fbpx

Author: Rachel Lyngholm

Spotlight On Anjna Swaminathan

For her Commission at Roulette, Anjna Swaminathan presents WOVEN: Entangled Memorabilia—a multidisciplinary work that brings together original music, poetry, and improvisation to meditate on personal, cultural, and artistic rituals of nostalgia, loss, and mourning. The project was initially inspired by the works of Indian Malayali painter and artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) and Tamil poet Subramania Bharati (1882–1921), both late 19th to early 20th century artists who were integral to shaping images of women as vessels for Indian national identity during the movement against the British Raj.

Photo by Gal Shaya

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

My name is Anjna Swaminathan and I am a violinist, composer, vocalist, theatre artist and educator. I was primarily trained in the Carnatic (South Indian) art music tradition, but my creative work has branched out to include Hindustani music, creative music, western classical music, new music, spoken word, and theatre. I’m committed to creating artistic and activist work that considers the multitude of histories, privileges, and marginalizations that each of us carries.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

For my commission at Roulette, I’m very excited to be presenting the latest exploration of WOVEN, a philosophical, political and artistic project that has lived and matured with me for over eight years. This iteration is entitled WOVEN: Entangled Memorabilia features seven string instrumentalists including Stephan Crump (bass), Naseem Alatrash (cello), a string quartet/Greek chorus featuring Leerone Hakami (violin), Manami Mizumoto (violin), Lauren Siess (viola), and Thapelo Masita (cello). I’m excited to work with these wonderful musicians (and people!) to explore ideas of ritual, memory, loss, attachment, abandonment, and many other ideas of nostalgia and memorabilia that we carry within ourselves, our instruments and our interconnectivity as human beings. Something I am particularly excited about for this performance is that I have tapped into my diverse community of artists, thinkers, immigrants, and people who have graciously offered their personal vocal reflections on these subjects to help build the sonic landscape of the work. 

What is influencing your work right now?

Personal and communal mental health. I’ve been increasingly recognizing that the issues that come up for me are not only connected to internal questions, traumas, and experiences but also to communal ones—and even ancestral ones. In January of 2018*, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder after a long battle with anxiety, depression, and other chronic manifestations of an unmanaged mental health issue. In naming and facing the patterns of fear, attachment, and misunderstanding that directed many of my decisions and impulses until then, I have gained a deeper empathy for the cultural nostalgia, collective feelings of abandonment, and communal anxieties that cripple much of society today—regardless of political and cultural allegiances. My diagnosis, as well as the conversations, realizations, and resolutions that I have experienced since then, have contributed to a greater sense of vulnerability in my music, and an attraction to inviting a larger community to be vulnerable with me in our shared art-making. I’m very grateful that the artists involved in the performance and production of WOVEN: Entangled Memorabilia are equally enthralled and nurtured by the leap into honesty, vulnerability, and sharing that this project invites them to take. 

How did your interest in your work begin?

This project was initially a response to frustrations with the funeral rituals surrounding my mother’s death in 2010. As a rebellious 18-year old, I thought that researching the intentions behind the rituals might give me some direction in coping with her death—or at least give me some intellectual rationale for resisting the process of coping. Since then, it has transformed to consider rituals of memorializing in which we partake outside of a funeral space and more recently, it has been about memory and how it exists in the body, cultural, and mythical nostalgia and its personal and political implications, as well as the chronic resonances of ancestral trauma.  

How long have you lived in New York City, and what brought you here?

I have lived in New York City for almost five years! I came here for music—mostly following my sister Rajna Swaminathan, a musician who had built a small community for herself here. I’d initially planned to move here to get away from the relative lack of musical community that I felt in Maryland, but after I attended the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in the summer of 2014 and got the opportunity to work with amazing musical elders—particularly women of color like Imani Uzuri and Jen Shyu—I began to see a potential for New York to be a space to free my artistic voice and lean into a community of people like me who not only survived, but thrived in sharing their full selves. 

Rajna and Anjna Swaminathan. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Rajna and Anjna Swaminathan

Anjna Swaminathan’s WOVEN: Entangled Memorabilia takes place on Sunday, April 28th 2019 at 8pm with performers: bassist Stephan Crump, cellists Naseem Alatrash and Aaron Stokes, violinists Leerone Hakami and Manami Mizumoto, and violist Lauren Siess.

*Correction: In the printed version of this article, Swaminathan’s diagnosis with BPD was reported as occurring in January of 2017; this version has been corrected to reflect the true year: 2018.

Wet Ink at 20 by Kurt Gottschalk

On Monday April 1st 2019, the Wet Ink Ensemble celebrates 20 years of adventurous music making in NYC and around the world with a concert celebrating the work of the ensemble’s four acclaimed composer members—Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Kate Soper, and Eric Wubbels. The concert will feature a retrospective look at “classics” of Wet Ink‘s repertoire, including Alex Mincek’s From Nowhere to Nowhere and Kate Soper’s Door, and new sounds including Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary iii for solo cello featuring Mariel Roberts and the world premiere of a new work for Wet Ink‘s core septet of composer-performers by Eric Wubbels.

Image result for wet ink ensemble

The composer/performer collective has been the norm in most musical currents ever since the Beatles set the standard of a self-contained unit. Since then, rock, R’n’B, and jazz bands more often than not write the music they play. Somehow, though, contemporary composition (in its various iterations) has been slow to catch up. There are plenty of performing composers, but what we’ve come to think of as a “band” (as opposed to an ensemble) is still a rarity in the concert hall. 

A certain level of rock band fanaticism can be excused, then, when it comes to the Wet Ink Ensemble. Collective noun aside, they are—under any common understanding—a band, no secret to those who’ve been paying attention for at least some of the last twenty years. With a lineup that includes voice, drums, saxophone, and electronics (along with the more expected flute, piano, and violin) and with most of the members contributing compositions to their book, the Wet Ink Ensemble has become one of the most exciting names in New York’s crowded concert calendar.

The band, in fact, sprung into being (a number of permutations ago) alongside the decidedly rockier band Zs. Saxophonists Alex Mincek and Sam Hillmer met at the Manhattan School of Music and in 1998 began playing and organizing concerts together—with Mincek’s Wet Ink Ensemble and Hillmer’s Zs often sharing both bills and members. But it took twelve years for the Wet Ink core membership to coalesce. (The collective also operates a large ensemble for bigger commissions.) Soprano Kate Soper and pianist Eric Wubbels joined the Wet Ink fold in 2005. Soper remembers one of her early performances with the ensemble, where Wubbels played Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari and she sang Beat Furrer’s Aria.

“I was so nervous my lips were shaking. The concert was at the old Roulette on Greene Street, where we used to play a lot. This was one of those venues that feels packed with twenty people, with folding chairs and big pillars crowding the audience and a small table for merch and beer. We ended with the Feldman, and I remember leaning on the wall behind the piano (there weren’t enough seats for the performers), listening to Eric play and being suspended in a kind of sentimental awe—doubtless amplified by post-performance endorphins—a feeling that what we were doing, as a group, was special, and that I was happy and vaguely amazed to be a part of it.”

A day in the life of a concert at the Greene Street location where Roulette held shows from 2004–2011.

Listening from the stage gives the members of the ensemble a unique vantage to hear what they’re part of, and Soper isn’t the only one to appreciate that privileged position. 

“I turned pages for the premiere of the children of fire come looking for fire, a violin and piano duo Eric wrote for himself and Josh,” said former Zs drummer Ian Antonio, who joined Wet Ink in 1999. “I sat in the typical page-turner’s place to the left of the pianist and had a pretty good view of the full score. Eric and Josh’s performance was mind-bogglingly precise, raw yet polished, powerfully emotive, and I was perfectly stationed to watch them do it while wrapped inside the piano’s resonance. It’s not an uncommon experience, working with all of the members of the Wet Ink band, but I especially remember thinking after their performance how lucky I was to work with a collection of such humble and hardworking virtuosos.”

Individual awe at the group of which they’re part seems to run strong among the members of the ensemble. Violinist Josh Modney played his first concert with the group in 2008.

“I don’t remember much about the experience of performing on that first concert, except for the feelings of awe, terror, and elation that came with playing chamber music alongside such extraordinary musicians,” he said. 

“But I do distinctly remember one of the pieces I didn’t play on as a turning point in my relationship to music: Eric Wubbels and Erin Lesser’s performance of Wubbels’s Shiverer. There were so many things about that performance that defied expectations. The playing was impeccably tight. The sounds coming from the flute and piano, and the blend between both, were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Listening to Eric and Erin’s performance was an ecstatic experience. I had listened to and performed plenty of contemporary music at that point, but hadn’t encountered composers and performers who could wield their technical virtuosity and expressive beings to push into this other zone, a high-country of the spirit. The performance provided a moment of clarity for me, revealing not only that making contemporary music on this level was possible, but that this was the kind of music I wanted to make, and these were the people I wanted to make it with.”

At the time of Modney’s first Wet Ink concert, Lesser—who attended the Manhattan School with Mincek and Hillmer—had already been playing with the group for seven years. 

“My first performances with the band took me out of my comfort zone,” she said. “I was not expected to be in concert dress for shows. We were not playing in concert halls, but in venues like the Bowery Poetry Club and the Friend’s Seminary Meeting House. The music could be anything from graphic or open notation scores to new complexity. A few times, I remember showing up and being handed music, hot off the presses, to perform with instructions like ‘play as loud as possible’ or ‘I want it so soft you don’t even know if you’re making sound.’ Sometimes there was little or no rehearsal, but there was always a respect for the ability to go for it and make it happen. 

“These are all skills and ideas I take for granted now, and that have become ubiquitous, but at the time it seemed risky and new to me,” she added. “I was inspired to learn new techniques and was ready to engage with whatever was put in front of me—all the while receiving nothing but encouragement from my colleagues.”

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the dynamic Wet Ink has forged is the dedicated electronics and live processing. That’s the often-just-offstage role of Sam Pluta, who met Mincek and Wubbels at the Darmstadt Festival in 2006 and immediately “knew then that I wanted to make music with these people.

