Author: Caitlin Gleason

Dispatch: Muyassar Kurdi

Muyassar Kurdi is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist working across sound, performance, movement, visual arts, and film. Kurdi’s 2020 Roulette Commission Vast Geographiesa performance with bassist Luke Stewart based in ritual exploring ecology, movement in stillness, walking, embodiment, and sound as liquid architecture—originally set for April 22, 2020 has been postponed due to the pandemic.

Kurdi shares a series of paintings done in the midst of total isolation in NYC since mid-March. Kurdi notes, “I feel painting has been my main activity during quarantine because it’s meditative and deepens my exploration in color. Color has been really healing.”

All painting from April 2020. 35mm film photo by Maren Celeste.

As part of our Roulette at Home digital initiative, Dispatches is set of brief communications or small collections of new work from artists, sent directly to our community—a way to remain connected and engaged in a time marked by distance and isolation.

 

 

 

 

 

Oren Barnoy: future erasure

The prayer is the physicalization of an intention to have something to revisit every morning. Both building upon and executing over and over as it becomes part of the musculature of the body, it becomes a semi-automatic experience. A sequence of movements that can be done in small spaces and large depending on location. From this prayer or movement sequence we amplify it in our own ways. — Oren Barnoy

On February 5-7, 2020, Roulette will present New York-based choreographer and dancer Oren Barnoy’s newest work, future erasure. After a rehearsal in the final days of 2019, the three dancers for whom Barnoy created future erasure joined him in conversation with Roulette Director of Communications Caitlin Gleason to discuss working collaboratively, embodiment and individual expression, and the role of sound in the piece.

Caitlin Gleason: Tell me about the piece you are presenting in February at Roulette.

Oren Barnoy: We have been working on it for at least three years. The priority has always been the creation of movement and material, which is difficult to do in New York because of the lack of resources to rehearse. Additionally, it takes a while to make material that doesn’t reference ballet or other modern forms [of dance] because of the training that resides in our bodies. In my work, I recognize how the past lives in our bodies. I try to figure out what to embrace and what movements have an ideal ideology and which ones I don’t exactly feel as in line with. That work has been a dialogue between us. In the case of this show, it’s a little bit different because we’ve been working for a little while, so now I feel like we’re crafting it, working on the compositional elements of it a little more.

CG: What is the role of sound and music in this piece?

OB: I’m excited to work with [sound designer James Lo] because he is who he is, and also because he’s not me [laughter] and can offer a different perspective. I’m not going to be thinking of what sounds right, I’m coming from a place of an urban kind of soulful house music, hip hop sounds, and so on. James has his history and his life and his music and his interests, and so far it seems like what’s happening is I’m able to see the material more with the sounds that he’s making. We’re asking the same questions. What is this sound doing and why?

And the work is that question. James mentioned that a lot of that work consists of trying to see the movement as it really is and trying to imagine the different ways that the movement could be seen.

Paul Hamilton: That really resonates– just based on how we first started working with the material…when we did it at Gibney and we had house music and we started off with the prayer. Which was, for me, kind of a weird house flashback because back in the day when you would go dancing with friends you would say, we’re going to go to church, you know?

And so we started off with this stepping idea about the prayer and the house music, but now, as the piece continues, the music and movement have evolved, but far more interesting is how the movement is executed and how it lives in my body differently based on the different soundscapes that it exists in. It’s been really interesting to see what James has brought in and how it has affected the movement. It has reshaped and reformed, or been reborn in my body. The soundscape is very different.

CG: Oren, you mentioned that this work is more of a collaboration, rather than a choreographed piece for a group of dancers. How so?

OB: That’s right. Although, I don’t think it’s a historically-defined collaboration. It’s not a standard choreographer-to-dancer relationship either. It’s not a collaboration but it is people coming together to make a work.

Candace Tabbs: Oren, you’ve used the word “practitioner” before, like we are practitioners in this work, and I think that speaks to how we exist in the making of it. That it’s about how the movement is starting to live in our bodies. This kind of kneading it, like dough, letting it settle and then thinking of how we can expand it and stretch it to see what opens up and what evolves in the movement and the different shared phrases that we have in our group. Like the prayer, it’s kind of common ground where we explore. So “practitioners” kind of always stuck for me.

