“…Brooklyn’s leading avant-garde venue…” – Wall Street Journal 

 

Brooklyn, NY (For Release 03.01.2011) — ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn’s premier experimental performing arts presenter, engages artists, audiences, and ecology with new artistic practices in April’s series The Sonic Unconscious (April 16, 17, & 21). On April 16 & 17, artist Gina Badger leads two walking botany tours of the Gowanus area, followed by a screening of her short video work Mongrels followed by a witching hour reception. On April 17, the Amsterdam-based artist Yolande Harris premieres Fishing for Sound, a live composition incorporating sonified satellite signals appropriated from treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. On April 21, Norwegian artist Jana Winderen brings a live version of her multichannel sound installation Scuttling around in the shallows, exploring how shrimp and other tiny ocean creatures use sound for communication, orientation, and feeding.

 

Also peppered throughout April are showcases of the true meaning of collaboration and experimentation.  ISSUE co-presents the Unsound Festival New York Labs series (4/1–4/3), featuring the New York debut of Sweden’s The Skull Defekts with their new band member Daniel Higgs of Lungfish, alongside the Baltimore-based Zomes (Asa Osborne of Lungfish) and experimental musician Paul Wirkus (4/3, at Littlefield). And, electronic conceptualist and pioneer Gordon Monahan (4/23) comes to ISSUE, bringing his sauerkraut synthesizer, in which various fruits and vegetables control computer-generated sounds.

 

Other highlights this month include four free events presented by ISSUE: a performance by ISSUE’s Emerging Artist Commission recipient and guitarist Enda Bates (4/13); a concert by ISSUE’s new Artist-in-Residence, cellist/improviser Okkyung Lee (4/27); a conversation with author Veit Erlmann regarding his book Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, as the latest addition in ISSUE’s bi-monthly Theoretical Series (4/28);  and a language performance of two sound artists Jacues Demierre and Vincent Barras, providing a detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages as part of ISSUE’s ongoing Littoral Series (4/29). Complete April 2011 schedule is below.

 

 

 

UNSOUND FESTIVAL NEW YORK kicks off at ISSUE Project Room on Friday, April 1, featuring a sub-series of exceptional events, workshops and panels: UNSOUND FESTIVAL NEW YORK LABS. Unsound Labs comes from the idea of festival as laboratory, a place where artists are free to experiment and collaborate with their peers.  Unsound Festival New York is presented by Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York.

 

HATI is an audiovisual project based on sound of ethnic instruments from all over the world as well as hand-made instruments or found objects. HATI has formed many psychedelic rock and industrial experimental musical projects since the beginning of the 90s. Since 2007, HATI has performed as a duo: Rafal X-NAVI Iwanski and Rafal SABON Kolacki and occasionally with Dariusz Brzostek. In 2006, members of HATI organized and performed two tours with Z’EV, one of the founders of ‘industrial’ – the cultural movement.

Z’EV, a conceptual artist, sound sculptor, and poet,  has been concentrating on cooperative and collaborative composition and performance, recording and performing.  While but one of the progenitors of the ‘industrial movement’ in the mid-70’s, he, along with Neil Megson, was primarily responsible for delivering the ‘tribal’ impulse and esthetic into the Western cultural milieu between the years 1978-1984.

Dawid Szczesny works with samples from tapes and vinyl, switching between turntables and his laptop, to create sound. His music is based on abstract ideas about the interaction of loops and other bits of sonic material.  His most recent recording was a collaborative effort with drummer Rafal Gorzycki and vocalist Krzysztof Nowinski called “Trio Poems” released in 2009 by Polish label Mototype.

 

Multi-instrumentalist Shelley Burgon is best known for her improvisatorial work using harp and laptop. She is a member of the chamber group Ne(x)tworks and the band Stars Like Fleas. Shelley has performed her music for series such as the the MATA Festival, ISSUE Project Room’s Points in a Circle, free103point9 Wave Farm and Summer Winds. Shelley holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College.

Maria Chavez is an avant-turntablist whose work focuses on solo electric-acoustic sound pieces using a collection of new and broken needles, which she calls “pencils of sound.” Many of her live sound installations explore the paradox of time and the present moment, with many influences stemming from improvisation in contemporary art. In 2008, the Jerome Foundation awarded Chavez an Emerging Artist Grant, and in 2009 she received a Van Lier Fellowship. She was an artist in residence with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the DIA:Beacon Museum and recently performed for Christian Marclay and the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of Christian Marclay: FESTIVAL.