“I distinctly remember a concert where Alex, Eric, and Eliot Gattegno performed Alex’s piece Perpetuum Mobile,” Pluta recalled of that Darmstadt meeting. “The piece was aggressive, blocky, and sonically pyrotechnic. I could see the disdain on the faces of the Europeans in the crowd. Once in New York, I met Kate Soper, Erin Lesser, and Ian Antonio. Eventually, I joined Wet Ink. Josh joined a couple of years later, and the current septet formation has been in existence ever since.”

While watching each other at work has aided in establishing the Wet Ink aesthetic, audience members can play a part as well—especially when they’re jazz legends. Mincek remembers a concert in the early 2000s that “had a huge impact on my view of what Wet Ink was.

“Sam [Hillmer] and I performed a really tough duo for two saxophones which I had recently written,” he said. “We played well and were really excited—even though the audience was quite small, as it usually was—so we headed over to the bar in the venue to have a beer and debrief. I spotted an older gentleman a few seats away. He looked very familiar to me, but I couldn’t place his face.

“I asked Sam, ‘Who is that? Do we know him somehow?’

“Sam says to me, ‘Ummm…I think that’s Ornette Coleman!’

“We sheepishly approached the fellow and politely asked, ‘Good evening, sir. Pardon us, but are you Ornette Coleman?’

‘I am.’

“We spent the next few minutes expressing how much we respected his music and his playing, and how much of an inspiration he had been for us, how much happiness we had both drawn from his music. He thanked us for the kind words and then started talking to us in detail about our own performance! He was so enthusiastic and encouraging. He asked us questions. He offered advice and solicited advice. He talked to us both as a mentor and like a peer. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life!

“There is a special intimacy that is made possible between the performers, audience, and one’s own developing aesthetic when playing obscure music in out-of-the-way environments,” Mincek added. “We were nobodies, playing odd music we believed in, for just handfuls of folks, but Ornette was in the house, and he was really listening and digging it!”

What Wet Ink has built over the last twenty years might be seen as a perpetual motion machine, where the composers are the players, the performers are their own audience, feeding and sustaining each other. The musicians develop the work and the work develops the musicians.

“When I think back over the seventeen years I’ve been going to Wet Ink shows, even before I was in the group, what sticks out to me are specific pieces and performances,” said Wubbels, “several amazing early pieces of Alex’s; Zs playing Charlie Looker’s Nobody Wants to be Had at the Bowery Poetry Club; Sam’s Machine Language followed by Feldman’s Bass Clarinet and Percussion and an insane percussion sextet by Victor Adán; Mathias Spahlinger’s Aussageverweigerung / Gegendarstellung; Braxton’s Composition 227 (with a big rowdy group including Steve Lehman, Peter Evans, and Sarah Schoenbeck); opening for Evan Parker Electroacoustic Ensemble at Roulette; Kate and Erin doing an early version of Kate’s Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say at a weird little on-campus club venue at UCSD.

“I think an ensemble’s role in shaping a scene can be about a lot of different kinds of things,” Wubbels concluded. “In the case of Wet Ink, I’m proud that the significance of the group really does seem to be a function of the actual music that we’ve made together, in specific pieces and specific performances. There’s a reality and a concreteness to that that’s quite satisfying.” •

Wet Ink: 20th Anniversary Bash takes place at Roulette on Monday, April 1st at 8pm, opening our Spring 2019 season.

About the Contributor:

Kurt Gottschalk writes about contemporary composition and improvisation for DownBeat, The New York City Jazz Record, The Wire, Time Out New York, and other publications and has produced and hosted the Minitature Minotaurs radio program on WFMU for the last ten years.

Spotlight on Anaïs Maviel by Gelsey Bell

For her first Van Lier Fellowship concert at Roulette, vocalist and composer Anaïs Maviel premieres who is this ritual for and from? featuring collaborations with pianist and composer Sam Yulsman and choreographer Daria Faïn on February 5th.

The first time I heard Anaïs Maviel sing still echoes in my memory, infused with a June breeze, her drum beat, and sunshine spilling into a Brooklyn backyard. We were playing on a bill together for one of Mara Mayer’s Home Audio concerts (along with another Roulette favorite Gabrielle Herbst) that Mara had smilingly named Three Sirens. This was back in 2013 before Anaïs moved to New York from France, and her music wrapped into me like a fishing line, a siren song that continues to delight and inspire me. Now after five years in New York City, Anaïs has become an integral part of music and interdisciplinary art-making in the city.

— Gelsey Bell

Anaïs Maviel: who is this ritual for and from?

Tell us about what you’re planning for your shows in the spring at Roulette.

I’ve been thinking about a way I could take the February 5th show as a passage ritual for my solo practice, wrapping together my inside and outside, earthly and cosmic, past and future processes—an occasion for me to assess how my language and ability to relate have developed hand in hand, and to share cohesively intimate and common finds, blurring lines between self and other. What has come up so far is a fluid spiritual and bodily relation with acoustic and vibratory phenomenons I’ve come to approach as healing, as oneness. Some ways to access “otherness,” digging inward, seem to reveal collective stakes in performance, and its function in society. I’m interested in the witnessing experience being performative and the performing experience being meditative. I’m exploring gaps between meditative and cathartic practices, and the mediation of articulate language between these realms, in order to transform shared reality with continued intent through vibration. I’ll try to touch on some of this, as well as the collaborative processes that nurtured these inquiries: With choreographer Daria Faïn—who, alongside Robert Kocik (the Prosodic Body), has helped me realize every sounding body is already moving, that every moving sound contains language—and with pianist and composer Sam Yulsman, whose understanding of the symbolic undercurrents of my music has helped me unfold a compositional language.

The piece I’m performing at Roulette in Summer 2019 will be a continuation of my recent collaboration with Swedish visual artist, activist, and instrument-maker Jonatan Malm, with whom I’ve explored the resonances between ancient (trans-generational, diasporic wisdom) and future (immediate, urban cyborg) spaces of sound and their politics. Between music that comes from Northern forest lakes entities and Southern mangrove spirits, there are many conversations to have to address our current globalized ideological crises. We’re looking at this critical human dependency on the environment, and the sacredness of the realm of so-called nature, informing every step of human emancipation and collapse. From there, I dreamed a piece involving several synthesizers and wooden percussion instruments, played by vocalists and multi-instrumentalists—mediators between ancient and future relations to sound in space. This will be a toe-dip into some kind of an opera pointing at different layers of current reality and including my recent work around subconscious song-writing, micro-tonal and multi-modal harmonic systems.

We’re also doing a show together! Joined by Amirtha Kidambi and Megan Schubert, we will have a night where each vocalist-composer makes a piece for vocal quartet. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re planning for that and what you get out of collaborating with other vocalist-composers?

It is very exciting for me to get to write for such powerhouses. I’ve been feeling strongly about writing for voice, and I am absolutely thrilled to be involved in such an endeavor. Being part of each of your process as an interpret, at the same time as I write for each of you – what a dream way to be creative with other voices! I feel like it opens up possibilities, in terms of texture, range, and language. I hope I can honor each specific talent of yours and hopefully contribute to a collective expansion.

My piece starts from formlessness, soundscapes that fill our ears as we live our lives, that give flavor to each moment we experience, the light buzz and the cat’s walk, the blowing wind and the plane growl. Time shifts that move a sound shape to another, the extraordinary alignment of poly-rhythms between street work, breeze, pedestrian paths, crickets and bird jams, and their amazing harmony. Sometimes these epiphanies happen in long cycles, sometimes they are immediate, and they all speak to me as a language of interdependency between realms. Although some sounds have a certain opacity to my ear because I don’t understand their function, they still have a certain transparency as they intertwine with my reality and impact my way to be present to it. And ultimately, my body forms around these sounds to create language.

As far as content, I’m invoking the symbolics of a divine feminine shifting paradigm, the intuitive and practical Pallas-Athena—as other than the old-school sassy Venus. I experience womanhood as a critical point of view on current societal shifts. While these transformations impact society and human evolution as a whole at different paces, I experience their correspondences with interest. Like rivers whose streams are slow and take years to reach the ocean, while other streams are almost ubiquitous. I’m wondering about the role of femininity in this transformation, as I am concerned by the state of our species, our relation to each other across genre, age and culture, and to all forms of life in a strange race to destruction.

Your music often involves a mix of singing and drumming. How do those two activities interact in your work and compositional / improvisational process? Do they feed each other?

To sing and drum is at the root of my experience as a musician. I believe music, as a form of communication prior to articulate language, is fundamental to human experience. Pre-language in music is really interesting to me, a lot of my research focuses on the gestation process of expression, the alignment of pre-language with post-language music somehow. Music interests me to the extent that it carries the potential to (re)-organize our brains, as a prelude to the way we imprint our imagination onto reality.

Voice and drum offer direct access to the intuitive perception of vibration, as a laboratory for sonic alchemy. As a teen, I was lucky to be involved with sacred Shona music (from Zimbabwe); Realizing then that the entrancing function of rhythm in relationship to singing was key for transcendental experiences really hooked me on music for good. In Shona music, when you’ve sung for hours and the air is thick with woven vibrations, the magic of overtones takes hold, and the durational interaction of metallic buzzes and whirling calabash seeds sound like divine voices. Trance is key to bliss, accessing various states of consciousness, and collective transformation—voice and rhythm being its prime triggers. These principles are found in most traditional music which I find fascinating because it comes down to human coexistence transcending cultural differences, through the shared experience of hearing and sonic interaction.

Since connecting these dots, I’ve been obsessed with dimensional shifts, when repetition becomes a canvas for more harmonics and polyrhythms to reveal themselves, the ones that are already present on our surroundings and that, as musicians, we excavate or allow to appear—depending on the method. Also, percussion instruments, as well as voices, challenge dominant ideas of pitch. I love the whole percussive tonal world, how it refines the ear to over and undertones and how it impacts the way I sing. One would think a percussion instrument has only a couple notes, but the surdo, singing bowls, bells, and gongs have been for me infinite wells multiplying melodic paths I can explore vocally. Tuning my ear to percussion-impulsed shifting and bending intervals has impacted my harmonic perception, and how I approach rhythm and harmony together. As a composer, I’ve been exploring minimal, cyclical possibilities of drumming as a trigger to multi-modal, polyrhythmic explorations and odd textures combining voice and percussion. Personality splits have also been interesting finds, as the drum has this very conversational quality to it. I experience language shifts when I express myself with drums, or voice, or when both communicate under their own physical terms. All these are related to shamanism, which is inherent to such practice.

