"The Man Who Made Roulette Into New York’s Music Lab" The New York Times Sunday, May 19, 2024 Gift link
New in The New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section: my exit interview with the great trombonist and composer Jim Staley, who co-founded the essential new-music institution Roulette in 1978, and replanted it in his NYC loft in 1980, as he prepares to step away from leadership in June after 45 years.
From my first visit to Roulette in 1993 – the first time I saw Derek Bailey perform in person, a literally life-changing experience – to my latest encounters there with Du Yun’s OK Miss and Robert Ashley’s opera Foreign Experiences, this has been a venue special and dear to me. When I interviewed Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori about their new Phantom Orchard project in 2004 for my sole cover story for The Wire, the interview took place at the original loft.
I know that I’m far from alone in feeling this way.
I’m very grateful to Jim for sharing his thoughts about what’s happened and what’s to come—obviously what’s in the Q&A is only the tip of the iceberg. My thanks, too, to Zeena, Matt Mehlan, Jamie Burns, Joanna Mattrey, and the incredibly generous David Weinstein for crucial insights, and to Rachel Saltz and Emily Brennan at The New York Times for a smooth and illuminating edit.
You can help to send Jim off in style at this year’s Roulette Gala on Thursday, June 6, featuring a suitably dazzling constellation of artists: Zeena and Ikue, Henry Threadgill, Yuka Honda and Nels Cline, Immanuel Wilkins and Joel Ross, Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon, and John Zorn with Staley himself. You’ll find all the details here.
Until then, since I couldn’t use a lot of what I was provided in interviews, I plan to share exclusive outtakes in my Night After Night newsletter during the weeks to come.
I recall writing this review, which predates this blog by just over two years, but I don't remember for what outlet I wrote it. I located it today on a whim – after posting the image you see above on Twitter – on Acoustic Levitation, an online journal edited and published by Steve Koenig, a poet, teacher, and activist based in Brooklyn. A bit of introductory text on that site states "we are transplanting this from our former website," but I don't know what that other website was. I do recall distinctly that this review caused some passing friction between myself and one of the artists cited herein, until I'd clarified what I'd meant by a certain comparison—and that what I'd intended was the absolute highest of praise.
It's difficult for me to read this now, given its endless, seemingly unedited gush. But I'm always glad to find and preserve bits of my past, and the account absolutely does bring back some very, very good memories. I'll always be grateful to Stone… and to Stephanie Stone, his wife, who passed away in 2014, and Steve Dalachinsky, so present herein, who we lost in 2019.
Irving Stone Memorial Concert Saturday, July 5, 2003 Tonic, New York City
What are the odds that a little old man with a big heart, a sharp tongue and a taste for wild music and sweet herb could unite an all-star array of New York avant-jazzers and free improvisers and inspire them to perform all day long on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in July? Irving Stone probably could have given you an exact answer. After all, he'd spent decades employed as a statistician for the New York City Housing Authority. Stone, as he was universally known, was a fixture at pretty much every concert of exploratory jazz and downtown experimentation since Coltrane was blowing the roof off the Vanguard. (I used to use "Ayler" in that sentence, until his wife Stephanie once corrected me: She and Stone never saw Ayler at the Vanguard, though they saw him plenty of other places.)
As has been noted in countless other places, the Stones were treated like royalty among the circles in which they traveled. Yet conversely, they were – and Stephanie remains – among the most generous and welcoming of all souls on that scene. Again, as more than one observer has mentioned, when you saw them at a gig you were attending, you felt like you were visiting family. For at least one generation of downtown musicians, and likely more, the mere presence of the Stones at a gig felt like artistic validation.
All of those points, and many more like them, were brought up during two hours of heartfelt reminiscences of Stone that preceded Saturday's memorial music marathon, which was organized by longtime Stone favorite John Zorn with help from numerous close friends, including poet Steve Dalachinsky, critic Kevin Whitehead and many others. Though we heard tales that we'd all heard before, or perhaps even witnessed firsthand, still, there was more revealed that gave us a better image of who Stone had been before he became the Stone we all knew. "Irving Stone taught Harry Partch how to balance a checkbook," said Mrs. Gosfield, an old family friend whose daughter Annie has become a significant downtown composer in the Zorn orbit. "Irving Stone could sing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the voice of Louis Armstrong."