Anna Zaradny is one of Poland’s best known experimental musicians. Anna brings a much needed and appreciated sense of feminine grace and patience with her complex, slow-shifting laptop work. Along with Robert Piotrowicz (also appearing at Unsound Festival New York), Anna co-founded and co-curated Poland’s most important Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music – Musica Genera. Her debut solo album “Mauve Cycles” was released in 2008 and was described by Modisti.com as featuring a “sensitivity rooted in the aesthetics of ’60 sonoristic avant-garde (Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma).” This year she will release two new albums – a solo record for her own Musica Genera label and a split LP with Burkhard Stangl for Bocianrecords.

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and photographer. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images set to live guitar improvisation.

 

SAT 4.02: Unsound Festival New York Labs: Collaborations 2: MKM + Günter Müller w/ Taylor Deupree + Norbert Möslang w/ Lizzi Bougotso + Jason Kahn w/ Richard Kamerman (Tickets: $15/Members $12) 

Five musicians from Switzerland, Germany, and America, come together to explore the notion of “collaboration.” Opening the bill is Switzerland-based German Günter Müller who will perform in a duo with New York ambient innovator Taylor Deupree for the first time. Also that night, Switzerland-based Norbert Möslang collaborates for the first time with New Yorker Lizzi Bougatsos who is best known as Lza Bylza, singer and percussionist in the Warp Records-signed experimental band Gang Gang Dance. Americans Jason Kahn and Richard Kamerman continue the duo explorations, then Kahn returns to join Möslang and Müller to perform as the band MKM.

MKM formed itself spontaneously when the individual members, Günter Müller, Jason Kahn and Norbert Möslang, were asked to give a talk during a tour of Japan in 2006. Since talking was not enough, the three musicians were asked to play for a short set. The results were so good that the three decided to go on working together. The trio’s sound hovers between the at-times harsh rhythmic noise of Norbert Möslang’s cracked everyday electronics and the rich sonorities of Günter Müller’s percussion-based samples and electronics. Jason Kahn’s work on analog synthesizer bridges these two worlds, adding high frequency interference and processed piezo microphone and short wave radio input. MKM’s music will appeal to enthusiasts of noise, experimental electronics and improvised music.

Günter Müller was born in Munich but has been based in Switzerland for most of his musical life. Müller was originally a drummer and percussionist. In the early 80s he mutated his drum set into a new instrument with customized mobile pick-ups and a microphone system of his own invention. That system allowed Müller to modify and modulate hand-generated sounds electronically. In the late 90s he added minidiscs to his set up and then in the early ‘00s he added an iPod. Nowadays, more often than not he plays with just an iPod and electronics only. Tonight he will perform in a duo with Taylor Deupree for the first time, as well as the band MKM.

Taylor Deupree is a sound artist, graphic designer, and photographer residing in New York. In 1997, he founded 12k, a record label that focuses on minimalism and contemporary hybrids of acoustic and electronic music. The label has released over 70 CDs by a roster of international sound artists.  Since 1993, Deupree has created critically acclaimed recordings for labels worldwide including Spekk, Plop, Noble, Ritornell/Mille Plateaux, Raster-Noton, Disko B, Sub Rosa, Fällt, Audio.NL, Room40, Instinct Records, Caipirinha Music, Plastic City, Dum, and of course 12k and former sister label LINE. His solo works in recent years have explored a fusion of digital sound manipulation with organic and melodic textures that take influences from his interest in architecture, interior design, and photography. Continued shifting and sound exploration is vital to his work. His most recent album “Shoals” was released on 12K in 2010.

Norbert Möslang is from St. Gallen, Switzerland. He plays cracked everyday electronics. Möslang was the member of the band Voice Crack until the end of 2002 and has also played also in Poire_z. Additionally he has collaborated with many musicians including Borbetomagus, Otomo Yoshihide, Günter Müller, ErikM, Jerome Noetinger, Lioinel Marchetti, Jim O’rourke, Kevin Drumm, Jason Kahn, Oren Ambarchi, Tomas Korber, Keith Rowe, I-sound, Carlos Zingaro, Florian Hecker and others. Möslang, like his collaborator Lizzi Bougatsos, is also in the field of visual arts. This is the first time he’ll be appearing in duet with the singer. He will also appear tonight in the band MKM.