In what way do you see the place of politics in your work?

It is core and shell, although I want to be very careful about my work proving any point. Politics are ethics and aesthetics combined. I believe that as an artist, my function is to catalyze new political thoughts. As a utopian, I mean to open up possibilities for realities ahead. As a love warrior, I intend to deconstruct ideologies and to liberate hearts, minds, and bodies.

CONTRIBUTOR: Gelsey Bell

Gelsey Bell is a New York City-based critically acclaimed singer, songwriter, and scholar. She has released multiple albums, including most recently This is Not a Land of Kings, and Ciphony with John King. She received a 2017 Music/Sound Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, has had work included in PS1’s Greater New York exhibit, and has had both a residency and a commission from Roulette. She is a core member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. Performance highlights include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (on Broadway) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Crash, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s River of Fundament, John King’s Micro-Operas, Yasuko Yokoshi’s BELL, Kate Soper’s Here Be Sirens, and Gregory Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen.

Nick Dunston in Conversation with Darius Jones

On January 30 2019, in his first Van Lier Fellow performance, composer/bassist Nick Dunston presents his quintet, Atlantic Extraction, completed by Louna Dekker-Vargas on flutes, Ledah Finck on violin, Tal Yahalom on guitar, and Stephen Boegehold on drums, along with the world premiere of The Floor is Lava!—a work written for five double basses featuring the diverse talents of Kanoa Mendenhall, Almog Sharvit, Eva Lawitts, and Lisa Hoppe.

Nick Dunston: Atlantic Extraction/The Floor is Lava!

Darius Jones: Who is the Brooklyn-based composer, bassist, and scholar named Nick Dunston?

Nick Dunston: Well, I grew up in New York City—I was born in DC and moved here when I was four. I started off as a cellist. I guess my start in music wasn’t really for any “good reason;” my mom made me play cello, and the first time I switched to electric bass was because I just wanted to be cool. That’s really what it came down to. It took me a while to develop a sense of discipline in working hard at anything, really. My parents stressed the importance of at least working hard in school from an early age. My mom is Puerto Rican, and my dad is African-American, so they really stressed the importance of making sure you represent yourself in the best way possible—fighting the social odds against you. Even still, in music, I wasn’t super disciplined at first, and I had to develop that as I got into high school. As I spent more time actually practicing, motivating myself, and forcing myself to see things that was hard to do when I was younger—that’s really what contributed to my love for music: working harder and seeing that work actually pay off. So yeah, that’s how I got started with the actual discipline of it. I spent a lot of time as a kid not really hanging out with a lot of other kids my age. I really just daydreamed all day. I didn’t do much; I kind of would play ridiculous, fantastical scenarios in my head.

DJ:  Like what?

ND: I was into superheroes. I would spend time imagining superheroes or fantasy worlds—nerdy stuff like that. I played some video games, but I really just liked imagining creatures or people. And it’s not like I had a bleak childhood, I mean I was living in Brooklyn—it was all cool. But yeah, whenever I was walking around or doing anything, my mind was going-on with ridiculous, otherworldly thoughts and images and scenarios. I think that’s what allowed me to constantly churn out new music as a composer: there’s really no shortage of ideas and stuff that I see as valid. I’m so used to always re-imagining and re-imagining things and going back to things that I imagined years ago and developing those in my head. When I realized that I could be a composer, that mindset manifested into music.

DJ: When did you become aware that you could be a composer?

ND: It started in the beginning of high school. I played in a rock band before that in middle school. The band wrote songs together, and I would make up my own bass lines. I don’t know why, but at the time, I never thought of that as composition; I thought of it as just playing the bass. I think I realized it when I went to high school—I went to an art school. I would be sitting in the library and because I’m constantly playing stuff in my head, I would transcribe it onto manuscript paper. I don’t think of it this way now, but back then I was thinking, “oh, because I’m writing this down, that makes me a composer,” in a traditional sense. So since then, I’ve been working to deconstruct that idea because I was still pretty ingrained with a mainstream, eurocentric idea of what it meant to be a composer at that time.

DJ: So what is your compositional and instrumental process? How do you feel your process as a composer and instrumentalist leak?

ND: So, as a composer, it can start a number of ways, but typically I’ll solidify a really basic idea, whether it’s something as vague as a rhythm or a series of pitches or even just a really general sound. I’ll take between one and three of those and solidify them either by recording it into my iPhone or singing it or writing it on paper—or writing the idea of it. Then I try to work with as few materials as I can  to try to see how much I expand each one. Once I’ve sort of developed or brainstormed on a certain idea, I’ll try to make up a large-scale form. I’ve spent a long time doing that and really working out the form and basic order of events. At that point, it’s kind of just filling in blanks and seeing what makes sense. When I’m actually sitting down and composing, I try to take advantage of the one thing that I don’t usually do when I’m improvising and set up a goal and destination. That way I can pace myself and work my way towards those. That’s what I’d say my general process is as a composer.

As an instrumentalist, I used to start by warming up on the bass, making sure that the physicality of it is already there, but I’m starting to drift away from that. I’m finding it’s better for me if I start on the bass with a more musical approach, then blend it with the physicality of warming up. I think that the first thing I do on the instrument needs to be something more than just a physical approach. The physical approach is super demanding and super taxing. There are new things I’m doing like yoga to help me with that. But I think when I actually have the instrument, I need to start with an artistic kind of statement. Oftentimes, I’ll improvise for a stream of five to twenty minutes.

DJ: What are you trying to communicate with your ensemble Atlantic Extraction?

ND: Atlantic Extraction is the first band I’m leading as the sole leader. At first I was thinking about what kind of band I wanted in a general sense—a large or small group—before eventually settling on a quintet. It forced me to be really inventive with the way I compose for improvisers because not everyone in the group comes from the same idiom of improvising. Half the band members are classical musicians who have different ways of approaching improvisation. At first, we didn’t really know each other that well, so it has been about developing a personal relationship, as much as a musical one. That was something I did on purpose—I wanted to grow a band instead of finding one. It’s easy to find a band in our community, but I really wanted to build something from the ground up. We’re never going to escape our models or influences—and I’m not trying to reinvent anything, necessarily—but I find that by growing this band from the ground up, I don’t have a full vision of what we will be, but I’m realizing that it’s becoming clearer to me as we progress. There are things that are really surprising me about this band—there are definitely more curveballs than I had originally thought. I think the vision is also changing as the band grows. Whereas, if I started the group knowing what it would sound like or having any really strong expectations, I feel the whole process would be more about fulfilling that expectation rather than allowing for growth and evolution. So far it’s going great. It’s felt very trusting, very open, very vulnerable, and I’ve been surprised so many times with the music that we make. I think that’s because I freed myself from expectations.

DJ: Why did you choose the instrumentation for Atlantic Extraction?

ND: Well, some parts were functional, and other parts of it actually didn’t have to do with the instruments, at first. For functional reasons, I knew I wanted to do drums[Stephen Boegehold] and guitar [Tal Yahalom]—there are lack of pianos in New York—and really I’m very happy with letting that dictate some of my forms. I met Louna Dekker-Vargas who plays flute and Ledah Finck, a violinist and violist, a couple of years ago at the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival. I was there as a composer, and they were there for another project. I knew that I wanted to play music with them in some kind of capacity and  Atlantic Extraction made sense because they don’t play rhythm section instruments, in the conventional sense. That was the only functional requirement that I was looking for to fill rest the band. I’d always been interested in classical music and chamber music which is where I heard these instruments first, so I think that elevated the idea that it was kind of an unconventional instrumentation. It didn’t really register to me as that at first, but now that I look back on it it makes sense where it came from.

DJ: It’s a cool front line—flute and violin—it’s really cool. Essentially, as you said, you have this conventional rhythm section that we’ve seen before, but then this front line that is really unique.

ND: Yeah, I know a ton of saxophonists who double on flute and who play really good flute, but it’s not the same. It’s also interesting writing something where flute is the only possible option. It gives me puzzles to work on.

DJ: I can hear that in the music. The fact that you are saying, “I have to write for flute; I have to write for violin,” seems to be influencing the whole compositional process.

ND: Very much so. I really like puzzles and so in some ways it’s a balance of being really strategic and a game-maker. But another part of me is really into the idea of giving myself a slab of work and then working my way through it and treating everything like puzzle.

DJ: What’s the compositional approach to the ensemble?

ND: There isn’t any single approach, but as of recently, a bit for this ensemble and for another new group,I’m dealing with some timer stuff—stopwatch stuff—and gestural stuff. I’m experimenting with this notational approach where I’ll have between one to three simple themes. I’ll have those kind of off to the side – theme one, theme two, theme three. The rest of the notation is gestural – giving just information that is needed to execute the general realm of what I’m hearing while making room for the improvisers. It’ll look like, bass one and bass two play theme one and then there will be another part that says go down then they’ll go on. Then it’ll say sax one play long tones against this and I’ll be as specific as that. It’s this unfolding of people doing really basic tasks, but they to commit it and as they hear what’s going on against it they’ll naturally gravitate towards playing together.

DJ: How much do your personal aesthetics inform your decisions at this point in your career?

ND: I’m finding that it seems like my decisions are informing my aesthetics. I’m recently finding that I’m more into quirky, fucked-up stuff than I thought I was, but I only came across that by composing what felt right. I don’t really feel like my aesthetics, when it comes to composition, is predetermined. It feels more like I compose and then I’m like oh, okay.

DJ: Do you feel like the things you are aesthetically attracted in your work are being reflected in your choices and in the decisions that you’re making at this point?

ND: In terms of my life around music, yes. Over the past year I’ve been particularly introspective and doing weekly therapy sessions to kind of figure out myself and work through stuff that I haven’t really worked through in my life. I’m finding that by putting my work at the center of my life and focusing on that, everything else falls into place around it, particularly as it relates to my direct community and really investing in those relationships with people whether it relates to music or not. I’m working on finding a marriage between my personal life and musical life. Recently I have been placing a lot of importance on  my relationships with people and that approach has heightened my understanding of who they are as musicians and I think has refined and increased my own awareness of who I am as a musician, whether it be as a composer, as a leader, or as side person.