Molly Lieber:  Yeah because there is really detailed movement work happening. I wasn’t with Oren and Paul when this movement started, we [Candace and Molly] came in a little bit later. As a group we started really pulling apart movements and found if you stretch apart something, you can see it in a different way and get different things out of it. That’s what I feel like we do. The movement has been really stretched out so you could extract it and you can change it. I feel like there’s a vocabulary that we all understand and practice.

CG: That’s interesting too. I’m thinking about the relationship to music and scores and how that kind of functions in the same way.

PH: Yeah, I mean, all of us work with choreographers and I think all of us work in situations where we are in collaboration with choreographers. But there is something about the intimate nature of the style of this movement or the fracturing of the prayer in each person’s body because we’re kind of taking a source material and all doing it in our own way, which then kind of personalizes it in a very particular way. It gives us each a certain amount of agency over how we are interpreting the movement. There is of ownership over your own interpretation what you’re doing.

OB: When you say ownership, that’s so clear. That material is really that person’s material.

PH: And it would look very different if someone else was doing it and it would then become theirs.

OB: When you look at them you can see that they’re the same movements. But that is the work we’re doing, the movement becomes embodied differently in each dancer because we’re trying to amplify it and amplifying it means something slightly different for each person. Each person it expresses the movement a little differently but it’s the same. It’s an expression of them. We’re dancing from all sides.

I personally think that if the dancer has the interest or the willingness and the space inside to express themselves, that they’ll feel empowered and then hopefully as a group we would feel empowered, and that’s ideal. It’s part of my plan to find ways to express empowerment.

CG: In the winter of 2019, you presented work as part of Roulette’s New Movement Series, organized by Molly and Eleanor Smith. Did future erasure grow out of that work? Are they related?

OB: It’s a clear continuation.

CG: In what way? What elements are moving forward?

OB: The material itself. We are developing some new core physical movement material and there’s some material from the work’s previous iteration that is part of it. Often, I think that performances do not necessarily happen exactly when you’ve finished the piece. So at this point, it doesn’t feel like a finishing. It feels like such an infinite kind of experience and that last year’s work and February’s performance are one whole piece.

CG: Do you have any non-dance influences such as text, music, or artists that contribute to your process?

ML: Honestly, a lot of conversation in the room influences what’s happening. I feel like that’s something that’s hard to grasp in a performance, but I do feel like the whole nature of the vocabulary of the work, like saying again, it came from a shared vocabulary of open steps. Everybody knows each step, but then what’s shown is a version of those steps that comes from stretching it out and finding something that each person’s body can relate to. I think when you’re seeing it in performance, you’re seeing something that is hard to grasp. A lot of times people have seen this work and said to me “oh were you improvising the whole time?” No, each person knows what they’re doing the entire time. But it has the feel of improvisation, where you are doing something that’s a little hard to grasp. Yet we’re getting somewhere, and the fact that we’ve been doing it for so long and it’s still hard to grasp, speaks to the intrinsic nature of this vocabulary.

I think another influence is what we’ve been talking about in the room because there is community when you meet with the same people over a period of time – I’ve gone from being pregnant to having a two-year-old, Candace has gone through her journey, Paul has gone through his, and Oren has gone through his. I think that all shows up in the performance.

CG: I like that very much.

PH: I feel like the first time we presented this work, the title was a group of lines, a symbol.*

OB: Yes, it’s a big difference.

PH: Not that I’m holding on to that but in a way, for me, the symbol represented a lot of the inner-outer workings of the piece and in some sense represents how I feel about the matriarchal work in that it’s constantly moving, constantly overlapping, folding in on itself, opening out. I know we’ve gone on and different elements are being introduced, but I still do see the symbol as a frame. It’s like an eight-headed monster. There’s so much going on, there’s a space, then that, then this, then bodies moving in, and out and down and up. That’s my experience in it.

CG: I think that’s interesting that you bring up the symbol and then thinking about this transition to a written title. It seems like it follows the evolution of the piece.

PH: Yes. A symbol moving into words.

CG: Could you talk about working at Roulette? Is there anything that stands out about working in that space?

OB: There’s just a nice feeling about it overall. I feel a sense of freedom there and also the sound quality is so amazing. It feels like at Roulette you can blast it if you want, you can really feel the bass. I love that – I love the sound. And working with everybody there is really cool and they work with you to support your vision. It seems to be really about the work, zero drama.