Lizzi Bougatsos is the stylish singer and percussionist who also performs under the name LZA when performing with her decade-old psychedelic experimental New York-based band Gang Gang Dance who are signed to Warp Records. Lizzi has performed all over the world and continues to do so – saying she sees touring as her way of spreading a message “of love and creation.”

 

Richard Kamerman says his artistic interest is aimed foremost on the task of magnification. Small sounds, small gestures – made large. Inconsequential events – made important. Room acoustics, microphone/pickup placement, and amplification are often very important to his live construction of sound and he places great weight on the embracing of unintended consequences – e.g. errors in translation/format conversion, bursts of feedback, power supply failures. Although primarily a percussionist, he rarely sits behind a drum kit, preferring to explore the percussive behaviors of various re-purposed electronics, ranging from computer circuit boards to a system of found mechanical parts – fans, motors, etc – that he has been developing since 2006.  

 

Unsound Festival New York Labs and ISSUE Project Room present Gospel of the Skull featuring the New York debut of The Skull Defekts with Daniel Higgs. Baltimore-based Zomes (a project of another ex-Lungfish member Asa Osborne) and the Polish-born musician Paul Wirkus will open the night.

 

Zomes (USA) is the guitar/organ project of Asa Osborne, Baltimore-based guitarist of acclaimed Dischord signed foursome Lungfish. Zomes’ music is described by some as “heavy zone trance repetition.” Osbourne’s performance gear consists of a series of pre-recorded percussion tapes and a keyboard run through several effects pedals that distort, fuzz, and sustain the phrases. Zomes has recently signed to Thrill Jockey for a new album due in 2011.

Paul Wirkus (Poland / Germany) is a Polish-born musician who lives in Cologne. Since the late 90s Wirkus has emerged both as a solo performer (electronics, drums) and a collaborator with several projects ranging from modern improv to minimal electronica. Paul Wirkus has appeared at various renowned festivals such as SONAR, Barcelona; Musiques Volantes, Paris; c/o pop, Cologne; Les Urbaines, Lausanne; Wien Modern, Vienna. His recent collaboration with Ekkehard Ehlers (Berlin) resulted in the album “Ballads” that was released by Staubgold early 2009. Wirkus will also be performing with Svarte Greiner on percussion at B.A.M the following night, creating a live soundtrack to F.W. Murnau’s “NOSFERATU, A SYMPHONY OF HORROR”.

The Skull Defekts (Sweden/USA) aka Henrik Rylander (Drums / Electronics), Joachim Nordwall (Guitar / Vocals / Analog Synths), Daniel Fagerstroem (Guitar / Vocals / Electronics) and Jean-Louis Huhta (Percussion / Effects /Electronics) are joined by new member, former Lungfish member, Baltimore’s Daniel Higgs (Vocals / Various Instruments) for their new Thrill Jockey released album ” Peer Amid” and for this - their New York debut performance.

Hard at work on their numerous individual projects, constantly collaborating, releasing their own records on their own imprints, and touring incessantly, The Skull Defekts are Sweden’s answer to America’s Sonic Youth and Netherlands’ The Ex. Simply put the band is one of the centerpieces of the Swedish experimental rock scene.  Since their creation in 2005, The Skull Defekts have taken their base of classic rock with massive guitar riffing, and infused it with their interest in circular composition, drone, tribal music, Indian ragas, 60s minimalism, and experimental music from numerous ages.

 

Haunted House played at Tonic, the Cooler, Brownies and other venues in the late 1990s, until one of its band members moved away. The band was comprised of avant blues guitarist Loren Connors, vocalist/lyricist Suzanne Langille, avant guitarist Andrew Burnes (of San Agustin) and Neel Murgai (soundtrack for “The Yes Men Fix the World”). They re-unite for this performance, after roughly a 10-year hiatus. Simon Hopkins in Motion Reviews writes: “…There’s something extraordinarily alien about the blues that all the ‘rootsy’ marketing in the world can’t deny. Loren Connors is one of a handful of musicians helping his audience rediscover that other worldliness, and seldom has he done so with more clarity than here, as single blues phrases are seemingly extended across minutes rather than bars. Langille’s ethereal voice adds to the tension and exoticism, Murgai’s daf perhaps even more so. Meanwhile, Burnes’s guitar is the perfect foil for LMCs.”