And on it went, as local luminaries traded tales with longtime friends. Barely able to catch his breath in a headlong rush of emotion, step-grandson Jesse lamented that he wished he'd known his step-grandfather nearly as well as the sizeable audience assembled in the room. Steve Dalachinsky (who said he was unable to complete a serious poem about Stone because he knew the dedicatee would not approve) instead read a well-known poem by another late friend of his, Ted Joans, adapting certain phrases to better capture Stone's preferences.
Stephanie Stone, no doubt overwhelmed, addressed the audience from a seat in the front row. Normally a gregarious figure, she was clearly affected by the outpouring. The next, and last voice, belonged to Stone himself. No one in the room was spared a tear at the voice, nor a laugh as, in a pre-recorded interview, he recalled a conversation with Mark Feldman. The violinist had asked Stone if he'd noticed any difference in the way he sounded that evening, when he had used an expensive new bow for the first time. Stone politely replied that he hadn't.
"What? You mean you can't tell the difference between when I use a $2,000 bow and when I use a $500 bow?" Feldman had asked, incredulous.
"No, but I can tell the difference between when you're playing for real and when you're just fucking around," was the sincere reply. ("Fuck," we were told more than a few times, was a potent component in Stone's vocabulary.)
Further reminiscences detailed whimsical close encounters with Kenny Dorham, Salvador Dali and Charlie Chaplin—all of which served notice that Stone was a man who lived life to the fullest, and shared everything that he had. For the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, many of the artists who Stone nurtured over the years came forward to pay tribute on behalf of everyone assembled, in the manner that Stone had loved best.
Originally published on National Sawdust Log, April 13, 2018
Drummer Brian Chase is best known as a member of the vital indie-rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but that only reveals the tip of the iceberg where his creative life is concerned. A longtime participant in New York City’s busy underground-music scene, Chase has performed and recorded with a dizzying range of innovators, including Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Tyondai Braxton, Andrea Parkins, Jeremiah Cymerman, and Mary Halvorson, as well as bands such as the Fretless Brothers, Oakley Hall, the Sway Machinery, and Man Forever. Recently, he was among the dozens of artists who joined John Zorn in bidding farewell to The Stone in its original East Village location.
As a solo artist, Chase for more than a decade has pursued an interest in the limitless possibilities of just intonation and drone, inspired by the iconic Dream House operated by the maverick artists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. In 2013 he released Drums and Drones, the initial CD + DVD release devoted to his ongoing project of that name, on the esteemed experimental-music label Pogus Productions. The album’s DVD component included videos that New York artists Ursula Scherrer and Erik Z. made to complement Chase’s live performances. About that release, Chase explained at the time:
“Drums and percussion has seen some but not much exploration in Just Intonation, yet they are inherently designed to represent it as such: a drum head is tuned to a single pitch, one frequency, and resonates with rich harmonic detail. From there the overtone series can be uncovered and expressed. The Drums and Drones project deals directly with approaching drums and percussion from the standpoint of Just Intonation.”
Now, Chase will document the evolution and refinement of his pursuit with the forthcoming release of Drums and Drones: Decade, a three-CD package bundled with a 144-page book featuring essays about the project and its components, performance photos, and still images from the videos he's performed with. Encouraged by Zorn, Chase will release the set June 15 on his own newly established label, Chaikin Records. In a telephone interview, he discussed the album and label, and hinted at some of his future plans.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: The press materials announcing Drums and Drones: Decade mention that the project was inspired initially by your interest in the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. How did you become acquainted with their art?
BRIAN CHASE: For about a year and a half, I worked as a volunteer at the Dream House space… this was in 2005 or so. And that just sucked me in – I was hooked on the vibrations. And before that, I had met Jon Catler, who was a guitarist in La Monte's ensembles. So that's how I got introduced to La Monte Young, apart from history books: I met Jon and started playing in some of his groups, and Jon got me into just intonation and that whole scene, and that led me to La Monte. As I was working at the Dream House, I started to see parallels between just intonation and the resonance of a drum head.