DJ: What are a few things that influence your work besides music?

ND: I really like movement-based activities. That could be dance but even stuff that is found more in everyday life, like looking at the way people walk. My mom would always tell me to make sure I sway my arms when I walk. When she saw me walking with my arms straight down, she would always say, “walk with your arms in movement.” She was always nagging me about that, and my posture, and generally the way I present myself. She was teaching me about body awareness and now, body alignment is always on my mind. I’m fascinated by it. Whether it be in dance, the way people walk, the people’s posture, or body language really interests me.

DJ: Do you have a code that you live by?

ND: I never thought of it in that specific word, code, but I would say that yes—always believing in myself with one hundred percent conviction and commitment and really doing things on my own terms. I’m still learning about other traditions and other systems, but ultimately not letting any hierarchies or ways of making music dictate my work or who I am as a person. I’m creating my own standards and my own terms, and how I present myself as a person.

DJ: Now that we’ve reached the end, are there any questions you wished I would have asked?

ND: I mean I still have, you know, tons of anxiety about the way I declare myself as an artist and the person getting solidified. I thought you would ask more questions, but I’m glad you didn’t, haha.

DJ: No no, it’s because—well, how old are you?

ND: Twenty-two.

DJ: Yeah, man, I didn’t know what the hell I was trying do at twenty-two. I had an idea, for sure, but you know—at forty thinking about the kid at twenty-two, man. It’s light years. I would say, you are in a very different place than I was, but it’s great that you’re letting it flow, and I think that’s the right way to be at twenty-two.

ND: Yeah, I’m trying to work hard and be kind to myself and follow my interests.

DJ: One question I would like to ask you end it—there seems to be a large group of young, really interested, really talented players with vast perspectives on making work coming up right now. I mean you guys are kind the early twenties crew of cats that are in the interesting position of not being bogged down to any type of style or path. It seems you can do whatever really truly interests you. How do you feel about that?

ND: It’s exciting, but more so, a huge responsibility. I think it’s partially because of the huge open lines of communication and, arguably, lack of privacy. There’s just so much communication, such fast communication—and tons of people in the generation or two above us who are generous with their time and their thoughts, like yourself. We have so many resources, so it’s exciting to see what people are doing with these things, but it’s also a huge responsibility because it’s like, Okay you have all this stuff. We’re laying out all these ideas and influences here for you—here you go. Get to work. What are you going to do with them?

DJ: Exactly. Get to work. I like that.

CONTRIBUTOR: Darius Jones

Darius Jones is a critically acclaimed alto saxophonist and composer. In 2008, Jones was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship by Roulette, which he used to launch his chamber ensemble, the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, a project dedicated to new works for voice. Roulette continued their support for Jones’s work through a Jerome Foundation Commission, awarding Jones an Artist-in-Residence opportunity for the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit to premiere his vocal composition, The Oversoul Manual, in spring 2014. Following that performance, Jones made his compositional debut at Carnegie Hall with The Oversoul Manual in October 2014. Jones has collaborated with Gerald Cleaver’s Black Host, Oliver Lake Big Band, Eric Revis Quartet, Nasheet Waits Quartet, Trevor Dunn’s Proof Readers, Matthew Shipp, Branford Marsalis, Jason Moran, and more.

The New York Times: A Critic’s Favorite Space for Music in New York Turns 40

by Seth Colter Walls | This article originally published in The New York Times

Jim Staley at Roulette, the music space in Brooklyn. Mr. Staley, who helped found Roulette 40 years ago, remains its director. | Photo: Joe Carrotta for The New York Times

If you’re the kind of New Yorker prone to wondering what it would have been like to go to a CBGB that wasn’t located inside the Newark airport, you might also wonder if you arrived in the city too late.

Fair enough. But the old bohemian, culturally rich downtown Manhattan spirit still has a few embers burning through the city. And at least one of these, Roulette, is actually more powerful now than at the time of its birth in 1978.

Forty years after opening, Roulette is now nestled inside a YWCA complex at the corner of Third and Atlantic avenues in another downtown: Brooklyn’s. Instead of the 74 seats its co-founder — and current director — Jim Staley provided when he first organized concerts in his Tribeca loft, Roulette now has a theater that can accommodate 400. It’s not only the widest ranging music presenter in the city, but also the most comfortable and welcoming.

“As long as it’s something that’s of a creative and experimental nature, they’re interested in it,” Henry Threadgill, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and saxophonist, said in an interview. “They’ve always been interested in it.”

A potent trombonist as well as an administrator, Mr. Staley is modest in describing the roots of one of New York’s most important avant-garde music spaces. “It started out as a collective,” he said in an interview at Roulette. “And then I sort of initiated a series.”

That first regular series in Manhattan, which began in 1980, took place in Mr. Staley’s place on West Broadway. “We were just trying this out,” he recalled. “All these people came, and watched John Cage and Merce Cunningham come through the door, pay their five bucks.” It didn’t take long for noted composers, like the Fluxus artist Philip Corner, to start pitching concerts to him. When the neighborhood changed, Mr. Staley started looking for another home in Lower Manhattan. Late in the 2000s, Roulette leased a spot on Greene Street, until the financial crash sent the building owner’s assets into chaos.

In 2011, it came to Brooklyn, where it is host to a jovial mixture of styles. In recent seasons, Roulette has presented work by a trio including YoshimiO, the sometime drummer of the avant-rock group Boredoms; a sterling evening of two-piano works by Philip Glass; and a semi-staged presentation of a four-act opera by the composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton. It is also the rental hall of choice for some of the city’s most vital music programmers, like the avant-jazz Vision Festival and Thomas Buckner’s Interpretations series.

Anthony Davis, the composer and pianist, at Roulette. | Photo: Joe Carrotta for The New York Times

At a recent Interpretations concert, the composer and pianist Anthony Davis, author of grand operas like “X — The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and “Amistad,” announced he would perform some material from his next opera, “The Central Park Five,” set to premiere at Long Beach Opera in June. Mr. Davis’s operatic writing was once performed at Lincoln Center by New York City Opera; now, if you want to hear this work in the city, you’ll likely end up at Roulette.

Even if you can’t make it in person, you can tune in online; clips of select recent shows run on Roulette TV, while vintage audio recordings have been popping up on the venue’s SoundCloud page. Excerpts from performances by María Grand, Jennifer Choi and Amirtha Kidambi are particularly good on Roulette TV, and the SoundCloud page offers work by the likes of Leroy Jenkins and Pauline Oliveros. A launch party for an even more in-depth archive is scheduled for Feb. 12.

The organization also supports up-and-coming artists with residencies and commissions. In the months before the pianist and composer Kelly Moran made her debut on the Warp label, with the album “Ultraviolet,” you could hear her working out the balance of live pianism and electronics at Roulette, thanks to one of its emerging artist grants.

Describing the award as “way more monetary support than I’m used to,” Ms. Moran said in an interview that she was “shellshocked” to receive it: “It was kind of a surreal moment, because I had all these ideas for projects I wanted to do related to my record, and now I had the means to do them.”

Roulette is generous to audiences, too. To my mind, its balcony remains far and away the city’s loveliest, most relaxing location from which to take in music. I knew Mr. Threadgill liked it, too, based simply on the number of times I have spotted him there. “It’s just so comfortable,” he said during our interview. “I got addicted to sitting upstairs.”

Strangers tend to talk to each other during intermission, more than at other spaces devoted to experimental music. Artists often circulate before and after performances. And that beer you bought in the lobby? You can bring it into the hall.

“It’s always been the nature of these kind of places that allowed for that,” Mr. Staley said, when I asked how Roulette fostered that welcoming spirit. But once again, he sounded a little too modest. Certainly plenty of spaces pay lip service to the idea of openness, but wind up feeling cliquish.

To a critic’s mind, Roulette’s balcony remains far and away the city’s loveliest, most relaxing location from which to take in music. | Photo: Joe Carrotta for The New York Times

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Space Devoted to Experimental Music Turns 40. Order Reprints

WNYC: Phill Niblock, Jim Staley, and David Weinstein in Conversation with Alison Stewart

On this episode of WNYC’s All of It hosted by Alison Stewart, Phill Niblock (46:12) and two of Roulette’s co-founders, director and producer Jim Staley and director of special projects David Weinstein, join us to discuss Niblock’s upcoming “6 Hours of Music and Film,” his annual Winter Solstice concert, which takes place on December 21 at Roulette. Roulette has several other upcoming events, including: on December 20, a solo concert by guitarist Bill Frisell, on January 25, the Tri-Centric Vocal Ensemble will perform works from Anthony Braxton’s Syntactical Ghost Trance Music system, on January 30 and February 5, Roulette will present the first concerts by their Van Lier Fellows, bassist Nick Dunston, and vocalist Anais Maviel, and February 19-22, Roulette will host Mixology Festival 2019, curated by David Weinstein.

Our 2019 Commissioned + Resident Artists and Van Lier Fellows

Roulette is proud to announce our 2019 Commissioned and Resident artists – trumpeter Jaimie Branch, bassist Shayna Dulberger, saxophonist and composer María Grand, saxophonist Travis LaPlante, musician and installation artist Cecilia Lopez, interdisciplinary artist, composer, and pianist Mary Prescott, vibraphonist Joel Ross, composer, musician and theatre artist Anjna Swaminathan, composer Alex Weiser, and electronic music composer Val Jeanty — and our 2019 Van Lier Fellows: composer and bassist Nick Dunston and vocalist, percussionist, and composer Anaïs Maviel.

[COMMISSION] Jaimie Branch

A mainstay of the Chicago jazz scene and recent active addition to the New York scene, Jaimie Branch is an avant-garde trumpeter known for her “ghostly sounds,” says The New York Times, and for “sucker punching” crowds straight from the jump off, says Time Out. Her classical training and “unique voice capable of transforming every ensemble of which she is a part” (Jazz Right Now) has contributed to a wide range of projects not only in jazz but also punk, noise, indie rock, electronic and hip-hop. Branch’s prolific as-of-yet underexposed work as a composer and a producer, as well as a sideman for the likes of William Parker, Matana Roberts, TV on the Radio and Spoon, is all on display in her debut record Fly or Die – a dynamic 35-minute ride that dares listeners to open their minds to music that knows no genre, no gender, no limits.

