andrewcsmith (FMA Admin)

ISSUE Project Room's annual Darmstadt: Essential Repertoire festival often focuses on works that are influential far beyond the audience that has actually heard them. This year, Ensemble Sospeso will perform Morton Feldman's marathon late work "For Christian Wolff," a three-hour duet for piano and flute, and Joe Drew of Analog Arts will give the U.S. premiere of Stockhausen's "Cosmic Pulses," for 8-channel electronics. 

In 2010, the S.E.M. Ensemble was invited to perform at the festival, and one of the pieces played was the austere and yet unstable "For 1, 2 or 3 People," by Christian Wolff (Feldman's dedicatee). "For 1, 2 or 3 People" is, in some ways, the perfect piece to be played at Essential Rep. It's a piece that leaves a lot up to the performers, even things that would seem vital, such as how many performers should perform and what instruments they should play. But on another level, it demands so much interpretation and creativity from its constraints: commands to make "a sound in a middle place, in some respect, of the sounds around it," or "a sound involving stretched material." Christian Wolff has had a long history of collaboration with S.E.M., and the performers (Petr Kotik, Joseph Kubera, and Chris Nappi) take to the piece with the same familiarity as most musicians bring to someone like Mozart. Their interpretation of the piece, then, really becomes a sure, confident one, which is something required for music that has the potential for such sparseness. 

And at the same time, the piece requires focus and sensitivity to the other performers—each page constitutes a score, and players perform different sections of the score simultaneously. A large part of the piece requires coordination among players, with commands such as "play after a previous sound has begun, hold till it stops." For 2 or 3 players, this may mean some degree of coordination; for 1 player, this may mean reacting to environmental sounds. Have a listen to this piece, which imagines its own world, redrawing the roles for performers and audiences.

Okkyung Lee, one of Issue's 2011 Artists-in-Residence, performed back in April as part of a quartet that also included jazz guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Skuli Sverrisson, and drummer Tom Rainey. She's collaborating with the dancer Michelle Boulé this Friday in a free performance at Issue Project Room's 110 Livingston space in Downtown Brooklyn, in a piece called long white shadows (FREE | RSVP), where the two performers will constantly change their relationships within and toward the space.

A classically trained cellist born in Korea, it's not like Lee doesn't regularly work with jazz musicians. She's a staple of the New York free improvisation scene, counting as past collaborators Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, John Butcher (at Issue Project Room on 09/20, Buy Tickets), Tyshawn Sorey, and many more. But there's a certain vibe to this performance that distinguishes it from others, perhaps because the other musicians are laying down such a steady downtown-jazz-club riff that Lee's aggressive playing, focused more on sound than on groove or pitch, is almost out of place. There's a moment, about four minutes into the second track, where Ellman repeats a little lick and Sverrisson and Rainey join in, but then—what's that in the background?—a crazy, almost banshee-like scream that threatens to send this clean jazz groove off the tracks and into the woods. In most other free-noise improv settings, there would be a collective recognition and acknowledgement that things are now getting noisy and everyone would, somewhat safely, get noisy together. But something different happens here, which is that these two things—a steady post-bop jazz-rock groove and what could be Xenakis run through a half stack—coexist for a moment.

On September 16 & 17, ISSUE Project Room will present the series Minor Musics: Japan, highlighting a number of musicians associated with two geographically divergent but aesthetically related groups: Onkyo, in Tokyo, and Wandelweister, based primarily in continental Europe. Both of these groups are intensely invested in silence as a compositional and improvisational element, and the two-night event at ISSUE places them in solo and collaborative settings. The performers will include Taku Sugimoto, Taku Unami, Takahiro Kawaguchi, Moe Kamura, as well as Annette Krebs and Radu Malfatti.

The selection below is from the Annette Krebs and Taku Unami duo album motubachii, recently released on Erstwhile Records. In this album, seemingly musical sounds are juxtaposed with ambient noises, like sounds from a TV or radio playing in the background, or feet shuffling. It's ambient music by another means: rather than making making musical elements into furniture, the piece invites the listener to listen closely to the furniture of the everyday sonic world, placing it alongside manufactured and manipulated acoustic and electroacoustic sounds. 

The duo will perform this Friday night (more info | Buy Tickets), along with a duo performance by Radu Malfatti/Taku Sugimoto and a solo performance by Takahiro Kawaguchi. Both artists will also perform Saturday (more info | Buy Tickets) in various other duos (Taku Unami & Takahiro Kawaguchi, Annette Krebs & Taku Sugimoto, and Moe Kamura & Taku Sugimoto). Be sure not to miss this rare chance for a glimpse into one of Japan's most vital underground artistic movements.