Che Chen & Robbie Lee are Brooklyn, NY-based multi-instrumentalists who have been steadily and intensively developing their unique approach to free improvisation over the last several years. Using a shifting constellation of instruments that has included bass clarinets, baroque recorders, reed and pipe organs, renaissance keyboard instruments, flutes, saxophones, bowed and plucked strings, little drums, bells, tape machines and their voices, Che Chen and Robbie Lee create earthy, slow moving improvisations that are informed as much by the ethnic folk traditions of the world as they are by 20th century composition and improvisation. Their music places precedent in listening, attention and dynamic interaction in the moment. Chen and Lee have released an LP and several cd-r’s on their own Telegraph Harp imprint.

THU 4.07 - Esther Venrooy + Pygmy Jerboa (Tickets: $10/Members $8)

Esther Venrooy (b. 1974, Rosmalen, The Netherlands) is a composer working in the field of audio art.  After completing studies in classical saxophone, Venrooy attended the European Dance Development Center (Arnhem) as a composer in residence, where she began employing electronic and digital techniques in pieces aimed at choreography and stage performance. Gradually her music evolved into an independent means of expression and she continued her work with electronica at the IPEM (Institute for Psycho-acoustics and Electronic Music) in Ghent, Belgium where she still resides. Her works range from purely electronic composed music to improvised combinations of electronica with traditional instrumentation such as piano, guqin, pipa and satsuma-biwa. Apart from her artistic activities, Venrooy is a lecturer on 20th century music and experimental arts at the Ghent school of fine arts, where she also runs the Sound Lab.

Pygmy Jerboa (b. 2009, USA) is comprised of Maria Stankova (b. 1984, Bulgaria) and Iván Naranjo (b. 1977, Mexico).  They perform with live electronics which collide with their homemade/junk instruments and often transverses compositional and improvisational rules and anarchy. They are currently based in Brooklyn.

 

Unsound Festival has invited New York’s Carlos Giffoni– the man behind NO FUN PRODUCTIONS and the NO FUN FESTIVAL to co-curate an evening at Littlefield that explores the edges of electronic music with Russian CoH, experimental Polish artist Robert Piotrowicz in a duo with C. Spencer Yeh, German Marcus Schmickler and experimental band Instant Coffee featuring one half of the duo Matmos. Unsound Festival New York is presented by Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York.

 

Russian-born CoH is an electronic music producer, sound artist and engineer. Despite his Swedish home, CoH remains close to his cultural roots and the Russian avant-garde. He has recorded for many labels including the much-respected raster-noton and his own label wavetrap.  His latest album, just released by Editions Mego is “IIRON,” recorded in the Music Research Centre at the University of York in England revisits sounds first made in the Soviet-era USSR 11 years ago for his album “IRON.” The record sees revisiting his early 80’s underground music activities – a time when he was making and consuming “forbidden” metal music. Like Schmickler, CoH’s appearances Stateside are extremely rare – another reason not to miss this show.

 

Brooklyn-based Carlos Giffoni is a Venezuelan noise and sound artist. Often cited as a central point in the experimental music scene in America, Giffoni is known for both his own music and his work as a curator and label owner. Giffoni is the curator of the renowned No Fun Fest in New York City and also founder of the labels No Fun Productions and Not No Fun. Giffoni’s music involves various types of synthesis, extreme modular manipulation, rewired instruments, improvisation and live re-sampling. His latest solo album “Severence” was released on Hospital Productions last year. The album took the melding analog drone colliding tonality of his past expressions and introduced minimalist sequencer details to create a pure electronic landscape cultivated and informed by influences from both experimental and 20th century synthesizer music. At Unsound Festival 2010 in Krakow, Carlos not only performed but also curated a No Fun-related event. Tonight he returns to Unsound for a special solo set.

 

Warsaw-based, Robert Piotrowicz is one of the most prolific artists in the Polish experimental and improvised music scene. As an instrumentalist, he works mainly with his own live performance setup, developed around his electric guitar and an analogue modular synthesizer. His other activities include electro-acoustic studio compositions, music for theatre and sound installations and participation in interdisciplinary art projects. Piotrowicz has developed his trademark sound of intense dynamics seized in dramatic and balanced form over several solo albums the last of which “Lasting Clinamen” was released in 2008. He also co-founded and co-curated the respected Polish experimental music Festival and label Musica Genera. Robert will be appearing tonight in a duo with American C. Spencer Yeh.