[RESIDENCY] Shayna Dulberger
Thursday, March 7, 2019

Shayna Dulberger has been living and performing in the NYC area since 2003. You can catch her slapping upright bass in her old timey band Nifty Knuckles, rocking out on electric bass in band Chaser and exploring textures and found sounds on tape collages in noise project HOT DATE. Dulberger has appeared on over a dozen recordings mostly in the free jazz genre. She has performed in ensembles led by William Parker, Ras Moshe, Bill Cole, Charles Gayle, Jonathan Moritz and Chris Welcome. She plays electric bass on Cellular Chaos’s record Diamond Teeth Clenched (Skin Graft). Dulberger (b. 1983) is from Mahopac, NY. She attended Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division in High School and was awarded a Bachelor of Music from Mason Gross School of The Arts Conservatory, Rutgers University where she majored in Jazz Performance. Aside from performing she currently teaches at Brooklyn Conservatory.

[VAN LIER FELLOW] Nick Dunston
Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Nick Dunston is a Brooklyn-based composer, bassist, and scholar. His performances have spanned a variety of venues and festivals across countries in North America and Europe. While not tethered to any one community, his work often finds itself in between the spaces of jazz, Black American music, 20th century western classical music, experimental music, No wave, and in many cases, cross-disciplinary collaborations. He’s performed professionally with artists such as Tyshawn Sorey, Vijay Iyer, Marc Ribot, Imani Uzuri, Anthony Coleman, Amirtha Kidambi, Dave Douglas, Matt Wilson, Jeff Lederer, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Darius Jones, and more. As a composer, he’s written for and collaborated for a wide range of artists, from solo instrumentalists, to his own bands, to chamber orchestras, performance artists. He’s been commissioned by entities such as the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, the Joffrey Ballet School, The Witches, violist Joanna Mattrey, the ESMAE Jazz and Chamber Orchestras, and more. His currently leads two bands: “Atlantic Extraction” and “Truffle Pig”, and is a co-leader of “Feral Children” (with Noah Becker and Lesley Mok) and “Aurelia Trio” (with Theo Walentiny and Connor Parks). As a writer, he’s contributed monthly to Hot House jazz magazine since 2016.

[RESIDENCY] Maria Grand
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Tuesday, May 28, 2019

María Grand is a saxophonist, composer, educator, and vocalist. She moved to New York City in 2011. She has since become an important member of the city’s creative music scene, performing extensively in projects including musicians such as Nicole Mitchell, Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, Mary Halvorson, Jen Shyu, Fay Victor, Joel Ross, Steve Lehman, Aaron Parks, Miles Okazaki, etc. María writes and performs her original compositions with her ensemble, DiaTribe; her debut EP “TetraWind” was picked as “one of the 2017’s best debuts” by the NYC Jazz Record and her full-length album Magdalena was praised by major publications such as the New York Times, Downbeat, JazzTimes, JazzIz, and others. The New York Times calls her “an engrossing young tenor saxophonist with a zesty attack and a solid tonal range”, while Vijay Iyer says she is “a fantastic young saxophonist, virtuosic, conceptually daring, with a lush tone, a powerful vision, and a deepening emotional resonance.” María is a recipient of the 2017 Jazz Gallery Residency Commission and the 2018 Roulette Jerome Foundation Commission. As an activist in the performing arts, María is a founding member of anti-discrimination group the We Have Voice Collective. She is a member of the Doug Hammond quintet, has toured with Antoine Roney, and performs regularly with her own ensemble, as well as with RAJAS, led by Carnatic musician Rajna Swaminathan, and Ouroboros, led by Grammy Award winner alto saxophonist Román Filiú. She has toured Europe, the United States, and South America, playing in venues and festivals such as the Village Vanguard in NYC, La Villette Jazz Festival in Paris, Saafelden Jazz Festival in Austria, Millennium Park in Chicago, the Blue Whale in LA, IloJazz in Guadeloupe (FR), and many others.

[NYSCA COMMISSION] Val Jeanty

Being born and raised in Haiti until the age of 12 has exposed me to this merging in sound structures and has left an impression on the way I hear and create musical compositions. Living and creating in New York city for over a decade has granted me access to advanced study and knowledge of electronic sound composition. This knowledge in sound merging and design inspired me to create a new genre called Afro-Electronica, which is the incorporation of Haitian traditional ritual music with electronic instruments, the past and the future.” Jeanty issued her first album in 2000 thanks to a Van Lier Fellowship and has exhibited at the Village Vanguard and in Italy. Jeanty grew up in Haiti but moved to the United States in 1986, after the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Jeanty’s installations have been showcased in New York City at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Village Vanguard and internationally at Saalfelden Music Festival in Austria, Stanser Musiktage in Switzerland, Jazz à la Villette in France, and the Biennale Di Venezia in Italy. In the documentary film The United States of Hoodoo, she speaks about the relationship between sound and spirituality. In 2002, she was chosen by poet Tracie Morris as the sound engineer for her poetry installation at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. In 2011, she was commissioned by Wesleyan University’s Center for the arts to collaborate with Dr.Gina Athena Ulysse on Fascinating! Her resilience – a multimedia performance which explores the various meanings assigned to the word resilience in western conceptualizations of Haitians post-earthquake. In 2014, she collaborated with afro-Cuban bassist de:Yosvany Terry on his album “New Throned King” (5Passion), contributing samplings of vodou ceremonies. She was also the sound designer for the off-off-Broadway production Facing Our Truth: 10-Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege presented by the National Black Theater.

[RESIDENCY] Travis LaPlante
Monday, May 21, 2019

Travis Laplante is a saxophonist, composer, and qigong practitioner. Laplante leads Battle Trance, the acclaimed tenor saxophone quartet as well as Subtle Degrees, his newest project with drummer Gerald Cleaver. He is also known for his solo saxophone work and his longstanding ensemble Little Women. Laplante has recently performed and/or recorded with Trevor Dunn, Ches Smith, Peter Evans, So Percussion, Michael Formanek, Buke and Gase, Ingrid Laubrock, Darius Jones, Mat Maneri, and Matt Mitchell, among others. He has toured his music extensively and has appeared at many major international festivals throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. As a qigong student of master Robert Peng, Laplante has undergone traditional intensive training. His focus in recent years, under the tutelage of Laura Stelmok, has been on Taoist alchemical medicine and the cultivation of the heart. Laplante is passionate about the intersection of music and medicine. He and his wife are the founders of Sword Hands, a qigong and acupuncture healing practice.

[RESIDENCY] Cecilia Lopez
Monday, March 18, 2019
Thursday, June 20, 2019

Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and installation artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work explores the boundaries between composition and improvisation, as well as the resonance properties of diverse materials through the creation of non- conventional sound devices and systems. She holds and M.F.A from Bard College and an M.A. in composition from Wesleyan University. Her work has been performed at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Festival Internacional Tsonami de Buenos Aires, Floating Points Festival at Issue Project Room (New York), Ostrava Days Festival (Czech Republic), MATA Festival (New York), Experimental Intermedia (New York) Kunsternes Hus (Oslo) and Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius). She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015. Collaborations include projects with Carmen Baliero, Carrie Schneider and Lars Laumann among others. www.cecilia-lopez.com

[VAN LIER FELLOW] Anaïs Maviel
Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, music director and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. Inspired by Edouard Glissant’s reflections on Creolization, she has associated her practice with the inextricable currents that move spaces and people between times and lands. The contemporary context of re-formulation of self, reality and social structures led her to question the use of language, and to explore its vibratory essence in music. Involved at the crossroads of mediums – music, visual art, dance, theater and performance art – she has been an in-demand creative force for artists such as William Parker, Steffani Jemison, Daria Faïn, Larkin Grimm, Shelley Hirsch, Mara Rosenbloom, Melanie Maar & La Bomba de Tiempo – to give a sense of her eclectic company. As a leader she is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to large ensembles, music direction for cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing & transformative act. She performs extensively in New York, as well as in North, Central & South America and Europe. Her solo debut hOULe, out on Gold Bolus Recordings, received international acclaim and she recently released an eponymous album with carnivalesque duo DIASPORA. With a Masters Degree in Aesthetics (Literature, Arts & Contemporary Though – Paris VII Diderot University), she focused her scholarly works on Afrocentric paradigms of Creative Music as utopian alternative politics. Anaïs Maviel pursues essay and poetic writings as part of her artistic inquiry and published a recent article in French magazine Revue et Corrigée, interviewed by bassist and collaborator Maxim Petit about the stakes of multiculturalism in contemporary music.

[COMMISSION] Mary Prescott
TBA

Mary Prescott is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and pianist who explores the foundations and facets of identity and social conditions through experiential performance. An Artist-in-Residence at the Hudson Opera House (NY), Areté Venue and Gallery (NYC), and Arts Letters and Numbers (NY), Prescott’s work includes the interdisciplinary performance pieces Atlasomnia, Mother Me, and He Disappeared into Complete Silence (with saxophonist Darius Jones); the immersive multimedia chamber opera, ALICE; the online sound journal, Where We Go When; Hook & Eye, improvised performance with visual artist Angela Costanzo Paris; and film music for Thereska Gregor’s Nocecrepa, and Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. Prescott performs at independent, experimental and traditional stages internationally, appearing in the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Constellation’s Frequency Series in Chicago, Women Between Arts at The New School in New York, the Josip Kasman Music Festival in Croatia, Baiona Piano Festival in Spain, Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust and others. She is featured in Ophra Yerushalmi’s documentary film, Prelude to Debussy. A New York Foundation for the Arts Emerging Leader, Prescott is a Co-Founder of the Lyra Music Festival & Workshop at Smith College, where she served as Artistic Director and lead faculty for several years. Other faculty appointments include the Goppisberger Music Festival in Switzerland, the Louisiana Chamber Music Institute, Larchmont Music Academy, and Great Neck Music Conservatory. Prescott holds degrees from The University of Minnesota – Twin Cities (Bachelor of Music), and the Manhattan School of Music (Master of Music).