PH: We’re excited. When I found out this was happening I was like, that’s really awesome. Roulette, Brooklyn, exciting space and we have a history of working there and I feel very good about presenting work there.

OB: I also like that it’s different than Danspace Project or similar historically dance-presenting spaces. Roulette has a different history. It’s an honor to show your work at a space that started out as a platform for avant-garde music and has expanded. It feels a little different than working in a purely dance-based space, in a good way! We’re excited.

*In May 2019, Oren Barnoy presented at Roulette. Titled with a symbol, the piece was performed by Barnoy along with Hamilton, Lieber, and Tabbs.

[COMMISSION] Jonathan Finlayson

What: Rising jazz trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson performs music based on select poems by Sterling Brown.
When: Sunday, June 24, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20 Door, $15 Online
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/SP180624

Brooklyn, NY – Recognized by the New York Times as “…an incisive and often surprising trumpeter,” who is “…fascinated with composition,” Jonathan Finlayson makes his Roulette debut with a set of music based on select poems by renowned Harlem Renaissance poet Sterling Brown.

Born in 1982 in Berkeley, CA, Finlayson began playing the trumpet at the age of ten in the Oakland public school system. He came under the tutelage of Bay Area legend Robert Porter, a veteran trumpeter from the bebop era who took Finlayson under his wing; he was often seen accompanying Porter on his gigs about town and sitting in on the popular Sunday nights jam session at the Bird Cage. He subsequently attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music where he studied with Eddie Henderson, Jimmy Owens, and Cecil Bridgewater. Finlayson is a disciple of the saxophonist/composer/conceptualist Steve Coleman, having joined his band Five Elements in 2000 at the age of 18. He is widely admired for his ability to tackle cutting-edge musical concepts with aplomb. Finlayson has performed and recorded in groups led by Steve Lehman, Mary Halvorson, Craig Taborn, Henry Threadgill and played alongside notables such as Von Freeman, Jason Moran, Dafnis Prieto and Vijay Iyer.

Lineup:
Andre Solomon Glover – Baritone
Jonathan Finlayson – Trumpet
David Bryant – Piano
Chris Tordini – Acoustic Bass
Craig Weinrib – Drums and Percussion

Spotlight On: Anna Wray

Anna Wray

Resist x Improvise: An Evening for Roscoe Mitchell
Tuesday, June 5, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I am a percussionist living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I perform avant-garde jazz and new classical music and am starting to learn more about Brazilian and Cuban rhythms. Some of my favorite artists in New York right now are So Percussion, Roomful of Teeth, and Zeena Parkins. I currently study with Josh Quillen.

I was born in 1991 in Park Slope and went to the children’s YWCA program next door to Roulette. When I was five, my family, who had lived in a huge Fort Greene brownstone for nearly twenty years, moved to an old house in Sleepy Hollow, NY. I began studying music when I was six, first piano and then percussion, in private studios. The public schools also had great music programs with jazz ensembles, orchestras and musicals. I remain close to the directors at Sleepy Hollow’s Junior and High schools, offering workshops and participating in the music honor society.

After high school, I spent a number of years on the West Coast, first in Oakland, CA to attend Mills College where I pursued percussion performance, studying with percussionist William Winant and improvisation with Roscoe Mitchell. I continued my musical studies at CalArts in Los Angeles, receiving an MFA in percussion performance, studying Brazilian, Indonesian, Electronics, African, and North Indian music with percussionists, Randy Gloss, Amy Knoles, and David Johnson. After my masters, I taught full time as a general music teacher at an elementary school in Compton, Los Angeles. It was one of the most rewarding experiences in my life. I’m still in touch with my students. I returned to New York in 2017 to live closer to my family. I missed seeing my niece and nephew grow up and I really missed the New York Yankees. Also, New York City is the city where many artistic collaborations are happening.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

