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Apr 20

A DEEP BOOMING LAUGH

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A DEEP BOOMING LAUGH is an evening of atmospheric music by Brooklyn-based bands B0DYH1GH, Boiled Wool, and Sister Pact. Largely inspired by Riot Grrrl culture, the three acts revel in the Sad Girl aesthetic, producing pensive, intensifying music that features gorgeous sound reverberations that resonate within the acoustics of the Knockdown Center, providing an opportunity to collectively explore what diligent and thoughtful music can mean in the present.

About the artists:

Since 2010, Brooklyn-based art duo B0DYH1GH have developed a cult following for their epic, psychedelic, synaesthetic music; dark and weird art interventions; intricate, tautological grooves; and entrancing, mysterious style. They’ve performed at myriad events in New York City; including Birdsong, Spank, Pussy Faggot, Clump, Super Bisexuals, Everybooty Gay Pride, Jason & Jill, Apocalypse Wow, and F.:.NCY; earning a rabid fan base among the proto- Bushwick queer scene. They’ve also graced the stages of more ‘highbrow’ New York cultural institutions, performing at the Public Theater and Joe’s Pub; and the American Realness, Coil, Prelude, and Under the Radar festivals. They performed at the finale of 2013’s Queer New York International Arts Festival at La MaMa, debuting an evening-length performance called ALIEN AFTERLIFE, and organized and starred in the April 20th gala, DEEP-FRIED CANDYFLOWERS, at LES art gallery CultureFix. They’ve created site-specific work for galleries such as Strange Loop and the Impossible Project Space, where they presented their instrumental art-rock EP, BUTTERBAWL. They’ve served as models and muses for internationally-acclaimed artists such as Amos Mac, whose image of the band went viral after being featured in Out Magazine.

BOILED WOOL is the performance and installation project of artist Cynthia Chang. Cynthia Chang started making sculptures in college at the Rhode Island School of Design, often as ornaments for their performance work. After graduating, Chang shifted their focus to wearable items, using their knowledge of sculptural objects and material manipulation. They launched their label Something Happening in 2014, with a couple of signature pieces and club-inspired one-offs and they showed their first full collection Big Babies during New York Fashion Week. https://soundcloud.com/boiledwool
SISTER PACT is Logan Sibrel & Omar Afzaal. Sister Pact’s sophomore effort is a concept album wherein the protagonist journeys with a resurrected lover, and is later devoured when his companion is overtaken by his zombie urges. The album explores themes of love, ambition, and shortsightedness, and was inspired by a long meditation over a photo of Nancy Kerrigan, post 1994 attack.

Apr 18

SITE : SOUND

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Join us for a culminating exhibition and showcase staged as a sonic portrait and re-telling of the Site : Sound series.

Site : Sound is a series of intimate site-specific lectures, sonic-spatial interventions, and performances celebrating the pliancy and tactility of acoustic experience. Taking place across three boroughs of New York City from April 23 to June 25, 2017, twelve contemporary sound artists, composers, and instrumentalists invite the public to channel their curiosity and join in an exploration of the auditory sense.

Presented by Clocktower Radio and Lea Bertucci.

For more information about Site: Sound programming, visit:http://clocktower.org/event/site-sound-april-june-knockdown

Apr 14

Gamelan Dharma Swara

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Knockdown Center is pleased to host Gamelan Dharma Swara as they receive, unpack, and perform for the very first time their new set of gamelan instruments from Bali.

Over two decades New York City’s Gamelan Dharma Swara has built an international reputation as one of the country’s most accomplished and innovative ensembles—tackling a diverse and daring repertoire of both classical Balinese and contemporary music. The 20-member ensemble captivates audiences with the raucous, wondrous sounds of bronze-keyed percussion instruments, gongs, bells, and drums. On April 20th Dharma Swara’s new set of gamelan instruments arrive from Bali after nearly two years in the making. (The group previously performed on instruments generously loaned by other institutions.) Soon, with full access to a gamelan, Dharma Swara will enter a new chapter of study, creative exploration, music-making and dance intended to drive American gamelan forward.