 

[COMMISSION] Joel M. Ross
Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Chicago native Joel Ross is a “bright young vibraphonist on his own rocket-like trajectory.” (Nate Chinen, The New York Times). Joel has performed with many of jazz’s most lauded artists including Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian McBride, Gerald Clayton, Louis Hayes, Melissa Aldana, Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock, among others. He is an integral part of fellow Chicago native Marquis Hill’s Blacktet, and is increasingly active as a bandleader and composer with numerous groups under his name. He is currently based in New York City.

[COMMISSION] Anjna Swaminathan
Sunday, April 28, 2019

Anja Swaminathan is a versatile composer, musician and theatre artist. A disciple of the late violin maestro Parur Sri M.S. Gopalakrishnan and Mysore Sri H.K. Narasimhamurthy, she performs regularly in Carnatic, Hindustani and creative music settings. In the summer of 2014, Anjna was a participant at the celebrated Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, Canada, where she worked closely with eminent jazz and creative musicians and led workshops on the fundamentals of Carnatic improvisation and listening. She has since performed with and been encouraged by established musicians in New York’s thriving creative music scene including Jen Shyu, Imani Uzuri, Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Amir ElSaffar, Stephan Crump, Graham Haynes, Mat Maneri, Miles Okazaki and others. In 2015, Anjna came under the tutelage of renowned vocalist and scholar, T.M. Krishna for her training in Carnatic music, and vocalist Samarth Nagarkar for her training in Hindustani music and accompaniment. She frequently engages with the burgeoning community of Indian classical musicians in New York and New Jersey, and is an active member of the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a growing artist-managed collective of musicians, performers and educators with a firm grounding in raga-based music and a mission to create a diverse, community-oriented artistic practice. In 2018, Anjna was a composer fellow in the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, where she worked closely with esteemed composer and mentor Gabriela Lena Frank to study Western classical music notation and premiere her first ever string quartet, written for and performed by the acclaimed Del Sol String Quartet.  As a theatre artist, writer and dramaturg with interests in the intersection of race, class/caste, gender and sexuality, Hindu vedantic philosophy, and the boundaries of postcolonial Indian nationhood, Anjna often engages in artistic work that ties together multiple aesthetic forms towards a critical consciousness. She frequently takes part in interdisciplinary collaborations, often developing scores and providing musical accompaniment for dancers and dance companies, most notably, Rama Vaidyanathan, Prakriti Dance (Kasi Aysola and Madhvi Venkatesh), Mythili Prakash, Malini Srinivasan, Soles of Duende (Brinda Guha, Arielle Rosales and Amanda Castro) and Ragamala Dance. Anjna was commissioned (with co-composers Rajna Swaminathan and Sam McCormally) to create an original score for playwright/performer Anu Yadav’s one-woman-play Meena’s Dream. In her dramaturgical and theatrical work, she has a keen interest in developing new projects that seek to problematize the hierarchies of caste and gender that are inherent in her musical idiom, something that deeply informs her musical practice. She leads the multidisciplinary project WOVEN, which combines original music and poetry to meditate on and problematize ideas of death, memory and loss in Hindu vedantic philosophy. Her string trio for WOVEN features bassist Stephan Crump and cellist Naseem Alatrash. Anjna is co-artistic director of Rhythm Fantasies, Inc. – a non-profit organization that strives to promote South Indian classical music and dance in a space that encourages education and enrichment through innovation and cross-cultural collaboration. Anjna holds a Bachelors degree in Theatre from the University of Maryland, College Park.

[RESIDENCY] Alex Weiser
Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Broad gestures, rich textures, and narrative sweep are hallmarks of the “compelling” (New York Times), “shapely, melody-rich” (Wall Street Journal) music of composer Alex Weiser. Born and raised in New York City, Weiser creates acutely cosmopolitan music combining a deeply felt historical perspective with a vibrant forward-looking creativity. Weiser has been praised for writing “insightful” music “of great poetic depth” (Feast of Music), and for having a “sophisticated ear and knack for evoking luscious textures and imaginative yet approachable harmonies.” (I Care If You Listen). An energetic advocate for contemporary classical music and for the work of his peers, Weiser co-founded and directs Kettle Corn New Music, an “ever-enjoyable,” and “engaging” concert series which “creates that ideal listening environment that so many institutions aim for: relaxed, yet allowing for concentration,” (New York Times) and was for nearly five years a director of the MATA Festival, “the city’s leading showcase for vital new music by emerging composers.” (The New Yorker). Weiser is now the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he curates and produces programs that combine a fascination with and curiosity for historical context,with an eye toward influential Jewish contributions to the culture of today and tomorrow.

Sally Silvers In Conversation with Yvonne Rainer

Roulette has always maintained a relationship with dance artists, and I pride myself with being part of the adventure since the early 1980s. Jim Staley was the first to ever ask me to improvise live in concert (in 1982) and there has been no looking back—on stage or in my studio.

Beyond the world of improvisation, I also trace my choreographic roots to Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s Judson Dance Theater of which she was a founding member. When she asked me to be part of her newly formed dance group in 2005, I had been choreographing for over two decades. Although I had never wanted to be a dancer in anyone’s company before, you do not say no to your dance hero—and it was an unforgettable experience from 2005 to 2011.

Before, during, and after, Roulette has been a cherished source of support for me and so many others in the performing arts community and is still introducing me to a wild range of incredible artistry. My admiration for the legacies of experimental dance and movement, music and sound arts, and everything in between overflows in celebration of Roulette’s 40th!

—Sally Silvers

On November 29th through December 1st, artistic director and choreographer Sally Silvers presents the three-night run premiere of her dance piece ALONG at Roulette. A low-tech, science fiction based “girl power” adventure, ALONG imagines a place where different worlds and body languages confuse, collide, and waveringly communicate. The piece is intended to be a stark meeting of “super-heroes” stranded on a desert isle. Since there is no shared language, it starts from scratch to build a communality of difference. The cast includes dancers Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Megan Curet, Lindsey Jones, Cori Kresge, Benedict Nguyen, Veraalba Santa, Melissa Toogood, and Joshua Tucson and features three Gotham Girls Roller Derby Skater All-Stars: Lauren Corry (aka Caf Fiend), S.C. Lucier (Fast and Luce), and Katherine Rugg (Space Invader).

ALONG features live sound design and electronics by Bruce Andrews and Michael Schumacher, video by Ursula Scherrer, lighting design by Joe Levasseur, costumes by Elizabeth Hope Clancy, and drones by Charles Dennis.

For Roulette’s 7th issue, here she is in conversation with friend and collaborator, Yvonne Rainer.

Yvonne Rainer: How do you begin to make a dance; what are the very first “moves”—physically and cognitively?

Sally Silvers:  I usually start a new piece cognitively with literature (in the past: Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein, James Ellroy), or movies (eg. Hitchcock, Godard), or music/opera (Berg’s Lulu, Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments, Luigi Nono’s opera on revolutions), or a famous figure or concept (Tina Modotti, Sor Juana, cyborgs, women scientists, girl/group/power) and do a lot of watching, reading, listening for months—or mostly at the beach—trying to get a feeling, an instinct, and a grasp. I’ll start saving pictures, writing down movement ideas, daydreaming—in the past I would find some music that seemed relative and record myself improvising to it for movement ideas. To be honest, these days at my age, I have such a backlog of improvisations, I’m often reaching out to my younger pre-recorded self for current ideas.

I’m not sure why I chose science fiction this time. With few exceptions, I have been a true reality-based choreographer who wants to problematize the relationship to the body and others as a practice of social/political commentary hard-wired into the composition. I think it’s the current political state we are in now that maybe brought me to sci-fi to escape with utopias or with dystopias. I’ve narrowed myself to sci-fi written by women and that addresses my theme of communication (such as Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison), which hopefully takes up some of the problems we’re having now, however obliquely. I think of myself as a social modernist somewhat—I know that’s contradictory.  I might be an abstractionist at heart.

YR: To what extent do you want your sources to be recognizable in the finished product? I think I’m more of a literalist in that I want my literary affects to run parallel with movement in the form of readings, but if my memories of your work are accurate, you seem to let your literary influences lie kind of subliminally in relation to the “choreography.”

SS: My experience of your work is you want parallel tracks but often they don’t seem related. They seem like you want associations that don’t connect; that are related only by time.  I think I’m going for a connection, but a mystery as to why.

YR: It’s true, I deliberately go for the obvious “radical juxtapositions”—connection between word and image comes and goes, maybe usually “goes,” but the “mystery,” and perhaps the power, of your dances is not the why but how it works. Do you consider what you do more narrative than abstract?

SS:  I think “mystery” might have been a cop-out word.  Maybe I meant I was going for a connection that is a by-product of a constellation of all that is going on in the moment—things that link but can also contradict, therefore creating a challenge or dialogue. I really fight against the word “narrative.” Even if there is a story, as in [the Hitchcock-inspired dance pieces]: Actual Size (2014) and Tenderizer (2017)—which both premiered at Roulette—or when I did a version of Berg’s Lulu (1996), I make the “story” into situations or references, or abstractions (like making a space pattern that occurs at three different times out of the design of the opening credits of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest). The dancers can play any and all of the characters at any time or do many things that don’t seem to refer to an identifiable character at all. (Is a sequence of moves without characters really a narrative?)  Although I’ve noticed I don’t do much gender-crossing. Maybe that’s next. ALONG is going to be very influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin’s sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness about a genderless society—anyone can give birth—on a planet with entire vocabularies for ice. I see the derby skaters as a kind of “set design” of the constancy of “ice” while still operating as superheroes, for instance.

YR: I’m intrigued by your “…making a space pattern out of the design of the opening credits of North by Northwest”—do you mean all those diagonals followed by the milling crowds? (I looked up the credits on the internet). Ha! I thought my huge collection of newspaper photos and sports videos was an inexhaustible resource, but I never would have dreamed of going to movie credits—which suggests a modus operandi that might be described as “eclectic incongruity” in addition to your “social [post]modernism.” The world-is-your-oyster kind of thing—but I’m still curious about how much of these resources are buried or recognizable in the final product, and I can’t remember if you credit them in your program notes or if that’s even an issue for you.