I wrote Roscoe Mitchell in 2016, asking if he would consider writing a new work for vibraphone. He agreed, as I saved up money at my cafe job for his commission. A few months rolled by and I wanted to make more music with my good friends, Marilu Donovan and Christopher Foss, so I asked Roscoe if he could create a new work for vibraphone, harp and bassoon. In response, he told me that he had a baritone piece he wrote for Thomas Buckner and piano, that might work well with this new orchestration. We contacted my colleague, and Roscoe’s former student, Daniel Steffey to orchestra the virtuosic piano part for vibraphone, harp and bassoon. I then asked my dear friend Michael Lofton to join us as our baritone voice for the quartet. I’ve wanted to work with Michael my whole life, so I’m excited for our first performance together. One of my first memories of seing Michael perform was in the NYC Opera production of Carmen. (Unfortunately, I was crying as the curtain went up, rather than when Carmen dies, because my mother made me kill my pet Tamagotchi when she discovered it in my pocket. I hadn’t considered the noise it could make during the performance. You couldn’t turn off a Tamagotchi, without killing it. But it had become a level 4 frog from a tadpole! I must have fed the Tamagotchi in the middle of the night for weeks. However, seeing Michael in a blonde wig made everything okay.)

As the program develops, I have invited more of my colleagues to join the program, such as Brian Adler’s Human Time Machine. Through discussions with Brian Adler and Michael Lofton, we decide to focus this evening’s performance on African American social justice and equality.

What is your favorite place to eat or drink near Roulette?

Bedouin Tent, which is around the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Bond Street (Cash only!)

What is your favorite record?
The Harder They Come soundtrack (Jimmy Cliff! Toots!), Live at Roseland, NYC by Portishead, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and Metamorphosis by Philip Glass. Some of these albums I grew up with, while others were introduced to me at significant times in my life. I constantly return to them, listening to the album in entirety. Each time, I find new musical elements and textures, as well as new meanings from the lyrics.

What is influencing your work right now?
Brian Adler’s Human Time Machine. Brian has taken the time to meet with me and explore more ways to approach rhythm. Such as, focusing on syncopation as a downbeat, seamlessly switching from a triplet feel to a sixteenth note feel, and developing patterns in 5. Performing in the Human Time Machine is helping me develop my voice as an improviser.

What artists are you interested in right now?
I’m interested in The Knife and MIA. Their ability to create dance songs that include a powerful political message blows me away. I love that these two artists have a sound that is so distinct, and clearly their own. I find that empowering and I hope to one day find my own.

Describe Roulette in three words.
Safe, encouraging, loving

Brandon Lopez + Steve Baczkowski

Brandon Lopez + Steve Baczkowski
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Performance 8pm / Doors 7pm

What: Bassist, improviser and composer Brandon Lopez continues his 2018 Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette with a duet with saxophonist Steve Baczkowski that tests the limits of the musicians’ endurance and instruments.
When: Thursday, July 12, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost:  $20 Door, $15 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/SU180712

Brooklyn, NY – In the second performance of his year-long Van Lier Fellowship, bassist Brandon Lopez is joined by saxophonist Steve Baczkowski in a duet that tests the limits of the musicians’ endurance and their instruments. Known for the intense physicality of their performances, Lopez and Baczkowski transition between brutality and tenderness in a single show.

Brandon A. Lopez, deemed the “Ubiquitous Free Improv Bass Ace” by the Village Voice and said to play with a “bruising physicality” by the Chicago Reader, was born and raised in northwestern New Jersey. It was there that he cultivated a taste for left-of-center music and he has since had the pleasure of working with many of the world’s luminary left-of-center musicians, including Weasel Walter, Mette Rasmussen, Gerald Cleaver, Peter Evans, Ingrid Laubrock, and Dave Rempis. Lopez leads a piano trio “Mess” with Sam Yulsman and Chris Corsano. He frequently plays solo. He is the 2018 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room and was awarded a Van Lier Fellowship by Roulette in the same year. He attended New England Conservatory.

Steve Baczkowski is a Buffalo-based saxophonist. He has worked with Chris Corsano, Bill Nace, Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, and many others. His debut trio album will be released on Relative Pitch Records in the next year. Brandon Lopez and Steve Baczkowski met at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts, the center for improvised and strange music in Buffalo, New York. Quick friends, they decided to test the musical waters of the Brooklyn underground. A year later, they gave a brutal performance at the Exposure Festival in Chicago, wowing listeners and critics.

