Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Performance 8pm / Doors 7pm
What: Roulette’s annual Mixology Festival kicks off with an evening featuring Shelley Hirsch reviving Host Rickels’s curiously magical instrument The Mercurius Wagon, and ascending performer Crystal Penalosa‘s new piece Sources of Power for electronics, voice, and movement.
When: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $18 presale, $25 Doors
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: https://roulette.org/event/mixology-festival-2019-sources-of-power/
Brooklyn, NY – Presented as part of Mixology Festival 2019: Signaling, the singularly exceptional composer/singer/storyteller Shelley Hirsch performs with Horst Rickels’s curiously magical instrument constructed from cannibalized organ pipes, toilet plungers, and bicycle pumps, alongside some new and surprising creations. The Mercurius Wagon, built for Hirsch 30 years ago and restored especially for this event, is one of Rickels’s signature works, alongside a lifetime of sound installations, acoustic architecture, and music for film. Witness two unpredictable and uncompromising artists that always inspire through joy, tears, and wonder.
Sources of Power explores the authenticity in developing a new voice. Utilizing electronics, voice, and movement, Crystal Penalosa‘s new piece examines the vulnerability, power, and potential for safety that voice-work can lend to people who are transgender. The performance blends traditional voice—expanding the conduits of vocal training, breath work, and speech therapy—with non-traditional technological methods such as pitch shifting, frequency shifting, and wavetable synthesis.
Mixology Festival 2019: Signaling – highlighting artists whose work in sound and media contains embedded truths, both heartening and startling. Active for over 25 years, Roulette’s Mixology Festival celebrates new and unusual uses of technology in music and the media arts. Primarily a snapshot of current activity, the festival strives to reflect both the history and trends of innovation that impact the Zeitgeist. Curated by David Weinstein.
Shelley Hirsch is an award-winning, critically acclaimed vocalist, composer, and storyteller whose mostly solo compositions, staged multimedia works, improvisations, radio plays, installations and collaborations have been produced and presented in concert halls, clubs, festivals, theaters, museums, galleries and on radio, film, and television on five continents. She has been called a fountain of sonic mercury and has a virtuosic command of extended vocal techniques and vocal styles, imparting an enormous versatility to her music. She is the 2017 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellowship and remains both internationally renowned and an essential figure of New York’s avant-garde downtown scene.
Crystal Penalosa (she/they) is an American artist and interdisciplinary designer based in New York. Their work focuses on queer identity, utilizing modular electronics, and voice. Her solo work makes public their search for authenticity and how it intersects with trans visibility. She uses electronics, voice, and light in a performance exploring how voice is a source of power and safety. The structure is meditative and is centered on voice affirmations written during voice self-therapy. Penalosa has performed collaboratively and solo at Issue Project Room, Roulette, Sediment Gallery, MoMA PS1, Experimental Intermedia, Spektrum in Berlin, and the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg. They currently work with the veteran underground record label Generations Unlimited.