SS: I like that—“eclectic incongruity”—because there is a layering beyond just using the credits as a potential space pattern. For instance, the “diagonals followed by the milling crowds” led me to my movement instruction library where I found my book on billiards and chose a pattern illustrating how to get a particular ball in the pocket, so I layered that on top of the idea that came from the diagonals in the film. And the milling crowds, from an overhead film shot became a small triangle of people in the downstage left corner of the space who moved using vocabulary I learned from my book on beginning Labanotation. How recognizable these resources are in the final product is not very important to me. You would be surprised how many people have not seen North by Northwest or any other film of Hitchcock’s for that matter.  Although I’ve chosen a particular book, or artist, or film, because I am interested in it or it brings up issues that I am exploring, I think of the resources more as treasure chests of potential ideas to make a dance out of—blueprints or roadmaps to lend structure or ideas to start with in rehearsal: a way to both enhance and limit my imagination. Not chance procedures at all, but still a way to get outside of what’s typical or habitual in my own decision-making—I would probably never have chosen to pack six people in a small space downstage left on my own—I will identify the overall resource in the program i.e. “channeling Marnie, Psycho, and The Birds but nothing internal.  I think the piece has to stand for itself, and I don’t like being too literal. Here comes that abstractionist again. Or that impressionist.

YR:  Yeah, dance is such a drag in that way: unless you’re doing pantomime it is inevitably abstract and ambiguous with regard to MEANING despite the materiality of the actual bodies; so it remains always self-referential or tied to our familiarities with particular dance histories or training and so susceptible to interpretation. We give names to our configurations: clump, milling, collision, et al, which brings me to what you describe as “the current political state we are now in” and how to unpack that via “dance” in these perilous times. This may be my dilemma right now, more than yours in that I’m currently more interested in writing than in choreography.

SS: It’s true in dance–meaning is mostly in the eye of the beholder. That’s either delightful or frustrating, but it goes with the territory. The less literary an art form, the more ambiguous—though my literary tastes and collaborations tilt pretty severely toward ambiguity. But isn’t that part of the attraction too? And even when the movement goes against the grain of anything literal or character/narrative based, I still think it can have some leverage. When I’m choosing material that is socially-charged and make it collide in drastic or weird juxtapositions, it seems capable of making sparks for or marks on the viewer.

YR: How do you deal with your aging body as both performer and maker? Will you be one of the sci-fi “girls?” (One of my most brilliant choreographic decisions was to have you imitate right on the spot in performance the bravura male solo in Agon as it played out on a DVD with the player facing upstage, for your eyes only). Does the geriatric belong somewhere in what seems like your infinite collections of subject matter? Will you be performing in the new work? Knowing you, I see you reluctant to give that up. As I am. (Let’s go walking and running and gesturing into that good night!)

SS:  Right now (as of August 13th, 2018), I don’t plan to be in the current piece. That will be a first for me in presenting one of my larger dance evenings. I know I’m not giving up performing as you haven’t (your many geriatric versions of Trio A and your “interventions” in your own recent work when a dancer is sick, injured, or otherwise unavailable are priceless and thrilling), but for sure I am cutting back. There are all the societal pressures of being an older woman, much less an older dancing woman. Coming to terms with decreasing physical prowess is an ongoing conversation with myself in relation to the times and the patriarchy in which I live.

YR:  All the more reason to challenge those norms. A fantasy just entered my brain: you and I make a talking/dancing geriatric duet. But we should wait until you’re as old as I am!

SS:  Well, Yvonne, you would be 102 when I get to be your age. Fantasy remains fantasy—which is a category of sci-fi—but I love the idea.

CONTRIBUTOR: Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker who has been recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of the past fifty years. She emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of the Judson Dance Theater movement, an avant-garde performance style that blended elements of dance and visual art, and later turned to experimental film. Rainer is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Rockefeller Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Wexner Prize, and in 2015, the Merce Cunningham Award. She currently lives and works in New York.

Resonant Bodies Festival 2018: Q&A with Lucy Dhegrae

by Kurt Gottschalk

Lucy addressing the audience at Resonant Bodies Festival 2017 at Roulette. Photo by Gretchen Robinette.

On September 11, 12, and 13, Roulette will host the sixth Resonant Bodies Festival. The festival gives outstanding and inventive vocalists, regardless of genre, 45 minutes of stage time to fill however they want. We asked founder and curator Lucy Dhegrae to talk about the performers on this year’s program and how she goes about filling the bill.

Kurt Gottschalk: Composer and singer Paul Pinto’s operas owe a stylistic debt to Robert Ashley but with a near-future, dystopian vision that reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s fiction. His productions can be really funny. They can also be really foreboding. Do you think he’s a cynical humorist or a humorous cynic?

Lucy Dhegrae: I would say…cynical humorist! Paul is an extremely lovely and hilarious person, so I would say he is a humorist first, cynic second. Paul has virtuosic stage charisma. His energy is infectious. I think the work he is bringing for ResBods is more on the serious side, though I am sure Paul will defy expectations—which is part of why I love his work.

KG: Helga Davis sang in the 25th anniversary staging of Philip Glass’s seminal Einstein on the Beach and has worked with director Peter Greenaway and composers Missy Mazzoli and Paola Prestini, to name a few. She’s also been likened to the great jazz singer Jeanne Lee and regularly collaborates with Davóne Tines, whose set of gospel songs at last year’s Resonant Bodies was as staggering as it was unexpected. What appeals to you about Davis’s work and how do you see Resonant Bodies crossing between, on the one hand, art song and contemporary composition and, on the other, jazz and gospel?

LD: Helga is first and foremost a powerful voice and stage presence. I would be excited to see her do pretty much anything on stage, and that is the foremost quality I look for in any artist for the festival—an amazing performer. Her work defies genre and classification, and that too makes her perfectly at home in ResBods.

What I would like us all to focus on, for this festival and all Resonant Bodies festivals, is not genre or even aesthetics: it’s the person. I want us to get to know the person not only based on the sound of their voice or the mode in which they present, but in how they present their work, whom they collaborate with, and what makes them light up on stage. Every performer on the festival has a magic, but no two performers possess the same magic. There is no universal experience of the voice, no one right way to do it. What is such a delight for me as an audience member is to see someone who wants to be there, sharing something with us that is important to them, something they love. When you ask talented performers to do this, to me—it doesn’t get any better than that.

KG: Jen Shyu is truly a multi-talent, a composer and a dancer who sings in multiple languages. On top of that, she plays violin, piano, and several East Asian string instruments—all instruments that themselves have resonant bodies, as it happens. How do you weigh all the different job titles (composer, instrumentalist) that the singers you present possess?

LD: The voice is so fascinating to me because of how it manifests itself through the individual: through their physical body, but also through each person’s history and experiences. In addition to Jen’s training in a variety of instruments, she has also trained in vocal styles that accompany the instruments. You can hear the multifaceted stylistic approach in her voice: virtuosic timbre! She is one of the rare performers who embodies a variety of approaches to the voice from dozens of influences. So thrilled she can be a part of this year’s festival.

KG: Nathalie Joachim has worked in classical, hip hop, jazz, indie-rock, and electronic music. She’s also a member of the Grammy-winning chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird and has performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon with her duo Flutronix. I understand that you don’t put any restrictions on the performers, but do you think the festival has a particular aesthetic?

LD: Our motto is “curated unpredictability”—I myself am very much an aesthetic omnivore, and I like that our artists (like Nathalie) are too. We’re a home for artists who don’t belong to any one genre. The music world is a geography: artists are metropoles. Genre and aesthetic interests travel through and around the artists like roadways, but they are not the destination. I know that’s a giant metaphor, but this idea of Resonant Bodies illuminating the “map” of the adventurous vocal world is part of the function that we serve in the community. We can’t possibly show the whole map, or even conceive of its entirety, but we can begin to know it by presenting individuals who have their own unique domain. I think also by covering a greater literal geography with the festival, year by year we can bring together some of the various parts. Spoken word, beatboxing, rap—I’m interested in and open to presenting these in the future.

KG: Caroline Shaw is getting to be a well-known name. She’s the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music and she’s built quite a following over the last few years and I’m sure will be one of the more anticipated sets on the program. But I’m sure it’s more than a prestige booking. What made you want to include her on the program?

LD: I think most people know Caroline as a composer, violinist, and/or ensemble singer, but probably many of them don’t know her as much as a solo vocalist. She is hugely talented, and I wanted to see what she would do with the prompt of “here’s 45 minutes: approach this space as a solo vocalist.” As one of her fans, I’m really looking forward to hearing her on the festival! I know she has been developing this material for a while, and I am so grateful to her for cooking up something special just for ResBods.

KG: The German soprano Sarah Maria Sun put out a truly remarkable record on Mode Records, performing challenging works by Heinz Holliger, Salvatore Sciarrino, György Kurtág and others. At Roulette, she’ll be presenting a very different program, with works by Georges Aperghis and Rebecca Saunders, among others. I wonder if you could say something about what virtuosity means to a singer and what it means to you as a curator.

LD: Vocal virtuosity was probably my starting place as a curator. And there are many kinds of virtuosos in singing: virtuosic range, dynamic control, language, character, timbre, stylistic flexibility, emotional communication, audience interaction and so on. Sarah is not only a virtuoso in many of these aspects, but she has the added bonus of being completely compelling and vulnerable on stage. Virtuosity is totally worthless if one doesn’t have that, and Sarah has it in spades. I’ve been a huge fan of hers for almost a decade so I am over the moon that she is able to join us on this year’s fest.

KG: Pamela Z is an artist well known to Roulette audiences; she’s appeared on Roulette’s stages a number of times over the years and is a forerunner in working with voice and electronics. Do you think electronics is still a novelty in new music? Is it a crutch? Or is it just a more versatile piano that’s easier to move around?