C. Spencer Yeh is a Taiwanese-born classically trained violinist and improviser based in Cincinnati. He has released many cassettes, CD-Rs and other limited outbursts on his own imprint DroneDisco over the past 10 years, both under his own name and with the band project Burning Star Core. Yeh is concerned not only with the sensual aspects of sound, but the gestural qualities as well. Yeh has performed alongside and collaborated with artists like Tony Conrad, Evan Parker, Thurston Moore, The New Humans with Vito Acconci, Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano, John Wiese, Aaron Dilloway, John Olson and the Graveyards, Amy Granat, Jutta Koether, LaDonna Smith, Carlos Giffoni, Okkyung Lee, Atsuhiro Ito, Lasse Marhaug, Audrey Chen, Nate Wooley, JP Feliciano, Rafael Toral, Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio All-Stars, Damo Suzuki’s Network, and many others, He has performed across the U.S.A. and Europe in a variety of settings and festivals. He has also presented visual art and video works internationally.

Marcus Schmickler is a Cologne-based composer, musician and producer whose work lies between and in modern classical, electronic and post-rock genres. He is also known for his work under the pseudonym Pluramon. He first came to prominence as a member of the well-known Cologne experimental music collective Kontakta. Schmickler’s latest album “Palace Of Marvels [Queered Pitch]“ is just out on Editions Mego and is considered an essential release for those interested in contemporary Computer Music. Schmickler utilizes a new interpretation of the Shepard-tone, a 1960’s discovery by Roger Shepard, which creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually rises or descends in pitch yet ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. Schmickler’s live performances in the US are rare so don’t miss this opportunity.

 

The American trio Instant Coffee was formed as the result of a pleasant evening’s pastime: playing music together. Lisle Ellis was visiting M.C. Schmidt in Baltimore, and M.C. invited Jason Willet over to play. Lisle Ellis is a composer and improviser/bassist whose oeuvre spans three decades and two countries (Canada and the U.S.) and has brought him international recognition as an artist with an exceptional vision. M.C. Schmidt is, with partner in crime Dr. Drew Daniel, a member of the musique concrète pop/new music group Matmos. Schmidt has shared the stage with Terry Riley, the Kronos Quartet, Björk, Marshall Allen, David Serotte, So Percussion, Kid 606, 25 laptops, Pita Rehburg, 12 live snails, a lemon, and probably hundreds of other people and things. Jason Willett is an American musician, known largely for his work with experimental rock groups including Half Japanese, Can Openers, Pleasant Livers, X-Ray Eyes, The Dramatics, The Jaunties, The Attitude Robots, Leprechaun Catering and many more.

 

SUN 4.10 - Mark McGuire + Dolphins Into the Future + Floris Vanhoof + Monopoly Child Star Searchers (Tickets: $10/Members $8)

Mark McGuire (b. 1986) is an American musician living and working in Portland, OR, his principle instrument being the guitar and using various forms of electronic manipulation. Despite being best known as member of Cleveland electronic group Emeralds (alongside John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt), his solo work is as far reaching and expansive, with something in the region of 40 releases to his name, including releases for Wagon, Arbor, VDSQ, Weird Forest and Editions Mego.

Dolphins Into the Future is the musical project of Belgium’s (Antwerp) Lieven Martens. Martens also runs the labels Taped Sounds (formerly known as Dreamtime Taped Sounds, or Dreamtime Tapes) and Cetacean Nation Cassettes, and works as an ambassador for the Cetacean Nation. Furthermore, he hosts the weekly Oceaan Der Geluid radioshow on Radio Centraal, which airs (almost) every Tuesday from 10am till noon CET.

Monopoly Child Star Searchers (Pacific City 2011) Charles Berlitz, former agent for boy band, The Skaters, has been inventing landscape music for years, and runs his own production company called PACIFIC CITY SOUND VISIONS. Engelbert and Humpledinck have raved that: “Monopoly Child Star Searchers is fusion music, but not a fusion of genres of music, but that of a fusion of the Stars, the Sun, and the Tschungle!” Charles will be presenting to the East Coast his new sound “StarSwept,” which he explains as: “A memory blast of the beauty and evil that was experienced at the Spectacle of Light Festival in Salt Lake City 1988.” Expect immediate Hallucination.