Spotlight on G. Lucas Crane

[RESIDENCY] G Lucas Crane: Time Boiler
Tuesday, June 19, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

I’m a sound artist, musician, and performer, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. I collage together sound steeped in magnetic tape aesthetics, and I use sounds on the common cassette tape as my instrument. I’m a tape DJ. An ancient and future sounds DJ.

I say “sound artist” here because through my sound practice, the process that I use to compose sound artwork is a spiritual, conceptual exploration of where I stand on the contemporary cyborg continuum,  and I’m exploring those concepts in sound. As we externalize our nervous systems into increasingly sophisticated devices, synthesizers, samplers, sequencers; what is making the music at any given time? Making artwork today that uses recorded media as its source material, I feel like the contemporary information warfare zeitgeist we live in makes it important to be constantly critical about where your media is coming from and how much  “integrity” it has as it relates to the self. I’m not a luddite or an analogue / digital purist by any means, I just want to know what’s going on, you know? Viscerally, physically, in the making of artwork. There’s something comforting about my media mostly coming from piles at my feet. I’m trying to remake recorded material from my life, and contemporary sensory life is replete with slick attention hijacking almost at every moment. So my work is kind of like performing anti-brainwashing rituals for myself. I have to admit I fail most of the time. Still, I can have the freedom to consider, in the time-bound folds of a tape loop, that time and life is not just for endlessly rushing forward consuming till death, I can create a space for revisiting the past, the ever cut-up present, and help divine the future through these musical processes. So that’s what sound art means to me, currently. Using attention to the sonic environment to fight the brainwashing.

I put “musician” here because regardless as to why I do anything with sound, I try to humbly situate myself amongst the world-spanning musical tradition, in that music as a craft is a pillar of human expression and the output of the daily plying of this trade has a relatable impact on all humans. So seeing oneself as a musician is in some way to try to recognize sonic impact over sonic intent and realize that “music” as a sound practice is located in the web of interconnected social fabric that exists between people making and listening to sounds as music. It’s really about something you do that someone else hears and the recognition of sound as a nonverbal communication medium, as well as an extremely intimate form of communication between practitioners. I really enjoy and get a lot out of this tradition of world walking bards, heads, jammers, tapers, nerds, weirdos, and citizen-musicologists, and I’m trying to ultimately make something that people listen to and get something out of (as opposed to, say, the conceptual motivations).

Lastly, I put “performer” here because the different mindsets that come with studio composition and live performance is important to my work, and I try to do a percentage of sonic decision making in a ‘live’ context. Non-live composition, especially for collage based media work I’m making, then becomes developing systems of sound relationships that have different probabilities of success or failure, and have these systems and decisions play out in a live setting. Performance is important to me as both a composition tool and social ritual. It’s a really potent human tradition.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

I’m working on bringing something new for Roulette. New for me anyway. It’s called Time Boiler. Where I boil down some time. It’s an expansion of writing and music I’ve been making on the subject of time travel and ethics. Treating time travel and the mindset it requires as real and then working backwards from there to come up with how I remain an ethical human in all of that. How I remain myself. And how the time traveling mindset can reference and illuminate today’s society and the tyrannical control we are asserting over our reality and the reality of others. I think the practice and craft of music keeps one moral and honest, but that’s just me. For the past year I’ve been trying to expand my mind on the subject of time itself, which is sort of an outgrowth of my music practice in general. My music is made up of bits of sound from other times, and when I put them all together in real time, in a particular now, I feel the intense compression of time going into that moment, since my samples are frequently years old, mixed with things I just recorded. Music, as a medium ripped free of its mode as purely “personal expression,” is ultimately a “time binding” art form, where we fuse intent with what I consider a probing, a testing of reality via the body. Even when I don’t know who made a piece of music, I can hear it’s time-specific qualities, it’s made with machines and at a fidelity and style that correspond with a particular moment in time. Music is so hyper technological these days, that you can hear the time something is from via the the aesthetic qualities of the tech they are using. Even a recording of, say, a solo violin piece feels futuristic to me when recorded and reproduced in intense modern hi fidelity. if you reverse that consideration, it’s “a way to tell time” or to explore time. especially, I believe, right now! The act of making music is so time expansive, that during the act itself time does really weird stuff, shrinks down to where I’m exploring fractions of a second at the same time as focusing on an hour. This is almost a horrible insult to music in a way, as I’ve been speaking about music as collections of time and not how it sounds, but this is the most basic way I can try to understand what’s going on, since the sounds themselves are the things that conscripts my soul and makes for a compelling thing to listen to for others. There’s what you mix and then a how you mix it, and in my process the what, the actual sounds, grips me in the moment, leaving the how to be a more conceptual exploration of time, through how I make, organize, and relate to the tapes that I mix. I’ve just, lately, been thinking about what sound does to me and that leads to considering when it comes from, what it is, where every piece of the sound has an origin in thought or in time. I’ve been making sound work about this experience, which I feel like leads nicely to the recursive nature of my work in general; time chunked up and remixed, about time, in a time. So this new piece Time Boiler is my attempt at synthesizing these concepts into a performance.

