LP released by ISSUE Project Room's Distributed Objects imprint on September 18, 2015

Order at http://issueprojectroom.org/distributed-objects/thiefth

Originally released on CD in 2005 and out of print for a decade, Thiefth is the first of four collaborations between poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. This first LP edition, a limited run of 100 copies, is accompanied by a special edition letterpress print produced by Grenfell Press. Howe and Grubbs were first brought together when the Fondation Cartier in Paris proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been a dedicated reader of Howe’s for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe’s poetry and her voice immediately intrigued.  In late 2003, the two set about to create performance versions of “Thorow” and “Melville’s Marginalia,” the two of Howe’s longer poems that comprise Thiefth.

Preview - Susan Howe and David Grubbs: Theifth (DO04 LP)

Clarinet Quartets No. 1 and No. 2 offer a view of the beautifully stringent designs of composer, clarinetist and explorer into extended tonalties, John McCowen. These two pieces seem to culminate the past five or more years of John's diverse creative output as an improvisor, student of composition and touring musician into work that is both performative theory and relaxation. John is currently pursuing his MA in Composition at Mills College, studying performance with Roscoe Mitchell.

Music with accompanying score/art book available soon!

cairndesk.info



Clarinet Quartets No. 1 and No. 2 - John McCowen [album preview]

Julia Mihály: The Counting Sisters (2016/17):

The performance on stage is on the one hand an allegory for a ritual of „counting the dead“ as explained in the Indian folk tale of The Counting Sisters, where six women (in an act of political resistance) spend their
time collecting information around people who recently died due to political „issues“. On the other hand it is the translation of a general phenomenon of digital interconnection: The more information we receive,
the less we notice. Or to express it differently: The more we see, the less we see. Every day our online newspapers and social media timelines are covered with a vast amount of latest news, videos, pictures,
blog posts and comments about 100.000 dead of yesterday, 235.000 of today and a forecast for tomorrow. The dead disappear behind mere numbers. An incident becomes more grave as more dead are counted.
The individual becomes insignificant.

The voice and the resonating body form the nucleus of all sound and stand in interactive correspondence with a real time sound modulating Max patch. Furthermore the performer’s body functions as a projection surface for the visual translation of text immanent processes. Movements extend from raw performative expressions to a tool of interaction between the performer and the computer.

LINK to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8etkq4ktCw

Julia Mihály: The Counting Sisters

Alvin Lucier - Criss-Cross / Hanover (Excerpt 2)

“Someone must have handed me a piece of flexible tubing from the hardware store and shown me that I could play it, the pitch rising and falling according to how hard I’d blow through it. It was around 1970. I tied a red kerchief to this horn and called it my molimo, after the instrument the Mbuti Pygmies play to wake up their mother, the forest. According to the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest originally made their molimo by burying a special kind of branch in the ground for the ants to hollow out. As stores became part of their world, the Pygmies found that a drainpipe worked just as well. They claim that the molimo is the sound, not the object. ” – Simone Forti

Simone Forti – Al Di Là (SLT-004)

Saltern is excited to present Al Di Là, the first full-length collection of recordings by renowned dancer/choreographer, artist and writer Simone Forti. Forti (born 1935, Florence, Italy) has influenced generations of artists through her innovative approaches to dance and movement. Forti is noted for her extensive work with musicians, including Charlemagne Palestine, La Monte Young, Jon Gibson, Peter Van Riper, and Z’EV, among others. With Al Di Là, we hear Forti musically in her own right through a diverse collection of never-before-released pieces, ranging from the early ‘60s to mid-80s, that highlight Forti’s use of her voice, folk songs, handmade instruments, and physical space. The album, compiled by Forti with the assistance of Tashi Wada, includes a rare guest appearance by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and features a 28-page color booklet of writings, drawings and photos by Forti. Al Di Là is a uniquely personal and intimate portrait of one of the truly visionary artists of our time. Printed at Stoughton Printing Company. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.

From Forti’s liner notes: “I’m awaiting a song from afar, from afar, a song of goodbye from afar. For now I’ve seen the game I was playing, slowly leaving the earth and drifting far among the stars.”

Simone Forti – Molimo (1970-present)

Performance
Saturday, May 12th, 2018

ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn

Saturday, May 12th, ISSUE presents composer Vanessa Rossetto and sound artist C. Lavender each presenting new compositions. Respectively, these new works disclose parallel explorations into how trauma and memory collude with audition as a co-composional affective material. Rossetto presents work exploring the localization of transgenerational trauma taking residence in the individual body, while Lavender uses rapidly moving tones produced by specialized software that work with the brain's "frequency following" response as a form of rehabilitation.

Returning to ISSUE after previous performances at ISSUE’s KYE showcase in 2014 and Amplify series with Erstwhile Records in 2015, Vanessa Rossetto premieres “The Dirt,” a new work accompanied by a short film by frequent collaborator Matthew Revert. In a time when many fear that we are collectively hurtling toward a possible violent conflict fomented by jingoistic forces within our own national body, "The Dirt" presents an account of a similar situation long ago but remarkably fresh in the minds of people still living, where the dangers were comparable to those today, but the threat was external rather than internal. An exploration of transgenerational trauma, tenacity, survivorship and memory, the piece uses recordings of the composer's mother, who survived the London Blitz as a child, to interrogate the lingering effects of such upheaval, or any severe upheaval, upon even those who make it through and how this trauma can take up residence in the individual body as anxiety and depression.

For her ISSUE debut as a solo artist, C. Lavender presents “Transmutation Helix,” a performance piece engaging the audience to explore sound at deeply physical and emotional levels as a way to mend their relationship to stress and physical pain. The piece features Lavender employing specialized software to create tones which trigger a “frequency following” response in the brain, subtly modifying brainwave patterns between alert and meditative states. Within this dynamic sonic condition, the audience is given projected cues to explore the sounds they are hearing through gentle movement and breathing guidance.

Vanessa Rossetto is an American composer and painter based in New York City. She uses primarily field recordings, chamber instrumentation, electronics and a wide array of objects to create structures that expose the web of narrative threads underlying the everyday sound world around us. Rossetto has released material via Erstwhile, Kye, Unfathomless, Another Timbre, No Rent and other labels including her own Music Appreciation, and has been featured in publications such as The Wire, Signal to Noise and No Depression.

C. Lavender is a Hudson Valley, New York based sound artist, educator, and healer whose work spans through live performance, recording, installations and workshops. She seeks to create an immersive aural landscape for the listener, an experience which is intensely physical, emotional and ultimately cathartic as noted in a performance review from the Village Voice; "downright iconic, charged with meaning and transgression." C. Lavender has hosted sound-based workshops at The Rubin Museum, MoMA PS1, The Brooklyn Botanic Garden and RPI University. In 2016 she taught a ten-week class for children about the scientific and artistic aspects of sound. C. Lavender's 2017 full length album, “Vanishing Light,” was recorded in a semi-abandoned school turned county mental health center in Hudson, NY.

C. Lavender: Transmutation Helix - LIVE at ISSUE / May 12th, 2018

'192' explores the city sounds that we choose to ignore on a daily basis. Recordings for this piece were taken from the many bus trips that I have taken from Stockport to Picaddilly Gardens and The University of Manchester. Since moving to Manchester, my reliance on public transport  has introduced me to a whole new soundworld, one in which you can choose to ignore with an MP3 player. I decided to really study and embrace this environment, becoming more and more aware of the multiple layers of this soundscape and perhaps embrace this 'noise pollution' that commuters ignore. This piece reflects the rhythms, tones, atmosphere of the '192'. 

ZOOM0023

K Mulhern