 

Filmmaker and musician Floris Vanhoof (Belgium, 1982) approaches the celluloid of his films and the electronic components of his instruments closely. With an arrangement of electronic gear and film- or slide projectors he searches for the essence and potential of multimedia performance. Every concert becomes a hybrid form of projected images, living electronic circuits and field recorded sounds.

Emerging Artists Commission recipient Enda Bates’ hexaphonic guitar is simply a standard electric guitar with a special pickup providing access to each individual string signal. This allows each string to be processed differently and to be routed to a different place in the room. In this new piece, written specifically for ISSUE’s 15-channel hanging speaker system, the guitar will be transformed not just sonically but also spatially, as a localized guitar splits into individual strings, becoming a fragmented sonic cloud that will mimic the flight of birds as it moves around the audience. Irish composer, musician, and producer Enda Bastes is based in Dublin, Ireland, where he recently completed a Ph. D at Trinity College Dublin with Donnacha Dennehy. He is a founder of the Spatial Music Collective, and spatially distributed sound is a key factor in his work.

 

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

Yolande Harris’s installation Tropical Storm, developed in a residency with Alvin Lucier at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, is a shot of a Florida storm, with the sound of rainfall as the only audio. In The Pink Noise of Pleasure Yachts in Turquoise Sea, also exhibited during The Sonic Unconscious, Harris couples images of pink sunlight reflecting off water with underwater hydrophonic recordings of sea animals interrupted by the sounds of yachts, which interfere with the echolocation of these animals.

Yolande Harris is a composer and artist working with sound, its image and its role in relating humans and their technologies to the environment. Through her performances, installations, instruments and writings, she investigates how sound relates us to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological.

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

In the first day of this two-day series titled Mongrels, Gina Badger will lead an exploration of Gowanus on foot and onscreen. Badger will give a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of devolonization.

Fishing for Sound, which Yolande Harris will present for The Sonic Unconscious, is a live composition incorporating sonified satellite signals and underwater recordings from hydrophones, grounded by clicking noises appropriated from psychotherapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The composition weaves together recordings of sonic fields outside of human peception. Through the aid of technological devices, the listener navigates—a metaphor often employed by Harris—through these renderings by way of the EMDR clicking, linking bodily movement, like the blinking of an eye, to the navigation of virtual space in the memory.

Gina Badger is an artist and writer working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, her practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Yolande Harris is a composer and artist working with sound, its image and its role in relating humans and their technologies to the environment. Through her performances, installations, instruments and writings, she investigates how sound relates us to our surroundings, both architectural and ecological.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

In the second day of this two-day series titled Mongrels, Gina Badger will lead an exploration of Gowanus on foot and onscreen. Badger will give a field botany tour exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds in ecologies of devolonization. The tour will be followed by a free film screening of a video interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight, and a witching hour reception open to all.

Gina Badger is an artist and writer working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, her practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

Jana Winderen, a sound artist and acoustic researcher based in Oslo with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fine arts, begins her compositional process in any number of unpredictable locations: “in the boat or hanging on a rope in a crevasse.” Describing her work as blind field recording, Winderen often embarks on long treks to search for unique sonic environments to source sounds for her elaborate performances and installations.  Using hydrophones to record biotic and abiotic sounds, she then mixes these recordings into her layered compositions—uncanny semblances of inaccessible places.

In Scuttling around in the shallows, Winderen will continue her investigation into the sound of shrimp, exploring how the smallest creatures of the ocean use sound for communication, orientation, and feeding. Hydrophones—originally a military development—are repurposed, inadvertently producing unexpected qualities not informed by their original design. Here, the production of music and the study of cod are in excess of the technological thought.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

Sagittarius A-Star is the new incarnation of the legendary Italian label Qbico.  Qbico specialized in limited edition, hand-painted vinyls releases, ranging from free jazz to Japanese psychedelia, free-folk, and electronic improvisation. The special aesthetic of the colored vinyls and the limited edition cover art are testaments to the dedication and skill that goes into each of Sagitarraus A Records.