The new set of Balinese artisan-made instruments is composed of 20 metallophones, 20 brass pots, 3 gongs, 6 drums, and an array of flutes and cymbals, most of which are set in hand-carved, decorative  wooden cases. In owning one of the most complete sets of instruments with semara dana tuning (the most progressive and extensive mode of Balinese gamelan tuning), Dharma Swara will undertake complex pieces from both the classical repertoire and new compositions.

After their unpacking, the instruments will be on view at sunset from 7:00PM – 9:00PM, and Dharma Swara’s gamelan gendèr wayang ensemble will perform, demonstrate select gamelan instruments, and there will be opportunities for visitors to play the instruments.

Image: Gamelan Dharma Swara’s instruments are ready for its big unveiling.  Don’t miss this opportunity to be the first to welcome them stateside!  Here they are being blessed by the priest before they departed Bali, Indonesia. Photo by: Gusti Putu Aryamana.

Apr 13

QUADRAPHONIC MUSIC NIGHT

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File New is proud to present the first of our Quadraphonic Music Nights, featuring Brooklyn electronic musicians Martial Canterel, Michael Sherburn, Collin Crowe, Dylan Marcheschi, and Anastasia Clarke.

Quadraphonic (or Quadrophonic and sometimes Quadrasonic) sound – similar to what is now called 4.0 surround sound – uses four channels in which speakers are positioned at the four corners of the listening space, reproducing signals that are (wholly or in part) independent of one another.

Martial Canterel’s Sean McBride is the progenitor of American cold synth sounds of the 21st Century. He began under the moniker Moravagine before he started releasing limited edition cassettes and playing Brooklyn dives as Martial Canterel in 2002. Since then, McBride’s bleak intellectual exercises in the dark and danceable have flooded North America and Europe through the frosty fairwaves paved by Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Records. With an inimitable minimal style merging bright, urgent melodies ornamented and punctuated by the noises of industry and McBride’s sonorous, stern vocals, Martial Canterel’s recent releases (You Today, Refuge Underneath) have garnered both critical acclaim and a rapidly growing rabid fanbase. McBride’s influence can be heard in scores of bands in the Wierd cadre and beyond (he is also one half of the Weird Records duo Xeno and Oaklander). Through the collision of a uniquely humanistic means of production via live analogue synthcraft expertly paired with vocals and lyrics that reflect the pitfalls and pleasures of our age, Martial Canterel provides a visceral kick best felt on the dancefloor, amidst a flurry of flesh in motion. http://martialcanterel.bandcamp.com/

Michael Sherburn (of DUST / Earth Boys)
https://soundcloud.com/earthboys

Collin Crowe is an electronic musician, dj, promoter, a video and installation artist based in Brooklyn NY.
http://soundcloud.com/collincrowe

Dylan A. Marcheschi (Eastern Tapes)
https://soundcloud.com/dylanmarcheschi
Marcheschi is a multi-disciplinary artist who has performed and conducted workshops in New York over the past decade exploring minimalist noise and drone music, historical tuning systems, and psychoacoustics. He studied history and art at Columbia University where he spent time working and studying at the famed Computer Music Center. He’s active in a variety of fields from past work writing musical arrangements for New York’s Public Theater to most recently serving as director on an award-winning PBS documentary series. He curates the Monthly Modular Series, a long-running audio/visual showcase in Brooklyn which began as a night of exploration in analog synthesis but has grown to include all manner of improvised music and attracted internationally acclaimed artists. As a co-founder of Eastern Tapes he’s worked to release recordings from like-minded sound artists in the New York area over the past several years.

