MMXIX Summer Performance Series
Summer Performance Series
Organized by Tabitha Piseno
Friday August 23
Nick Scavo: "For Clark Filio"
DeForrest Brown Jr. + Dylan Scheer
Drumloop
Saturday August 24
G/N/O
Derek Baron
7038634357
Sunday August 25
Aki Onda + Loren Connors
Marico Kondo + Yuji Agematsu: "Document: Tepito"
Performances begin at 8pm / Limited seating
$10
BYOB
In 1999 Aki Onda met Loren Connors outside of the record store, Other Music, and interviewed him for a Japanese magazine. Soon after, the two presented a collaborative project at Anthology Film Archives where Onda created a series of slide projections that served as a visual score to performances by Connors. They continued to perform as Onda's Cinemage project, often with Alan Licht, from 2005 to 2009. In 2015 a series of recordings was released on audioMER as Lost City featuring a compilation of images from Onda and two soundtracks by Connors and Licht.
Now twenty years after their first meeting, Onda and Connors will come together for their first collaborative live music performance. For this occasion, Onda will present field recordings captured in New York alongside improvisations on guitar by Connors—an homage, a document of sounds and experiences of the city by friends through the course of two decades.
"Document: Tepito", a project by Marico Kondo performed with Yuji Agematsu, is a series of slide projections and music centered around documentation of the subculture of Sonidero in the neighborhood of Tepito in Mexico City. A complex style of street events that combine dancing, tropical music with roots in cumbia and salsa, live broadcasting by an MC, and enormous speaker systems, Sonidero has come to represent generations of working class music culture in Mexico since the 1950s. First performed as "Document: La Merced y Tepito" in 2017, this iteration of Marico Kondo's series will present specific documentation from the 60th anniversary of the market after dancing in the street was prohibited in Tepito in 2017, and will be presented in memory of Pocaluz—a host who held an annual event for Sonidero in his home and passed away in June of this year.
| "For Clark Filio" is a new work by Nick James Scavo dedicated to the American painter Clark Filio. The piece appropriates the stylization of Morton Feldman’s compositions that are dedicated to painters -- For Philip Guston and Rothko Chapel being perhaps the most well known -- part of the New York School of composers’ impulse to often emphasize experimental music’s reciprocity with Abstract Expressionist Art. Unlike Feldman, the piece embarks from a dubious and wholly unclear relationship to painting as a medium. Instead, the piece is composed from a strong affinity to Filio’s subject matter and process: paintings from film stills and TV shows, Sandra Bullock in Bird Box, Frodo’s ashen face overlooking Mount Doom, Nightmare from Soul Caliber, Aribeth de Tylmarande from Neverwinter Nights, Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel. Clark’s paintings use a precise technique clearly developed by someone who goes to the studio every day to make paintings. They gesturally capture a specific cultural moment as way of exaggerating and emphasizing the material medium of painting in a skilled, direct way. Simply put, and not unlike Feldman's compositions, Clark's various subjects throw us back to the material of painting. Feldman, an extrovert entertainer who happily threw himself between sweeping generalizations, wild analogies and impudent paradoxes — something that his relationship to painting is clearly a part of — is perhaps the Frodo, the Jamie Lee Curtis, the Sandra Bullock of the piece. For Clark Filio identifies with this impulsive mood; and, in homage to Clark and his work, attempts to in its own way necromance Clark’s paintings in order to throw us into the material of music. The piece follows a recent project of developing musical “Necromanticism” (Necromancy + Romanticism)— a style of composition that presents thousands of samples from “deceased” self-produced and institutional contexts as a kind of “summoning” of sound (necromancy). The project has been articulated as an act of conjuring “dead” cultural contexts and musical materials as a way to passionately commune around wrecked expressions of the meaningful (romance) — exaggerating the dance of institutionalized presentation as a zombie, and compositional techniques as amorous manipulations of the walking dead. Nick James Scavo is a musician and writer based in New York City. His current area of musical focus is developing the musical style of “Necromanticism.” He works in various solo and collaborative projects with The Actual School, contributes regular reviews and essays to Tiny Mix Tapes, and has presented work with MoMA PS1, Artists Space, The New Museum, Rhizome, Control Synthesizers and Electronic Devices, and in residence at NTS Radio. He has done institutional work with ISSUE Project Room, Blank