The Second Family Band is a collective of musicians based in Madison, Wisconsin. Formed in 2002, the group has been influential in the explosion of the Free Folk movement that developed in the U.S. throughout the early 2000s. Their musical style encompasses a variety of influences including free jazz, Indian raga, krautrock, bluegrass, psychedelic rock, and experimental avant-garde music. Inevitably, their instrumentation is also eclectic in taste, involving percussion, Moog & ARP synthesizers, piano, organ, violin, flute, home-made electronics, sound sculpture, field recordings of natural environments, vocal chants, guitars, sitar, banjo, sticks, rocks, stones, and anything else that can be found in the surroundings of each musical ritual.

Trulofa Trio is a Danish improvisational free folk/free jazz band consisting of members Nikolai Brix Vartenberg, Jon Dræby Nielsen, and Magnus Olsen Majmon. The trio is dedicated to playing music that encapsulates the intensity of the “now,” in tandem with the repetitive energy of a transcendental pulse tinged with free jazzy tribal outblows. They use both Western and non-Western reeds, drums, strings (Arabian Ney), saxophones, recorders, the Persian Daf, a conventional drum set, cello, middle-eastern Zurnai, the Chinese Erhu, and flute. The group has an upcoming LP release through the Italian label, Qbico.

Conceptual artist, composer, and musician Gordon Monahan’s Sauerkraut Synthesizer takes the natural electrical charge of fruits, vegetables, and brined foods and converts it into sound. Six fruits and vegetables, placed on a table, are plugged into zinc and copper terminals so that each object becomes an acid battery. Monahan manipulates them in a live performance, projecting video of the foods and the voltage output onto a screen.

Gordon Monahan's works for piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art. As a composer and sound artist, he juxtaposes the quantitative and qualitative aspects of natural acoustical phenomena with elements of media technology, environment, architecture, popular culture, and live performance.

Beginning in the late 1970's, he created sound works using elements of natural forces and the environment, eventually constructing long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996). His work for electronic tone generators and human speaker swingers (Speaker Swinging, 1982), is a hybrid of science, music, and performance art, where minimalistic trance music based on the Doppler Effect contrasts with issues central to performance art such as physical struggle and 'implied threat'.

Cellist and improviser Okkyung Lee is a 2011 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence. A native of Korea, Lee has been developing her own voice in contemporary cello performance, improvisation and composition. Using her solid classical training as a springboard, she incorporates jazz, sounds, Korean traditional and pop music, and noise with extended techniques to create her unique blend of music. She has received a composer commission from New York State Council on the Arts (2007) and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant (2010).

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Theoretical, ISSUE’s bi-monthly series of critical discourse, continues in April with ethnomusicologist, musicologist, anthropologist, and cultural historian Veit Erlmann. Erlmann’s book, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, examines hearing’s role as the “second sense,” — less rational and modern than seeing, the master of all senses, the “first sense.” Reason and Resonance is the first full-length study to explode this myth by reconstructing the history of aurality and the process through which the ear assumed a central role in modern culture and rationality.  Veit Erlmann teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published widely on music and popular culture in South Africa, including African Stars. His current research interests are the history of modern aurality; intellectual property law; and music, affect and Sufism in West Sumatra, Indonesia.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series presents Jacues Demierre and Vincent Barras this month. The detailed analysis of the sonorities of the ancient and modern languages, their re-elaboration and re-composition is finally embodied in a score-text, spread out on stage in its concrete dimensions through the language performance of the two sound artists. Barras & Demierre have previously published Voicing Through Saussure, a film by Véronique Goël.

Jacques Demierre (1954, lives in Geneva), pianist, performer, composer. His musical and sound work takes various directions: improvised music, contemporary music, sound poetry, sound installation. His compositions and sound realisations are concerned with the activity of listening and with sound space, and develop a very cross and interdisciplinary conception of music.

Vincent Barras (1956, lives in Geneva), performer, historian, translator. He teaches at the University of Lausanne (history of medicine) and at the High Schools of Art and Applied Art in Geneva (sound, history of the body). He is member of Contrechamps Editions in Geneva (contemporary music and aesthetics) and programmer of sound poetry and art language festivals (La Bâtie Festival and Roaratorio in Geneva). He has published various books, essays, articles, on body theory, medicine and psychiatry, contemporary poetry and music.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.