LD: I think electronics (in all its different forms) is an instrument, and Pamela Z is a modern master of that instrument. She is a great example of someone actually performing with electronics. She’s not staring dull-eyed at a laptop; she is a wizard casting a spell. Is the piano a crutch for Elton John? Is the guitar a crutch for Jimi Hendrix? In an interview I did with Jennifer Walshe for the 2017 Festival, I asked her about the line in her New Discipline (non)manifesto that mentions “maintain[ing] sexualised eye contact with audience members whilst manipulating electronics”—while this is kind of a joke, it’s also serious. Jen recognizes how difficult it is to manipulate electronics on stage in a way that keeps the audience engaged with the performance. Pamela Z has mastered this. I bow down to her artistry!

KG: Gelsey Bell is another name familiar in these circles.  She was an artist-in-residence at Roulette in 2015 and has been commissioned by Roulette with the Jerome Foundation. She’s also recorded works by Robert Ashley and John Cage and last year released an album with violist and composer John King. To say she’s a name to watch out for would be to put it mildly. No doubt she deserves the attention she’s received, but what do you think accounts for her star power?

LD: There are some people who, when they walk out on stage, without singing a note or saying anything, I just instantly fall in love with them. Gelsey is one of these performers. When she’s on stage, you feel her excitement to be there, and you feel her genuine curiosity and commitment to what she’s performing. This seems so simple, but it’s one of the most important tools of a good performer: the ability to reach down within yourself and connect to your love of the thing. It’s almost child-like. And it’s completely disarming for me as an audience member. The performer proceeds with (seemingly) zero self-consciousness, and so do we. Gelsey’s work pioneers new sounds from a place of love and joy, and it’s just a pleasure to take in.

KG: Last but certainly not least, we get to one Lucy Dhegrae. As a curator and producer, how do you decide when to include yourself on a bill and what can we expect from your appearance on the festival’s opening night?

LD: The first year we did Resonant Bodies, I performed as well as produced/curated, and while it was thrilling, it was also physically exhausting and not sustainable year after year. I swore I wouldn’t perform on the festival again until I had lots of staff support and I felt like I had something really special to share. I feel ready for this year’s festival because both of those criteria are met.

Resonant Bodies is by no means my vanity project; it is very much built by and for a community of curious vocalists. It is a lot to get up on that stage and share your heart and soul—a precious gift that an artist shares with the Festival and the audience. I can only be a proper steward of that gift if I myself go through it. I will be making music with friends new and old on stage, presenting new works as well as ones I am familiar with. Looking back at 2013, I feel I have changed and grown so much as an artist since then, and I am excited to invite the audience into my musical microcosm for 45 minutes.

CONTRIBUTOR: Kurt Gottschalk

Kurt Gottschalk writes about contemporary composition and improvisation for DownBeat, The New York City Jazz Record, The Wire, Time Out New York, and other publications and has produced and hosted the Miniature Minotaurs radio program on WFMU for the last ten years.

Spotlight on Kelly Moran

by s. karabush

 

On Friday, September 7th, Kelly Moran premieres a selection of electro-acoustic keyboard works for her first Van Lier Fellowship concert at Roulette.

Tell me a little bit about your upcoming album.

On November 2nd, my album Ultraviolet will be coming out on Warp Records. I’m really excited because I’ve been a huge fan of Warp since I was a teenager. Many of the artists on Warp are why I got into making electronic music in the first place—Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, etc. These musicians have been hugely influential to me in so many ways. To be part of that legacy is really affirming to me as an artist, especially since I’ve faced so much rejection for not fitting within an easily categorizable musical genre. It felt so amazing to be accepted by a label *because* I’m such a weirdo! This record feels like a culmination of what I’ve been working towards for the past few years; it’s all prepared piano, but I designed a lot of detailed sound-worlds around the piano using different synths and electronic textures, so it sounds very lush and dreamy. It’s also more improvisatory than my past records—all of the pieces began as improvisations that I recorded and later refined, so I sound really untethered and free on the album. Writing and working on the piano parts for this album really changed the way I play, and I feel like I’ve discovered a new way of playing my instrument that is idiosyncratic to my personal musical tendencies.

You were the sole engineer and producer of your last five solo albums. Why do it yourself?

I’m a control freak! Haha. But really, I studied recording engineering and production in college because I really wanted to be able to make music without relying on other people to record or produce it for me. I was naturally interested in it to begin with, and I always felt that working alone forced me to come up with creative solutions to any roadblocks I’d encounter. And of course, another reason is the fact that I’ve always been hyper-aware of the fact that the production world is very male-dominated, and I feared that letting someone else produce my music meant that they would end up getting all the credit for it. I wanted to show that I was capable of doing it without anyone’s help to make sure people knew I was the mastermind behind all the intricacies in my music. Now that I’m a bit older and have established myself by making a few records all on my own, I feel more relaxed about working with other people. Ultraviolet is the first record I let someone else produce with me, and it was really thrilling to get a different perspective on my music for the first time.

How has your creative voice developed since BLOODROOT, and through your work with Oneotrix Point Never?

My entire creative process has changed since Bloodroot, and it made me really excited that I was able to shift gears so radically for Ultraviolet and create a sound that was completely new for me. Bloodroot sounds just a little bit stiff and academic to me to me at times; while writing it, I was sitting at the piano with staff paper tediously writing these awkward, little melodies with weird, angular harmonies that were sort of uncomfortable—physically—for my hands. Most of the songs on that record were so short simply because the music was challenging for me to write, and I’d get exhausted and want to move on to something new! It’s not the most enjoyable music for me to play either because of some of the positions and patterns. But Ultraviolet is rooted in improvisation to a greater degree, and I really just let myself go wild without overthinking chord changes or harmonic structures. I stopped intellectualizing things so much and forgot about theory. So much of it was about the physical response I would have to the piano while improvising patterns and playing around with stretching and compressing rhythmic phrasing in new ways.

Working with Dan (Oneohtrix Point Never) has also opened my eyes to new creative possibilities. I am really grateful to be part of his MYRIAD performances because he has such an incredible vision that is executed beautifully on every level: from the lights, to the video work, to the stage design, to the giant trash bag inflatables that slowly and menacingly inflate during the performance beside us. He really thought about how to create a multi-sensory experience for the audience on every level, and that’s definitely something I see myself striving for in the future. I don’t want to just play a concert; I want to give the audience an experience that delivers both sonically and visually, so it’s fully immersive. I want people to feel like they’ve slipped into another dimension for an hour.  

Tell me about the dialogue between musical traditions (New Music, Metal, Minimalism) that we hear in your music. What’s in there that’s hidden? That we might not catch at first listen?

There are a lot more similarities between these genres than meets the eye, I think. When I started getting into black metal, my first thought was that it reminded me exactly of minimalism: both genres rely heavily on repeated notes/tremolos, a steady pulse, and a commitment to tonality. I’ve transcribed black metal songs on piano, and they legit sound like they could be Philip Glass piano etudes. A lot of black metal is actually pretty compositional if you ignore the terrifying banshee vocals—especially 2nd wave black metal, which to me is very catchy and melodic. Someday, I’d love to transcribe a metal piece for a chamber ensemble just to prove how similar it can be to contemporary New Music since they have really similar foundations.

Tell me about the role experimentation plays in your work.

There was a point in high school when I was in a practice room playing piano, and I heard someone down the hall playing the same exact piece, only way better. It was sort of a eureka moment for me because I realized I was striving to do something that a lot of other people could do way better than me, and it suddenly didn’t feel exciting to me anymore. I obviously love playing piano and learning music, but I personally don’t find satisfaction from playing pieces that every pianist has played. I wanted to seek out the weird, unexplored repertoire that was shunned by academia and discover new ways of playing piano. The piano department at my college didn’t want to give me academic credit for learning how to play prepared piano or contemporary music, which only made me want to do it more. For me, it’s not just about being different for the sake of being unique, but I genuinely love discovering new timbral combinations that feel wholly unique to my creative voice. When I made Bloodroot, I wanted to make a record that was comprised entirely of piano timbres, and I experimented with generating sounds from the piano in so many different ways. It challenged me and really opened me up to new sonic combinations I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. I am always going to be pushing myself to find uniquely different techniques of playing piano and new ways of combining it with other timbres to make it sound fresh and new.

What are the hardest material restraints you’ve faced as an artist?

That’s easy: not having the money or resources to make the music I want to make. Since I was never able to afford studio time, there are bird chirps and weird environmental artifacts on all of my records because I was always recording on my piano at my parent’s house. It’s been a huge blessing to receive the Van Lier Fellowship from Roulette in that it’s opened up so many possibilities I’ve never had before. When I first moved to NYC, I was freelancing as an accompanist, and I didn’t have a lot of extra funds to spend on things that weren’t food, rent, or a metrocard. Now I’m able to buy equipment and gear that I’ve wanted for a long time. The Van Lier Fellowship has also allowed me to work with other artists on my projects and actually pay them for their work when I wasn’t able to do that before. I’ve wanted to collaborate with video artists for so, so long, and I’ve been using part of my fellowship to work with with a designer to make projections for my upcoming performances. I’ve been dabbling in video art myself for a few years, but I’m by no means an expert and have really limited production capabilities in that realm. I’m really thrilled that now I am able to work with someone who can elevate the visual aspect of my performances to a higher level.

One last question… I was checking out your Twitter account and there’s a lot of figure skating. Are you really into figure skating? Has anyone ever skated to your music? What’s up with figure skating?

Yes, I am really, really into figure skating, both as a spectator and participant. I just love that it’s such a beautiful, expressive sport that’s also dangerous as hell. It looks so easy, but it’s SO hard. And it’s inextricably tied to musical expression! You won’t be considered a great skater if you don’t have a strong grasp of conveying the emotions behind the music you’re skating to. A lot of skaters I’ve met are also musicians, actually. I’m also really into the idea of a sport being so extreme that you willingly hurl yourself into the air at high speeds and land on ice with hundreds of pounds per square inch of force. That is absolutely wild to me. I love it. And it’s been great having a hobby that challenges me in similar ways music does – like music, skating requires a ton of discipline and practice. So much of skating is repeating the same movements over and over again, and I get a really big thrill from mastering the smallest maneuvers. As of now, no one has ever skated to my music but I would absolutely die of happiness if someone did, especially if they were Russian and prodigious. (No country is dominating figure skating like Russia is right now.)

CONTRIBUTOR: s. karabush

susan/snooze karabush is a musician who writes and dances. He has worked at Roulette since 2013, currently as Director of Operations.