I'd wondered how you made that leap. Most people, when they think of drums, think of the qualities of attack and impact, rather than sustain and resonance.
Yeah, but I was thinking about it… the way a drum is set up is that a drum head is tuned to have a pitch, but within that resonance there's a whole complex sound world, a complex array of harmonics. I started to develop my skills in tuning, where I could tune a drum head to a very specific frequency, and then from knowing the frequency, I would be able to know my harmonics, and where they exist on the frequency spectrum. The way the project developed was I would start by tuning the drum to a specific frequency, usually 480Hz, based on how La Monte went about tuning – he would tune to a fundamental of 80Hz, which is the hum of ConEd… or National Grid, whatever it is now – and from there, I would use digital EQ to boost the harmonics of that fundamental.
So that's the technical aspect. But I was also very much into the meditative aspect of listening that came with the Dream House: the idea of not being able to hear all of the sound all at once, and understanding listening as a process. The compositions developed with that in mind; they were structured to allow listening to unfold, and to be experienced as a subjective process for the listener.
Did you ever have any kind of personal interaction with La Monte and Marian?
I've had some over the years, yeah, little bits here and there. Social encounters, as opposed to artistic collaborations? Yeah. One memory I have is when I was working at the Dream House around holiday time, New Year's. I was finishing my shift, and La Monte stopped me and had gifts for me: "a gift for your body, a gift for your mind, and a gift for your soul." The gift for my body was homegrown chili peppers [laughs], and they were the hottest chili peppers I've ever had. The gift for my mind was some incense, and the gift for my soul was the Midnight ragas CD with Pandit Pran Nath.
You've been developing this body of work for more than a decade now, a process illustrated by your new album. How has your approach evolved over the years?
It's been a continual trial and error experience. [Laughs] The first album is very much about me finding the methods for the first time – which is really exciting. I love the spontaneity of that.
The second album [Drums and Drones II: Ataraxia] definitely shows a more refined approach to my methods. And then the third album [Drums and Drones III: Acoustic] is a purely acoustic album, because in the process of developing the electroacoustic material, I would discover new techniques of getting harmonics in an acoustic way. It took about eight or nine years before I had a full repertoire of developing methods to bring out the harmonics in a purely acoustic way from drums.
You've played these kinds of pieces everywhere from The Stone to Basilica Hudson. Is there an ideal space or an ideal acoustic for getting the results you're after? Can you do it literally anywhere, with the judicious use of electronics?
It can be dome anywhere, but the environment changes what is done. I have to learn how to adapt to the scenario.
Each performance is in a sense site-specific.
Definitely.
So you've got this massive project you want to put out into the worlds. What made you take the leap of starting your own label?
The label came about as an idea from Zorn. He knew I was developing some releases, but I didn't have the output for them. I told him of one label that was interested, but wanted me to pay for the manufacturing. Zorn said for that same money, I could start my own label.
And he would know.
Exactly. So I took his advice. It was kind of the next step for me, because I do have a lot of projects, and I'm very deeply involved with many different aspects of the New York City music community. I was starting to feel a little inhibited by not having a label. So while I wouldn't necessarily have envisioned it for myself, now that I'm in it and starting to do it, I see all the possibilities.
You've announced two more projects for future release already. One is untitled: after, your collaboration with Catherine Sikora. Can you talk a little bit about that?
That music is more on the avant-jazz side. Catherine is a brilliant improviser, and we've had a project for a number of years now.
It's fully improvised, rather than assembled with some compositional strategy?
Yeah. And the way we developed our pieces was we used pieces of text from a Beowulf translation.
Seamus Heaney?
Exactly. Catherine is a big fan of Beowulf and Seamus. She typed out some excerpts on an old typewriter that she had, and brought them into a rehearsal one day. We went through and developed some themes and motifs that provided a springboard for improvisation.
Is that basically a loose template, where every time you revisit that project it comes out differently?
Definitely. The pieces tend to have the same character, which is kind of cool, considering that they're all based on specific passages from the book. But yeah, the music is different.
I gather from the press-release statement about your third release, 13 Million Year Old Ghost, that you're not allowed to reveal the performer's true identity. But can you point toward the sound world the music occupies?