Minor Musics: Japan is made possible, in part, by generous support from Japan Foundation NY.

This past week, ISSUE held a reception and short concert by our Artists-in-Residence Nate Wooley & James Ilgenfritz [Artist-in-Residence Nate Wooley with MIVOS Quartet + Peter Evans: Saturday, 6/18, FREE | RSVP] at our future home at 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. This space, which has previously hosted more than a few string quartets, William Basinski, Ellen Fullman, and a solo acoustic (amplified) performance by Elliott Sharp, had still barely touched the performance style that makes up a healthy portion of our programming: free improvisation. Both Nate and James seem to approach improvisation as an act of listening. They leave ample space for silence, and even when playing solo don't merely rattle off licks learned in middle school. The immediacy of their playing and their mental and emotional presence in the room is always felt.

This performance at 110 Livingston (their first public performance as a duo) seemed to amplify the artists' awareness of their own sound. This highly reverberant space has not yet been acoustically treated, and when there are few other people and no furniture it's difficult to even have a conversation in the room; any word spoken just bounces around the room for 7-8 seconds. So a duo performance by these two virtuoso listeners cannot help but include the room in the equation. The sounds are held, or blasted into the room. But they always step back to listen to the full sound. It's always about the result, and about the aggregate of sounds heard, not only spoken; it's not about the player.

If Wet Ink Ensemble existed when "uptown" and "downtown" still had meaning, much of their programming would seem to land them decidedly north of 34th St. But like the capital-D Downtown groups, the bread and butter of their programming comes from the ensemble members themselves, with composers such as Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels, Sam Pluta, playing vital roles in the group. Lately, inching toward its teenage years, the ensemble has started to program ambitious portrait concerts of underheard-in-America European composers like Peter Ablinger and Matthias Spangler, usually in places like Columbia's Miller Theater or various cultural centers.

However, Wet Ink always seems to make two or three appearances a year at ISSUE. Tonight, for the annual Darmstadt Institute, Wet Ink Ensemble will play new works by composer, trombonist, early AACM member, and Columbia professor George Lewis, vocalist Kate Soper, and pianist Eric Wubbels, with older works by Rick Burkhardt and Alex Mincek. The tracks below are saxophone & piano duos from the group's March 2010 concert at ISSUE: "Pendulum III" by saxophonist and Artistic Director Alex Mincek; and "this is this is this is" by pianist and Executive Director Eric Wubbels.

ISSUE Project Room's annual Darmstadt Institute — which borrows the name (if not polemic) of the famous incubator of post-WWII difficult music — runs throughout the month of June, with imports like John Moran & Saori, Terre Thaemlitz (aka DJ Sprinkles), and Jennifer Walshe; Darmstadt stalwarts like TILT Brass, Claire Chase & Rebekeh Heller, and the Wet Ink Ensemble; and some revivals of underrepresented American artists such as David Borden's Mother Mallard Portable Masterpiece Co. and Larry Austin. Almost all of these artists are represented in the mix directly to the right of these words, in works ranging from late-70s pieces by Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co. – one of the first-ever synthesizer ensembles, counting Robert Moog and David Tudor among its members – to an improvisation by inimitable pianist Thollem McDonas, recorded last year in the Can Factory.

We'll continue adding to this mix, as we excavate more recordings from the seemingly endless ISSUE archive, and feature tracks from artists once or twice a week. For now, though, check out the full Institute schedule and, if you're in town, check us out.

Tonight (5/26/11) at ISSUE, we're bringing together two artists of ecstatic noise. The Italian group Jooklo Duo, having recently played in Philadelphia, Somerville, and around the U.S. in support of their new album The Warrior on Northern-Spy Records, and guitarist Bill Nace will each play their own sets, followed by a collaborative trio set. Also worth mentioning: Jooklo Duo will be on Scott McDowell's show The Long Rally tomorrow morning from 9 am.

The first time I heard Jooklo Duo (not until recently, unforutunately) I thought there was something wrong. This recording sounds a little like someone turned a microcassette recorder to full amplitude and dropped it down a saxophone. But, in that way, it sounds perfect—capturing the greater spirit of a live performance, without the inclination to make the instrument sound like it's in a real room, or to soften the edges. Instead, it's like an early bop track with so much to say and very little time to say it all. And after four and a half minutes, although there's an impression that they could have gone on longer, the track ends with a hit that seems like, even though they're getting cut off by the recording engineer, they'll finish up their allotted time and leave no room for a response. Bill Nace, always driving his guitar past the point of drive into a distortion, detaches from the solo electric guitar drone-set playbook. It's all about nearly breaking the instrument, or the amplifier, or your ears, and shaping a wall of sound that lacks the spectral coherence of Stephen O'Malley or Glenn Branca's open strings while still containing an internal logic.