And speaking about the performance, it’s important for me to use this opportunity at Roulette to attempt something that could only happen here, this being about time there has to be a trail aspect to the performance, so I’m setting up a few precarious musical feats I have to pull off and there’s no guarantee I’ll succeed. I mean I can practice, but there has to be this aspect of “even a failure will be specific to this time here.” I’m “racing against the clock” like we all are if we let ourselves. And the good thing is that any failure will just be another piece of music to the listener. No ones dying on a table if I can’t pull this piece off.

Another idea I’m exploring in Time Boiler is that of the rarified time object. Since I work with cassette tapes to hold my samples, there’s this solid touchstone aspect to sound that over the years of playing various samples I start to get really attached to specific tapes. Like I fetishize them to an unhealthy degree. So for this piece, I’m exploring making the tapes super crazy to the point where they could be treated like holy objects. There are only one of these tapes, and that weird sacred quality will then extend to the sounds that I put on these tapes, and these qualities will extend into affecting how I situate these samples into the overall composition and performance. I like relating to each sample as a physical object. I find it to be a mentally healthy consideration to have with sound. I get really angry sometimes at all the samples I have on my computer, like “what are you even doing in there in that dumb place.” Just numbered files sitting in a list in a simulacra of a folder in a box. Putting them on tapes frees me to really play with them, juggle them, get a physical grip on them. And making them increasingly crazy looking then effects how I come to feel about them and subsequently how I play the sounds contained therein in a piece of music. I’m trying to unite all the different factors of what truly goes into my musical performance moment to moment.

What is it like living and working in New York City?

Well I’m from here, from right here on 3rd Avenue! So it’s like home to me always, and I have to constantly remind myself to not feel too at home too much of the time because the reality of New York City as a place people move to to work on their lives is starkly different. I want to be able to put myself in people’s shoes. That’s the advantage of living in this city — people and their lives are all around you and you have a better opportunity to learn about people and experiences that are different from yours. The sheer scale of this quality is mind-boggling and unlike anywhere else. New York City, it’s got SHEER SCALE, with everything, the bad and the good. I’m pretty into people and what they do, I’m anti-misanthropic, and so this city is great and curious to me. You also have the opportunity to experience first hand how shitty a city can be to its people and how shitty people can be to each other, and that’s a different learning experience. This scale of human potential and depravity is deeply spiritually educational, and it’s a stark experience. When I go other places these realities are muted and more hidden in their locally specific ways, and I get pissed off and bored. I’m sort of a city rat, a creature of New York. In that way I’m kind of naïve and spoiled. I find any other place than New York City to be deeply exotic. “Oh so your clean trains turn off at night? Huh, wow. Crazy.”

What are you really excited about right now?

My dreams are crazy right now. Like full on sci-fi wonderland dreams with sequels and reboots. It’s making me question my memory and my waking life. My memory of these dreams is so intense, but it always comes with the feeling that these memories can only ever be half the story, or a third of the story. Are my dreams lies? Mis-remembered? Are they nonsense? Are they deeper truth? How could a labyrinth made of creosote logs that is also a submarine lit with jars filled with fireflies have some deeper truth? Or are the stories that affect me like what happens in my waking life? I’m psyched about this — its going to take me the rest of my life to figure out. I suppose it’s something we all have to reckon with, but I’m excited about it. I’m probably going to make some sort of…card game?…out of my dreams. Not sure. It’s going to sound funny but I’m really excited about how the human mindset is reacting to contemporary technology and how its going to require this intense criticality about what kind of information we take in to even survive with a sense of self, it’s already happening and these last few years has really shown that the casual violence of human communication can be harnessed into a psychic environment that conscripts us all. So that usual background notion of achieving or living in some type of “freedom” is going to be harder and harder to find without a new generation of intense criticality about what we take in and how. I have hope it’s going to lead to actual resources for leading a healthy life, because we all know how good the internet is for getting the same old poison into our psychic systems. So I would like to focus on and promote the good tools, not the bad. And I’m excited that it will be harder and harder to ignore the bad parts of human society. It’s all coming out now. The masks are slipping.