It does hint at the drone side of things, but it does kind of have more of a typical song aspect to it.
You can't divulge who it is for contractual reasons?
Well, it's a friend of mine from the rock world. We're doing the mastering next week, so I think after that we'll start to feel more confident about revealing more information.
Going forward, do you have a sense of what kinds of projects and artists you're interested in pursuing?
I've started thinking about another round – I like the idea of doing three releases at a time. We'll see how this goes, and if I break even or it's sustainable, then I'll look toward another batch. One idea I had was to feature some great Brooklyn music… there was a lot of great stuff happening on the Brooklyn rock scene that I don't think made it past its history, unfortunately. A lot of bands that were pivotal at the time, like from 2000 to 2006, that get overlooked when people talk about the Brooklyn scene. So I was thinking about doing a compilation in a similar format to No New York that features four bands. And maybe it would be a two-LP thing; maybe it would be four bands over two LPs, possibly. So that's something I was thinking of for next time.
Your use of the term LP just then begs the question of whether you'll be issuing Chaikin releases on formats other than CD. Any plans for vinyl or cassette?
Yeah, definitely, 13 Million Year Old Ghost will be an LP. I thought about doing the album with Catherine on cassette, also, but I think that'll just stay on CD. Doing a label, the economics of all of this is… very apparent. [laughs]
Drums and Drones: Decade is due June 15, 2018, on Chaikin Records.
Originally published on National Sawdust Log, Nov. 29, 2017
Even for an artist as versatile and unpredictable as Sarah Hennies—a percussionist, improviser, and composer originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and now based in Ithaca, New York—her newest work represents a substantial achievement. Contralto, an hour-long work for vocalists on video with strings and percussion (either live or recorded), is named for the musical term that denotes the lowest female voice type. The principal source material is provided by a cast of trans women, filmed by first-time director Hennies as they speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises designed to help trans women develop a more conventionally female vocal sound.
Hennies is best known to new-music cognoscenti as a solo artist and for her work alongside fellow percussionists Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart in the protean percussion trio Meridian. In indie-rock circles, she's the former drummer for Austin combo The Weird Weeds, and the current time keeper for Philadelphia slowcore outfit Obody. For Contralto, which will be presented its world premiere on Nov. 30 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Hennies has assembled a stellar band of old friends and regular collaborators: Meridian bandmates Feeney and Stuart, violinist Erik Carlson, violist Wendy Richman, cellist T.J. Borden, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and percussionist Ashley Tini.
Speaking by telephone from her home in Ithaca, Hennies talked about the personal and stylistic discoveries that led her to imagine and assemble Contralto, as well as the circuitous creative path that gave her the tools and determination to get it done.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: To judge by the evidence I've seen thus far—a video trailer, a descriptive essay, and some sections of the score—Contralto is unlike anything you created before it. So let's get rolling with the most basic question: How did you come to conceive this piece?
SARAH HENNIES: It started a few different ways. Around three or four years ago, when I was first dealing with any kind of trans stuff and I didn’t know anything, this friend of mine had this really squeaky voice: super, super high. The first time we hung out, I don’t even remember how it came up, but she was like, “Oh, I can still do my old voice.” She started talking in this really profoundly deep, low voice, and I thought it was so startling. So when I started to think about making a piece that was about voices, at first I wanted to try to get a bunch of trans women to expose their quote-unquote “natural” voices. And the more I thought about that, the more wrong it felt for a lot of reasons… not that interesting, and not something that I wanted to do, because I felt like it would sensationalize physical things and focus on body stuff instead of actual identity.
And then, there’s a course that is offered at Ithaca College for free that is basically like trans voice training. They say it’s for trans people, but really only women take it, because what I learned years ago was that when a trans man transitions, his voice changes, because when you take testosterone, it causes your vocal chords to thicken, and your voice drops and gets more profound. And that does not go the other way. So I started to think of this as: when you think about trans women’s place in the world, you can change all of these things and go to all of this effort to do what’s called “passing,” and kind of assimilate into society, but there’s this one thing that you just can’t fix… or I wouldn’t use the word “fix”…
Alter?
