NYC (Queens) and was an award-winning sound sculpture installation/performance work (independent artist submission) at ISCM World Music Days (Weltmusiktage) in Bonn, Germany. Both installation/performances were done with analog audio tape (mixed to mono) and moved in the space using light-panning device and penlight.

This installation will be on view before and after the performances.

SONG (2016)
8pm

Commissioned by Harvestworks, Morton Subotnick will present Song, an evening-length, site-specific composition for the Knockdown Center. The work features live electronics by the composer diffused in the space by 3D speaker arrays created by acoustic engineer Paul Geluso and performed by Ne(x)tworks, a collaborative ensemble of seven musicians.

Mar 08

All the more my thoughts multiply + The Audio Visual Matrix

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Knockdown Center and Harvestworks, in association with CT:SWaM, will present two audio-visual performance works that were commissioned and produced by the Harvestworks’ Artist in Residence Program.

All the more my thoughts multiply
by Jane Rigler and Elizabeth Hoffman with video by Anna Weisling

All the more my thoughts multiply is a work for flute, electroacoustic sound, and interactive video that explores the psychology of a lone character from the Noh play “Aoinoue”, taken from the massive and influential 11th c. Japanese epic “Tale of Genji.” Possessiveness is a challenge to overcome. Spirits and Shamanic exorcism evoke opportunities to explore the elements of such possessions. In this mono-drama the gestural significance of both the spatialized sound and the movements of the flutist weave together textures of light and music through an ancient Japanese folk story.

The Audio Visual Matrix
diNMachine (Michael Schumacher and Nisi Jacobs)

The Audio Visual Matrix (AVM) is an interdisciplinary performance system commissioned by the Harvestworks Artist-in-Residence TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art and Music) Lab. The system enables fast and flexible interconnections of audio and video data streams to modulate content. The inspiration comes from the “pin” type matrices found on synthesizers like the EMS Synthi, where players patch any modulation source to any destination. The AVM uses a similar grid system to create paths between elements (instruments, computers, cameras, etc.) and allows for feedback loops as well as typical modulation. See: http://avm-dinmachine.tumblr.com/

diNMachine will perform in eight-channel sound. It will be the first performance with the Audio Visual Matrix software diNMachine developed with Tommy Martinez in residency at Harvestworks. A short Q&A will follow.

Mar 02

Alison O’Daniel – Room Tone

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An Art in General New Commission presented in collaboration with Knockdown Center. “Room Tone” refers to the moment on a film set when crew and actors pause in order for the sound mixer and boom operator to record room tone, the subtle location-specific sound present in every space. Weaving narrative between film segments and object-making, O’Daniel will create a layered and immersive installation. Based on collaborations with three contemporary composers, Steve Roden, Christine Sun Kim, and Ethan Frederick Greene, O’Daniel builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary through varying levels of access to information such as color, sound, and storyline.

O’Daniel’s engagement with different mediums is a type of call-and-response, building upon and transforming the specific language of one onto another. Experimental and documentary film collapse and coincide with sculpture and installation, in a collaborative process that highlights the inevitable loss or re-creation of information as it passes through various channels. The presentation purposefully disables audience members’ normative perception of events and materials in order to present new modes of listening and seeing. Emphasizing subjects’ relationship to silence or unavailable sonic elements, Room Tone draws on O’Daniel’s own experience as a hard-of-hearing artist. The project’s form of exploded storytelling results in a performative arc that is less reliant on traditional script structure and more on physical choreography and collaboration. The audience is guided through narrative holes, unknowns, and missing parts in order to engage in a process of deep listening that aims to extend far beyond the aural realm.

Click here for the full press release and to learn more about Art in General.

Performance: The Deaf Club featuring Future Punx,
Wall, and ASL storytellers. Thursday, April 28, 7:30-11pm

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