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Category: Blogcast

Brandon Lopez + Steve Baczkowski

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

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

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

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

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

Spotlight on G. Lucas Crane

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

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

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

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

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

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

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

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

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

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

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

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

What are you really excited about right now?

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

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

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

How did your interest in your work begin?

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

What is influencing your work right now?

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

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

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

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

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

The Lamentations
Brandon Lopez – Bass
Sam Yulsman – Piano

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

[RESIDENCY] G. Lucas Crane: Time Boiler

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

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

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

Samuel Blaser Trio: Taktlos

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

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

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

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

Roulette joins We Have Voice

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

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

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

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

[DANCEROULETTE] Susan Rethorst with Gregory Holt and Gabrielle Revlock: Stealing from Myself

What: Blending old and new work from her 30-year career, choreographer Susan Rethorst creates a dance for and with performers Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt.
When: June 13–15, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost:  $20 Door, $15 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368

Brooklyn, NYStealing from Myself engages the personal archive of beloved choreographer Susan Rethorst to create new material for and with performers Gabrielle Revlock and Gregory Holt. Rethorst draws on 30 years of material to create a physical vocabulary for the two dancers utilizing small gestures that build into a large work over 30 minutes. Rethorst strings her gestures into passages and then paragraphs that become evocative stories, exploring “movements that are like found objects,” and has no fear of making ambitious work. Some say the experience is like being transfixed by a great painting.

Since 1975 Susan Rethorst has steadily created dances out of New York and Philadelphia. Rethorst’s work has been presented by The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Marks, The Whitney Museum, and others. Internationally her work has been produced by The Holland Festival, Spazio Zero Rome, The Kunsthalle Basel, The Aix-en-Provence Festival, Jerusalem’s Room Festival, and more. Rethorst has been instrumental in devising BA and post-graduate programs in Copenhagen, Cork, Salzburg, and Amsterdam. She initiated a program for the Amsterdam School of the Arts, a study of choreography in Studio Upson in Pennsylvania (SUPA), and the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. Rethorst was among the first to receive a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) for Outstanding Achievement in 1985. In 2008, she received her second Bessie for 208 East Broadway: Suitcase Dreams.

Gregory Holt is a choreographer from Philadelphia, where he also works as a community organizer. His dances are refined, process-based works, looking for social structures in somatic experience. His organizing work is in developing the local cooperative economy and direct action for climate justice. His work has been shown across the US, in Canada, and in Europe.

Gabrielle Revlock is a dance-maker known for her work with the hoop and her “inventive,” “rambunctious,” and “mesmerizing” choreography. Presenters include American Dance Festival, JACK, Gibney Dance Center, FringeArts, Joyce SoHo, and Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Internationally she has performed in Japan, The Netherlands, Singapore, Hungary and Russia.

[RESIDENCY] Amirtha Kidambi: Lines of Light

What: The composer/vocalist Amirtha Kidambi channels centuries of vocal tradition through electronics and structured improvisation
with inspired, virtuosic collaborators.
When: June 17, 2018. 8pm.
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $20 Door, $15 Presale
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: bit.ly/SP180617

Brooklyn, NY – Virtuosic composer/vocalist Amirtha Kidambi continues her 2018 residency with Roulette to present the world premiere of Lines of Light. The piece is inspired by the title of the late Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light and medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen’s reference to her vision of God as “The Shade of the Living Light” and brings together a group of female vocal powerhouses. Featuring Jean Carla Rodea, Anaïs Maviel, Emilie Lesbros, and Charmaine Lee, the quartet is a structured improvisation, intended to allow each vocalist to exercise maximum creativity within the larger framework of the piece. Following the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Kidambi assembled the group to freely improvise in order to form community with female musicians from diverse backgrounds in a time of extreme vulnerability and uncertainty. Developed out of Kidambi’s long-term vision to elevate vocalists within experimental music, as they have been historically marginalized due, in part, to the gendered nature of jazz and the avant-garde, Lines of Light showcases the increasingly high caliber of vocalists currently working in New York. The resident artist will also present a new improvised duo with Lea Bertucci on analog electronics. In the duo, Bertucci manipulates Kidambi’s voice through tactile methods with analog tape machine, by pressing on the reels and physically touching the tape. Kidambi reacts in turn with a vocal arsenal of timbral techniques, creating a literal visceral feedback loop of noise, processed, and amplified voice.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to experimental bands and new music. She is the creative force behind the band Elder Ones, as well as a key collaborator in Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, duo with Darius Jones and his groups Elizabeth-Caroline Unit and Samesoul Maker, Maria Grand’s DiaTribe, various groups with William Parker, Charlie Looker’s Seaven Teares and Pat Spadine’s Ashcan Orchestra. As an improviser, she has played with Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, Ingrid Laubrock, Ava Mendoza, Trevor Dunn, Ben Vida, Tyondai Braxton, and Shahzad Ismaily. Kidambi worked closely with composer Robert Ashley until the end of his life and had the honor of working with Muhal Richard Abrams for the premiere of Dialogue Social. She has performed nationally and internationally in Europe and Asia, with Elder Ones and solo in collaborative formations for the Whitney Biennial, Carnegie Hall, Newport Jazz Festival, Berliner Festspiele (Germany), Festival Jazz Jantar (Poland), Borderline Festival (Greece), Bimhuis (Amsterdam), and Music Unlimited (Austria).