What’s your absolute favorite place in the city to be and why?

Wandering, just wandering around everywhere. The places I really like are the connective tissue of the city. I just like sitting on a random bench somewhere. I like going into a places I’ve never been. Rejecting what the phone tells me.

How did your interest in your work begin?

For me, there is a strong mental relationship between sound and narrative. Successions of sounds are sentences; a song is a paragraph. Sound as text. I started off when I was younger in love with words and what they do, their limits and advantages. Every sound I work with evokes some sort of story to me, but this is distinctly related without using words. It’s incredible that smashing sounds together can do this through the medium of the human brain, and my work is an attempt to plumb the depths of this relationship. Articulation can achieve clarity but kill innovation; saying something well trumps saying something of substance, etc. sound is a medium of different possible meanings existing in the same moment in time. Articulation with words fixes its nature, collapsing meaning back into an either/or realm that we are trained for. Even recording sound onto media fixes its nature and allows it to be remixed, further collapsing its potential meaning. I’m interested in sound recordings as texts of my memory and fragments of my own story, but I’m trying to discover associations that will lead me into my own future by cutting up and collaging my past. I’m extremely interested in forging a path through sonic art despite my training being firmly outside musical tradition and training. I think there’s a way to approach sound art as story making, and even if I sound like an idiot along the way, I’m interested in the outcomes of working deeply with these tools and concepts.

What is influencing your work right now?

Time travel and the chasing down of what it means to be an at a particular moment in time, and how we go about relating to our past and future selves, who we can only experience in the present. Trying to expand my consciousness through complex performance rituals and the time-specific concepts of hope vs. truth in time and as it relates to how we live half on and half off the Internet now, where time is compressed. To do something even if you can see into the future, is to have hope, to have an audacity, a type of insanity. The truth of things might be hopelessly cynical and rational and risk-averse, being right on the Internet now stands in for action or community, but hope for a better world and the values that hope requires still are important, even if you have a time machine and have tried and failed a hundred times to change the past, or see the future that might be inevitable. You still have to try, un-cynically. I might never make the nicest, most palatable music manhandling my sound memories on tape, but I can exemplify the seeking values of wonder by experimenting. 

[VAN LIER FELLOW] Brandon Lopez: The Lamentations + Bennett/Foster/Wooley/Lopez

What: Bassist, improviser and composer Brandon Lopez plays The Lamentations, followed by a newly-formed quartet.
When: Thursday, June 21, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $25 Door, $20 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/SP180621

Brooklyn, NY – Brandon Lopez plays The Laminations with frequent collaborator Sam Yulsman. Composed specifically for improvising musicians, the piece—although named after The Book of Lamentations—is secular and ripe for interpretation. Lopez will then be joined by Nate Wooley, Michael Foster, Ben Bennett to perform as a quartet.

Brandon A. Lopez, deemed the “Ubiquitous Free Improv Bass Ace” by the Village Voice and said to play with a “bruising physicality” by the Chicago Reader, was born and raised in northwestern New Jersey. It was there that he cultivated a taste for the left of center musics and has since had the pleasures of working with many of the world’s luminary left of center musicians such as Weasel Walter, Mette Rasmussen, Gerald Cleaver, Peter Evans, Ingrid Laubrock, Dave Rempis, and has toured and played prestigious halls, DIY basements, festivals across North America and Europe. Lopez currently leads a piano trio dubbed “Mess” with Sam Yulsman and Chris Corsano. He frequently plays solo. He is the 2018 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room and was awarded a Van Lier Fellowship by Roulette in the same year. He attended New England Conservatory.