Anastasia Clarke is a New York/Oakland based composer and performer working with voice, digital signal processing, and analog tools. Her work finds form in solo performances, improvising ensembles, and sound for dance and theater. She has performed and released music as Silent Isle since 2011. Anastasia is currently an MFA candidate in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College.
http://soundcloud.com/silent-isle

Apr 12

Sunday Service: Caitlin Baucom Presents…

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We are pleased to announce Sunday Service: Caitlin Baucom presents… Orlando Estrada, Greem Jellyfish, PAUL (Angelina Dreem), QUALIATIK, Lorelei Ramirez, and An Only Child.

This month, Knockdown Center invites Caitlin Baucom to host our free monthly performance series Sunday Service. The evening, titled A Raging Grace, will gather artists across disciplines who are lit from within by a burning well, and rather than combust, they use its fuels to go higher and brighter.

‘It’s like having a sickness that gets more fierce as it passes on to wellness. We don’t have to view that period as an invitation to despair, but as a sign of potential transformation… whatever pain we are experiencing…’ –bell hooks

Working across performative disciplines, the artists included are also active as organizers and participants in their broader communities, acknowledging that the roots of rage go beyond the merely personal and its power can feed the world. Together, ‘we admit that we don’t want to see the world blown up; we are for the human species.’ –Andrea Juno & V. Vale, Angry Women.

Watch footage of the evening on our MEDIA page here.

About the Curator
Caitlin Baucom is a Brooklyn based artist and composer. She has shown interdisciplinary performance work at Knockdown Center, SIGNAL Gallery, HERE Arts, Dixon Place, JACK, 315 Gallery, and ABC No Rio in NYC; Dfbrl8r Gallery, High Concept Labs, Mana Contemporary, and MCA Chicago; and in Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Leipzig and Weimar, Germany. As a performer she works regularly with other artists, and has interpreted the works of Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark and James Lee Byars for MoMA and New Museum. She’s held residencies in Chicago, New York and Weimar, and has work and writing published in Emergency INDEX: Volume 3, Bad at Sports, Incident Magazine, and Sorry Archive’s Air Sheets. Her curatorial experiment trevorshaus programs monthly events bringing artists working across performative disciplines into a heightened temporary reality, and recently premiered the immersive sci–fi opera GENERATION SHIP at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, featuring site specific commissions from a community of movement and sound artists.

About Sunday Service
Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

Apr 05

Black Swords (Black Rain + Orphan Swords)

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In late 2013, Orphan Swords sent an email to Ike Yard proposing a vocal featuring for their track Vassago. That track – later featuring a vocal part written and recorded by Ike Yard – was released by Desire Records on the “Risk In a New Age” EP  (2014).  It was the beginning of a long term collaboration between NYC-based Stuart Argabright and the Orphan Swords, from Brussels.

 

Later on, Orphan Swords was invited by Desire to remix an Ike Yard track for a compilation around the reissue of their 1983 classic album “A Second”. Orphan Swords then invited Black Rain to remix Asmoday from their EP “License To Desire”. Black Rain is Stuart Argabright’s project with Shinichi Shimokawa – rebooted in 2012 on Blackest ever Black.

 

The three musicians connected quite well and became good friends over time, not merely sharing interest in music but also in the arts in general and the philosophies that relate to them. In April 2016, after Stuart performed at Rewire Festival with Pete Swanson and Vessel, they spent a night in Brussels at Orphan Swords’ HQ “New Terminal Studios” and recorded hours of music in the most spontaneous and direct fashion. This raw material has then been simmered within the following weeks. The two tracks that figure on “The Future Of The Sun” EP are the pith and marrow of what occurred that night.
Apr 02

Space In The Living Room: Chung, Safety Scissors, Guy Car

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After finding a home at Jupiter Disco with its monthly occurrence… SITLR takes the spirit of the living room to the Ready Room of Knockdown Center for the first time. An unpredictable evening of music where boundaries between music genres are lifted to provide a richer experience where dancing, conversations and contemplation can coexist.
Chung
Safety Scissors
Guy Car
Apr 01