Right. There’s this one pesky thing that none of us can really deal with. And what I found from the class… one of the women in the piece—the older woman in the pink sweater, her name is Dreia [Spies]—when we were filming her part, we talked about the class, because I met her there. She was asking me to explain the piece a little bit. I was like, well, I think the class is asking people to do something that is basically impossible. This is someone who’s taken the class repeatedly, and she was like, yeah, I think that’s basically true.
The class is designed to help you essentially pass, vocally?
Right, but what I found is that it does not… you know, it depends on the person. A different person, who I really wanted to be in the film, but she maybe just decided she didn’t want to, has one of the deepest speaking voices I’ve ever heard. I feel for her, because that’s really hard. But also, I started to think that the piece I needed to make was not that we all need to change our voices so that we can fit into society better, but that people need to change their definition of what they think a woman sounds like. This idea that it was trying to do something impossible is something that I was already doing in my music a lot. And from taking this class, there’s all of these exercises that started to remind me of pieces that I had already made before I ever thought about this class. [Laughs]
Oh, now that’s really curious and interesting.
The music in the trailer for the film, the kind of droney humming and sine-wave music, I actually made about six years ago. It was a test for a vocal piece that I never wrote, for a concert that a group I was in was doing in Austin, the Austin New Music Co-Op. We did a concert with a vocal group called Convergence…
A contemporary-classical kind of situation?
Right, right. The thing that ended up in Contralto I ended up releasing on a tape, just as its own piece. It’s a recording of myself multi-tracked four times, where all I’m doing is humming across my vocal range, so that one part is as low as I can possibly hum and one part is as high as I can hum. The highest part is kind of squeaky, it’s the only part that kind of wavers, and you can tell it was a little bit difficult. I wasn’t thinking about this in relation to trans- anything when I made the piece; I just made it. And there’s a lot of stuff like this where I can look back to 10, 20 years ago and be like: oh, that’s why I was thinking about this, and that’s why I was doing this.
Which tape includes the vocal piece?
It was called Casts. It’s on Astral Spirits. That tape ended up being sort of an odds-and-ends collection, just four pieces for something-plus-sine waves. There was one where I’m repeating a word over and over again, one for hi-hat, and one for vibraphone, and then this voice thing.
It’s interesting, [Contralto] is a convergence of all these things that I’ve been interested in, and they’re all just sort of happening at the same time. But it’s not explicit… I didn’t think of it as trying to do that. It just kind of happened on its own. I started to see that this was a link between all of these different things that I was doing. So that’s why I initially wanted to make the piece.
The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
Change is upon us once again, and with it a fresh start for Night After Night—elsewhere. As of Thursday, April 23, the primary focus of my work has shifted over to a newly launched Substack newsletter, also called Night After Night. That title has provided my online identity – my "brand" – for more than two decades; no reason I would change that now.
From the new site, my explanatory preamble:
As in all of my previous ventures – from blogging and freelancing through stints with Time Out New York, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Sawdust Log – I’ll be covering music in its infinite richness and variety, emphasizing what’s happening here and now. I’ll interview composers and performers about their newest projects, as well as bigger, broader ideas. I’ll review current recordings… and concerts, too, when the opportunity returns. I’ll direct your attention toward pertinent news and reviews published elsewhere, too.
I plan to post twice a week, and some posts will be available to everyone. But paying subscribers will have access to premium content now in planning stages… stay tuned.
Following that preamble, the first real entry – a biographical prelude, an extensive interview with Quince Ensemble and composer David Lang, and a postlude to my New York Times obituary of Richard Teitelbaum – was sent out on April 23. You can read it now, for free.
You'll notice that subscriptions are available, and at some point soon I'll start to roll out features meant exclusively for those who subscribe. That said, I completely recognize that this is a difficult time, and I intend to keep a substantial portion of my work freely accessible to all.
As for this long-serving Typepad blog, well, it's staying right where it is, and shifting to serve, even more than it does already, as an archive for past writings—both my original posts and the work I make for others. The playlists will stay here, too, and I'll try to be diligent about them.
I'll continue to add more past content when I find time (ha!). But for now, the Substack newsletter is where I'll be moving forward.
