Queens Symphony Orchestra and Council Member Elizabeth Crowley present a 7-piece jazz ensemble.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Lectures: Presentations: Workshops: Experiments: Studies: Concerts: Exchanges:
Under the guidance of Daniel Neumann, CT-SWaM founder and accomplished sound engineer, this 3 day workshop is catered to sound artists, noise producers, composers of electronic and electro-acoustic music, as well as experimental musicians and sound designers, interested in deepening their practice and exploring spatialization as a creative element.
The workshop will give a historical overview on the subject with some technical background and explored aesthetics and techniques for spatialization. One objective is to practice listening as a phenomenological activity: the listener immersed in inner spaces / distance and continuity / sound as intersubjective space.
For more information on attending the workshop click here.
The workshop itself is now closed to the public but participants and guest performers will present work at Knockdown Center on the following days:
Sat, Nov 14
4p-6p: performances by participants
6p-8p: Pedro Lopes (Berlin), lecture and performance
Sun, Nov 15
2p-6p: performances by participants
Tue, Nov 17, $7 suggested donation
Kamron Saniee
Michael Hammond
Gus Callahan
Matthew Gantt
&
Gabe Raines
7pm Gabe Raines will present “Sun Castle – Room of a Thousand Doors – Door Two”. His sound project describes various spaces inside an imaginary castle. The spaces can be together into a functional audio map of the cavernous circular room.
8:30pm Jenn Grossman: multi-channel pieces
9pm Woody Sullender’s “Variations on Furniture Music” is a series of multi-channel electronic music performances utilizing arrangements of modular cardboard forms outfitted with audio transducers. His work encompass a variety of media including music, sculpture, performance, theater, installation, architecture, origami, and even sonic weaponry. Among other activities, he is founding co-editor (will Bill Dietz) of the sonic arts publication Ear | Wave | Event (earwaveevent.org).
All performances are open to the public.
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Follow the activities:
Blog: https://ctswam.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CT_SWaM
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ctswam
As part of Quebec Digital, New York (October 22 – 25), Elektra and FuturePerfect co-present two audiovisual masters from Montreal — Herman Kolgen and Nicolas Bernier. Kolgen performs his acclaimed Dust, an audiovisual masterpiece inspired by Man Ray’s photograph “Elevage de Poussiere.” Concerned with giving form to what the eye cannot capture, Kolgen creates a spectacular world from mere dust particles, revealing their fibrous networks, deep structures and hypnotic complexities. At the threshold between the invisible and the visible, Dust becomes intoxicating and the video surface a veritable accumulation of x-rays. Simultaneously emotional and conceptual, audiences will never see or hear dust again in the same way.
Nicolas Bernier’s Frequencies (synthetic variations) is a part of an ongoing process that draws upon basic generative systems. Performed in real-time, this is Bernier’s first laptop performance, a dialogue between sound, light and material. Frequencies consists of pre-written sequences of synthetic sounds with light synchronized within small acrylic structures; a digital work visually translated into physical elements. With incredible precision and minimal means, Bernier creates a mesmerizing work where audiences can either hear the light or see the sound.
Click here for more info.