The Lamentations
Brandon Lopez – Bass
Sam Yulsman – Piano

Bennett/Foster/Wooley/Lopez
Nate Wooley – Trumpet
Michael Foster – Saxophone
Ben Bennett – Percussion
Brandon Lopez – Bass

[RESIDENCY] G. Lucas Crane: Time Boiler

What: G. Lucas Crane presents his latest investigation into time, memory, and loss through a series of live tape-based compositions.
When: June 19, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20 Door, $15 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/SP180619

Brooklyn, NY – Performer and sound artist G. Lucas Crane continues his investigation into information anxiety, memory, media confusion, and new performance techniques for obsolete technology in his latest work Time Boiler. A tale of time-travel memory loss explored through tape-collage music, as well as a series of attempts at time compression through musical trials on the performing body, Time Boiler illustrates the psychological consequences of time-travel on the human mind through a series of live compositions using Crane’s extensive cassette tape archive.

G. Lucas Crane is a musician whose work focuses on information anxiety, media confusion, sonic mind control, and time skullduggery. His cassette tape-based sound practice explores the liminal space of hybrid analogue aesthetics and new performance techniques for forgotten technology. In New York City, he has performed at The Stone, Museum of Art and Design, Pioneer Works, Roulette, Issue Project Room, and the Brooklyn Museum. He was a 2011 LMCC Swing Space Resident Artist and received the NYSCA Individual Artist Commission for sound design of the theater piece This Was The End, for which he also received a Henry Hewes Award and a Bessie nomination. Crane received a Jerome Foundation Commission from Roulette in 2014. He is a co-founder of the Silent Barn, an experimental art and performance space in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Samuel Blaser Trio: Taktlos

What: Sam Blaser Trio make a rare New York appearance on the occasion of a new album released by legendary Swiss label HatArt.
When: Monday, June 18, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $25 Door, $20 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/SP180618

Brooklyn, NY – Samuel Blaser, with Marc Ducret and Peter Bruun will give a rare New York performance at Roulette. Known for “a precise, expressive style on trombone” (New York Times), Blaser utilizes his foundation in jazz and classical music to produce tunes that develop seamlessly through interactions between the players. The international trio released a new album on legendary Swiss label HatArt to coincide with the performance at Roulette.

The Samuel Blaser Trio was founded after a poolside dialogue between Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser and French guitarist Marc Ducret (known for his work with Tim Berne) in Cabo Frio, Brazil. Danish drummer Peter Bruun (a member of Django Bates’ Belovèd trio) seemed like a felicitous fit for the group, and beginning with an inaugural gig in May of 2013 at the Jazzdor Festival in Berlin, the three players began touring extensively through Europe, Asia and South America.

Line-up:
Samuel Blaser – Trombone
Marc Ducret – Guitar
Peter Bruun – Drums

Roulette joins We Have Voice

Roulette is proud to announce that we have joined a growing number of institutions that stand with We Have Voice and will adopt the Code of Conduct set forth by the collective in order to create positive change in our performing arts community.

We Have Voice, founded by Fay Victor, Ganavya Doraiswamy, Imani Uzuri, Jen Shyu, Kavita Shah, Linda May Han Oh, María Grand, Nicole Mitchell, Okkyung Lee, Rajna Swaminathan, Sara Serpa, Tamar Sella, Terri Lyne Carrington, and Tia Fuller, is a collective of musicians, performers, scholars, and thinkers from different generations, races, ethnicities, cultures, abilities, gender identities, economic backgrounds, religious beliefs, and affiliations. Together, they are determined to engage in transformative ways of thinking and being in their creative professional world, while being ingrained in an inclusive and intersectional analysis.

On creating the recently released Code of Conduct, María Grand, tenor saxophonist and Roulette 2018 Commissioned Artist, told the New York Times, “The idea is to propose solutions, and also open the conversation to go further.” The Code has been described by NPR as “an aspirational document that helps define sexual harassment and consent for the unusual workplaces and unique circumstances of the performing arts, offering clarity and tools for anyone who witnesses or experiences harassment.”

We are so proud to be part of this positive change and hope others will too. Learn more about WHVC on their website and via profiles from NPR, the New York Times, and Jazz Right Now. Catch the collective speak at Roulette as part of Vision Festival on May 24th at 5pm.