Shots Blank Forms, Brooklyn, NY February 27, 2020 General admission
Personnel:
Daniel DiMaggio, amplified objects, recordings John Friberg, amplified objects, recordings Matthew Friberg, amplified objects, movement
On Thursday night at Blank Forms, the intimate third-floor walk-up gallery space recently opened in Clinton Hill by the curatorial organization of the same name, the trio Shots played a brief show for a room filled to capacity with visibly intent listeners. What the group does is difficult to describe, but the summary Blank Forms provided neatly conveys the basics:
Their understated amalgam of barely-there object rustling—clanging metal, broken glass, running water, tempered feedback, timid drumming and strumming—could be mistaken for distracted dishwashing, a rusted fence squeaking in the wind, a raccoon in your shed.… Shots teeter, precariously, on a ledge between environmental and performed sound, but with a sincere carelessness and deliberate ineptitude more deeply rooted in hardcore than the bleached fossils of virtuosic improvisation.
Demand had prompted Blank Forms to add a prior performance on Wednesday. On Thursday the room was well filled but relaxed and comfortable, with listeners seated on the floor or standing along the peripheries. An exhibition of visual art by Graham Lambkin was hung around the space, the finely wrought, fantastical pencil and collage works subtly foreshadowing the balance of mundane and surreal qualities in the performance to come.
There's an intrinsic mystery of means in performances of this sort, wherein artists hunch over tables filled with electrical gear, patch cords, and contact microphones, and desperate critics cite "electronics" instead of enumerating specifics. A more diligent writer might have scanned the table at which John Friberg was stationed, scribbling an inventory of the black and silver objects it held. Likewise Dan DiMaggio, on the opposite side of the room with his own implements—one of which quite obviously was an old open-reel tape recorder.
But the make and model of each gadget employed seems less important than an elementary observation: what these two were doing essentially amounted to amplifying sounds – whether produced by some action or played from a recording – and distributing them throughout the room, not always in natural or intuitive ways. Between them, Matthew Friberg tapped and scraped objects – finger cymbals, painted rocks – on a wooden tray table, when he wasn't stepping away to perform choreographed gestures and steps nearby.
There's a lineage to this kind of performance, extending from John Cage, David Tudor, and the New York School through improvisers like AMM, Taku Unami, Sachiko M, and Jeph Jerman, and onward to disparate sound artists like Gabi Losoncy, Arek Gulbenkoglu, Vanessa Rossetto, and Graham Lambkin himself. There also are writers better qualified to discuss this lineage; an excellent place to start is the premiere issue of Tone Glow, a blog-turned-newsletter by Joshua Minsoo Kim, which includes revealing conversations with Shots and with Dan Gilmore, whose Careful Catalog label issued last year's brilliantly opaque Shots LP, Private Hate.
None of this is meant to suggest that Shots sounded like any or all of those forebears or colleagues, but rather simply to note that DiMaggio and the Fribergs are extending a fertile tradition of sonic practice in rich, provocative ways.
The low, indeterminate murmur that opened the performance sounded metallic and vaguely aqueous, something like being inside a ship's hull among drips and echoes. DiMaggio stalked around his bit of territory, nursing a beer bottle and occasionally adjusting some out-of-sight control. A recording of trucks or buses idling and rumbling forth seemed to emanate from his sector; other such outdoor recordings – human voices, honking fowl – surfaced now and again throughout the performance. But small, discrete noises, or bursts of them, punctuated the sound field with evidence of individuals performing.
The notion of intent came into question frequently. When John Friberg laid spent batteries from a handheld recorder aside on his tabletop, that minute action, and the sound it produced, seemed no less intrinsic to the performance than did the sounds the reanimated recorder might have produced—to say nothing of the more literal sounds he added with a snare drum, a suspended cymbal, or a stimulated metal plate. Likewise, when DiMaggio opened another beer on a window sill, abruptly and loudly, or when he allowed the wooden chair on which his feet were propped to fall with a clatter, those sounds, too, seemed performative. Chance also had its place: a roll of aluminum foil affixed to the window behind DiMaggio obviously was meant to flutter and wrinkle on rising gusts, but the specific rattle and crinkle produced, and how it interacted with other audible elements at play, clearly were beyond anyone's control.