In the early 1980s, Ellen Fullman began developing the "Long String Instrument," stringing tuned piano wire across her Brooklyn studio. In the last thirty years, she has moved this instrument all over the country, and for one day she'll perform in ISSUE Project Room's new space at 110 Livingston, in Downtown Brooklyn (May 22: 3 pm & 7 pm: brand-new ISSUE members get two free tickets). It's been compared to standing inside an enormous grand piano, or "some cyclopean subterranean grotto" (The Wire). She has an upcoming release on Important Records, Through Glass Panes, and the mix below includes a few of these tracks as well as collaborations with the artists she'll be joined by later this month.

These comparisons, like "standing inside an enormous grand piano," don't quite convey the symbiosis between Fullman's instrument and her way of playing it. It's true, the audience is sitting in a room with seventy 80-foot, precisely tuned wires strung across it, but the comparison seems to fall apart when you realize you've never quite heard a piano that sounds like this. Instead of playing digitally, Fullman's playing seems to live on the threshold of audibility. The on/off of the piano seems distant — can a light brush on a single string be counted as a "note," in the same way that pressing a key constitutes a note?

The careful tuning of the strings causes sympathetic resonances among them. The wire is strung between resonator boxes made of Sitka spruce, built by a harp builder, and the sound is entirely acoustic. This setup, which on the surface seems simple, like a giant guitar with no frets or a harp with no pedals, creates infinitely complex resonances and acoustic effects. In a resonant space, the line between the instrument sounding and not sounding could be blurred.

The uploaded tracks include collaborations with the musicians she'll be performing with on May 22. Through Glass Panes, her new CD on Important Records, includes a duet with Theresa Wong, "Never Gets Out of Me," and other tracks include a duet with percussionist Sean Meehan ("untitled 3," out on cut), electronic musician David Gamper, and trombonist Monique Buzzarté ("Fluctuation 5," from the album Fluctuations on Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening label).

The label Table of the Elements lives up to its name: nothing more than elemental, and nothing short of encyclopedic. They’ve released a 4-CD box set by Tony Conrad titled “Early Minimalism,” and they’ve kept available a number of truly foundational works by Rhys Chatham, among them “Two Gongs” and “Die Donnergotter.” The concept of cover art was reinvented in the early age of the CD; a 128 page book was included with the 7-disc Charley Patton revival collection “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” where used copies fetch around $200 on Amazon. The list goes on and on, with a dual focus on the avant-garde and on so-called primitive American musics: from John Fahey’s fingerpicking to Zeena Parkins’ electro-acoustic harp.

But the periodic table is only so large, and eighteen years later the label has reached the end of it. To celebrate this occasion, the label has assembled a three-night Copernicium Festival (May 12 – 14, $20 a night or $15 for ISSUE members) as a massive sendoff, with artists ranging from Stephen O’Malley, to Jonathan Kane’s February, to Tony Conrad, to Zeena Parkins, to a performance of Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio with a small guitar army. It’ll traverse minimalism, blues, death metal, free improvisation, film, and visual art (with projections of Robert Longo’s Pictures for Music from 1979).

I’ve uploaded tracks from Jonathan Kane’s February releases February and Jet Ear Party, as well as a recording of Zeena Parkins’ March 2010 duo with violinist Jon Rose. The mix also includes a track from Peg Simone’s performance at ISSUE which later appeared on her Table of the Elements release Secrets from the Storm, and a live performance by death-sludge-metal artists Sunn O))), whose Stephen O’Malley will headline the final night of the series. Check out the attached mix, and come by any or all of the three nights to celebrate the conclusion of a great label.

Art by Kim Seltzer

Dave Nuss (of the No Neck Blues Band) and playwright Eric Sanders have teamed up, and for the past five years have been working on an opera Original Innocence, which will be premiered in a workshop performance at ISSUE Project Room this Friday (3/25, 8 & 10 pm). Their tale weaves threads of Eastern mysticism, feminism and the dissolution of opposites that form the basis of the Judeo-Christian creation myth into a 75-minute production that reimagines the myth as a form of liberation.

Check out the music below, and be sure to watch the video of their rehearsals and Dave Nuss's commentary on the project.