Forms, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and Empty Editions, Hong Kong. His recent published music includes “Vampyroteuthia” with Xander Seren, “Vorsch,” and numerous discrete works published in collaboration with Aaron Dowdy and Seren. His recent writing includes the essays “Traditional Music of a Wrecked Species: Dredging New Instruments Out of Bad Technology,” “A Musicology of Exhaustion” with Pat Bean, and “Against Worldbuilding: Fight The Snob Art of the Social Climbers!” He is also currently writing a preliminary treatise of a theory of music centered around an idiosyncratic conception of Wrath, edited by Alec Sturgis, to be published soon. DeForrest Brown, Jr. is a New York-based rhythmanalyst, media theorist and curator. His work is concerned with speculative futures in performative contexts and programmatic intersections of technology and thought. He also produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music as well as being a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign.. Via App is an alias of Dylan Scheer, Brooklyn based experimental synthesist, sonic field researcher, electronic composer and performer, and club chaos conduit. They are most known for their acrobatic, narrative, conjuring, ever-transmuting live sets. Their studio recordings exist, in part, as documentation of their performances and are often live recordings stitched together. Daffy Scanlan is an artist from New Jersey and currently based in New York. Her work explores the transportation of antiques through time and space, paying tribute to the neglect and ultimate disembodiment of un-new objects. She combines cracked and broken textures with antiquated color stories, creating portals into a canon of abuse and trauma. Under the moniker Drumloop, Scanlan collages micronized bits of language with piano and digital synthesis to create sonic representations of her internal universe. Her debut EP, Revenge Body, was recently released by Sweat Equity. |
| For millennia certain agents lay peacefully dormant, void of occupation, ebbing and flowing with the moon and tide. But once activated, they’ve spawned a new network of awareness. The Global Neurosis Operative exists as a unification force, a restoration program to reinstall the sensibilities that have been ripped from our collective consciousness. compile.global 7038634357 is Neo. Derek Baron is an artist working mostly with music and sound. Collaborative projects include Permanent Six Flags, Cop Tears, and Causings. Derek co-operates the Reading Group record label in New York City. Upcoming releases include "The Dress of the Century" solo tape on UK label Regional Bears and an LP of chamber arrangements of Theodor Adorno's piano music by Cop Tears, due out on Reading Group early next year. |
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| Aki Onda is a New York-based artist, composer and curator. He is known for his “Cassette Memories”—works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by using the cassette Walkman over a span of last three decades. Onda often works in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and choreographers. For the last fifteen years, he has worked with artists such as Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Paul Clipson, Raha Raissnia, Daisuke Yokota, Annea Lockwood, Loren Conners, Alan Licht, David Toop, Rie Nakajima, and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his work at The Kitchen, MoMA, P.S.1 MOMA, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Présences électronique, Bozar, ICA London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nam June Paik Art Center, and many others. Loren Connors has improvised and composed original guitar music for over four decades. His music embraces the underlying aesthetics of blues, Irish airs, blues-based rock and other genres while letting go of rigid forms. He names abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko as his most important influence. Connors has performed solo and with many veterans of independent music such as Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, Daniel Carter, Samara Lubelski, Alan Licht and Kim Gordon. Connors has worked closely over the years with vocalist Suzanne Langille, including in an avant blues band called Haunted House with guitarist Andrew Burnes and percussionist Neel Murgai. His recordings have been released on Family Vineyard, Northern Spy, Drag City, Recital, and other labels. Marico Kondo (b. Tokyo, Japan) is a documentary photographer, independent researcher living between New York and Mexico City. She received an MA from the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo where she worked as a researcher and translator in the fields of Sociology and Urban Subculture. Kondo’s ongoing projects focus on documentation of the Sonidero of Mexico City, and the Latino immigrant community in Jackson Heights, New York. |
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