The performance lasted only around 30 minutes. It felt complete, sufficient and satisfying; still, I'd gladly have stayed to listen a great deal longer. "Non-music" is a term that seems to have taken hold concerning the area of sonic activity under discussion here. But from my perspective, what Shots created in this live event was music, unequivocally.
If you happen to be in the vicinity of Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ, tonight (Feb. 13) at 8pm, you can see the premiere performance of Fantini Futuro, a new multimedia piece by the great experimental trumpeter and composer Ben Neill. Inspired by Girolamo Fantini, the Baroque composer credited with bringing the trumpet in from the hunt and the battlefield to the concert platform, Neill collaborates with two musicians well-known in New York's early-music community, countertenor Ryland Angel and harpsichordist Gwendolyn Toth. Neill will introduce the Mutantrumpet4.0 (pictured above), the newest iteration of his longtime hybrid electro-acoustic instrument… this one even controls interactive video. Here's a brief preview:
Neill has created Fantini Futuro with support from the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology program, and the show is directed by Bob McGrath of Ridge Theater. There's quite a bit more information about the piece on Neill's website, and you'll find more specifics about the Ramapo presentation (including directions) here.
And stay tuned… Neill is in hot pursuit of a New York City engagement for this new project.
The extraordinary French composer Éliane Radigue was born on this day in 1932, and celebrated her 88th birthday today as an artist whose star very much appears to be in the ascendant. Her recordings are widely available now, in lovingly prepared editions with beautifully restored sound. Occam Ocean – the body of acoustic work Radigue has busied herself producing since 2011, after a lifetime of creating tape and electronic music – has swollen to more than 50 pieces now, and counting. Last year, the independent curatorial concern Blank Forms mounted a nationwide tour devoted to some of these works, as well as a series of New York playback concerts featuring newly restored analog-tape recordings. To the best of my knowledge, every event sold out.
More opportunities to hear Radigue's music, as played by expert interpreters and collaborators, loom ahead. Frequency Festival, happening in Chicago in February, includes two Radigue programs: one on Feb. 26 featuring violist Julia Eckhardt and trumpeter Nate Wooley, and one on Feb. 27 featuring cellist Charles Curtis, linchpin of last year's Blank Forms tour.
Should you happen to be in Paris come March, Ensemble Dedalus will be playing an all-Radigue program at the Philharmonie de Paris on March 20—though it appears to be sold out already. And on May 2, Brooklyn location TBA, Nate Wooley shares a bill with composer-guitarist Michael Pisaro (presenting a version of Radigue's electronic piece L'Île Re-Sonante) under the big banner of Long Play, a new three-day festival presented by Bang on a Can.
There surely are more concerts. (If you know about one, tell me and I'll add it.)
Interested in getting to know more about Éliane Radigue? This 15-minute IMA Portrait documentary is a lovely place to start. It's in French, but includes subtitles.
I strongly recommend highly Intermediary spaces/Espaces itnermédiares, published in paperback last October by les presses du réel. The book, printed in both French and English, features a lengthy, substantial interview of Radigue conducted by Julia Eckhardt, the aforementioned violist. Also included are an authoritative timeline detailing events in Radigue's life, and an annotated guide to her complete works. The book is available at a handful of online retailers, but I ordered my copy directly from the publisher, inexpensively and with no fuss.
Beyond that: just listen. Do whatever it takes to get your hands on Œuvres Électroniques, the extraordinary 14-CD box set of Radigue's complete electronic output, issued in Nov. 2018 by INA-GRM. The box has gone into a second printing after the first one sold out faster than anyone could have anticipated.
Then, get to know Radigue's acoustic music, in which players of extraordinary focus and patience fashion the same kinds of acoustic phenomena the composer long pursued with feedback, tape, and her ARP synthesizer. Occam Ocean 1, a 2-CD collection of solos, a duo, and a trio, and Occam Ocean 2, a spectacular performance by an orchestra of improvisers, are available on the French label Shiiin—and, thanks to U.S. distribution by Naxos, those recordings also are on YouTube, Spotify, and other major streaming platforms.