Formal Complaint

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Craft, scrap, and architectural minimalism coincide in Formal Complaint. Featuring work by Aria Dean, Female Background, Christopher Hanrahan, Mario Navarro, and Megan Pahmier, the exhibition returns handiwork to formalism, maintaining a sense of slackness. Metal armatures lean and bend precariously; a painting on unstretched canvas drags on the floor. Discarded materials and everyday objects come to conjure an upright but ‘bereft formalism’ (as Hanrahan calls it). Tenderness and despair coalesce in objects that can only just support themselves, much less make a claim for historical or philosophical significance. The works in the exhibition undermine past minimalisms from multiple directions—in terms of material, attitude, and dependence on context—but out of a care for and maintenance of form, rather than a casting off of it. Through these mergers of vernacular minimalism and sad design, work and supporting structure, Formal Complaint creates its own ecology of exhibitionary space.

Exhibition Events

April 15, 6-9pm
Opening Reception
May 25, 7pm
Artist talk

Aria Dean is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, CA. She currently holds the position of Assistant Curator of Net Art & Digital Culture at Rhizome. Her writing has been featured in Artforum, The New Inquiry, Real Life Magazine, Topical Cream Magazine, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. She also co-directs Los Angeles gallery and project space As It Stands LA. Currently, Dean’s research, writing, and visual work explore the relationship and resonances between blackness, media, and communication and information technologies. She works primarily through text and sculpture to hypothesize an apocalyptic blackness.

Female Background consists of Gabriella D’Italia and Cameron Crawford. Their collaborative work has been exhibited at TEMP, New York; Doyers, New York; and Perimeter Gallery, Belfast. Publications include Mary Magazine, Bell School Press; Touch, See, Taste vol. 1 (anthology), Temporary Agency; and Maine Arts Journal Quarterly, UMVA. Readings include Interstate Projects, New York.

Christopher Hanrahan was born in 1978 in Mudgee, Australia, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Hanrahan was the recipient of a 2015 Australia Council Greene Street Residency, a 2013 New Work Grant, and a 2013 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas, notably at MONA, Hobart; PICA, Perth; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Recent exhibitions include Vitreous Humour at Kansas Gallery, New York, and Sequester, Embassy of Australia Gallery, Washington, DC.

Mario Navarro (b. 1984) is a Mexican-American artist based in New York. The formal aesthetics and syntax to which Navarro returns stand as alternative references to certain classes of objects, just as words do not refer to things themselves. In Navarro’s practice, objects and architectures operate as nodes of meaning and conceptual signification within a broader system of relations. His work belongs to collections such as The Petitgas Collection (London), Frances R. Dittmer Collection (Chicago), Sayago & Pardon (Los Angeles), ArtNexus (Bogotá), Dieresis Collection (Guadalajara), and Fundación Colección Jumex (Mexico City).

Megan Pahmier lives and works in New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and completed her Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College. Her work has been featured in the New York exhibitions Drawing for Sculpture at TSA Gallery and Future Fossils at Dutton Gallery as well as Hand, Finger, Digit at The Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, Scotland, among others. Most recently, she exhibited her work at Essex Flowers in New York in the two-person show Dust Stutter.

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Dana Kopel is a curator and writer based in New York, where she works at the New Museum. Recent exhibitions include If you want to do something, forget this debt, and remember it later, Celaya Brothers Gallery, Mexico City; Givens, AA|LA, Los Angeles; Abstract Sex*, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and Care (curated with Marian Tubbs), Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was an assistant curator for the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Art in America, frieze, X-TRA, Modern Painters, and elsewhere.

Rachael Rakes is an independent critic, curator, and teacher based in New York. She is currently the Programmer at Large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center; an editor at the Brooklyn Rail; and Editor at Large for Verso Books. Rakes has written criticism in numerous outlets, most recently for Art-Agenda, Artforum, the Village Voice, and Ocula. With Leo Goldsmith, she is at work on a book on the collaborative practices and media critique of radical filmmaker Peter Watkins, which received a 2014 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.

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