Lines of Light
Jean Carla Rodea
Anaïs Maviel
Emilie Lesbros
Charmaine Lee
Amirtha Kidambi

Amirtha Kidambi/Lea Bertucci Duo
Amirtha Kidambi – Voice
Lea Bertucci – Analog Electronics

Spotlight on Amirtha Kidambi

 

[RESIDENCY] Amirtha Kidambi: Lines of Light
Sunday, June 17, 2018 @ 8:00 pm

Tell us about yourself and what you do.

My parents are from South India (Tamil Nadu) and immigrated to the U.S., settling in Buffalo where I was born. I was raised in the Bay Area where we did weekly devotional bhajan singing in the Indian community — where I basically learned to sing, that and choir in public school from age five. I also grew up doing Indian classical Bharatanatyam dance, which is deeply connected to the rhythms of Carnatic music and accompanied by a Carnatic ensemble — typically voice, violin, mridangam and the dance teacher intoning the rhythms on syllables. I grew up listening to a lot of that music, but also lots of classical music, jazz, R&B, metal, and punk. I got into more experimental / avant-garde music in college while studying classical music and hosting a radio show called “The Modern Age,” where I learned about a lot of music and composers such Edgard Varèse and early electronic music, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, Meredith Monk, and Giacinto Scelsi. That got me interested in singing experimental music and performing the work of contemporary composers, so when I moved to New York that is what I primarily focused on, and then turned towards improvising and composing my own music.

I guess I have always been interested in intensity and extremity, individuality and expression, subversion, music, and sounds that went against some kind of establishment… so all the music I was into when I was young across categories had those elements. Mostly I am focused on Elder Ones, which is the primary vehicle for my compositions but getting more used to the idea of solo work, which I found really daunting in the past. As I get more comfortable with it I am digging in deeper and think it will be a focus for me in the coming years. In recent years, I decided to only work with people who are asking me to do “my thing” within their music and have long-term existing relationships with them that will carry into the future. The music of Mary Halvorson, Darius Jones, Charlie Looker, Robert Ashley, Pat Spadine and other folks, all of it makes room for my own creativity through improvisation and expression, always in dialogue with the composer.

Describe the project you are developing for Roulette.

I’ve been working primarily on new solo work and also new pieces for Elder Ones for the first concert. The solo work is really informed by my studies in India and listening to a lot of solo work by musicians I admire. I’m also incorporating some percussion using ankle bells, from my days as a Bharatanatyam dancer and using some of that rhythmic language, though it’s still in an experimental stage. For Elder Ones, I’ve been writing music in direct response to all the horrors of our time. It’s overtly “political” and I don’t really care if it’s heavy-handed. We’re “talking back” through the music about what’s going on. It’s the only thing I know to do at the moment. We also brought in some new sounds, synth and electronic Sensory Percussion, so that has been adding an interesting sonic element to weaponize.

For the second one, I’m developing a vocal quintet of Emilie Lesbros, Anais Maviel, Jean Carla Rodea and Charmaine Lee (I’ll also perform in it) and an improvised duo with Lea Bertucci on analog electronics. I’m still developing the ideas for the second concert, but the general goal is to write an ensemble vocal work that gives these very unique and creative singers room to do their thing and experiment, in the context of a vocal group. I feel that improvised music, especially in the avant-garde scene is very instrument-centric, so this is an effort to build community with singers. There are some really amazing vocalists in New York right now! I was really inspired by working in Darius Jones’ vocal project Elizabeth-Caroline Unit.

How did you become involved with Roulette?

Roulette was one of (if not the first) venue where I was paid as a professional musician in New York. It was back in 2009 or 2010 with Seaven Teares at the Greene Street location in Soho, opening for Lee Ranaldo. Since then, Roulette has been part of nearly every major project I’ve done in New York — Dialogue Social with Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley’s CRASH, Darius Jones’ Oversoul Manual, Pat Spadine’s SheSings Herself A LittleSong, as well as the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Commission where I developed Elder Ones, and now the residency. I owe SO MUCH to this venue, seriously!

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

Hard! I live in Astoria, which I really love because it’s extremely diverse and has a major neighborhood vibe. The thing that makes it worth it is the people interactions, both in the music scene and just the general weirdness of people around you. The musical community is just so incredible here. I feel like I meet new musicians who are incredible all the time and then there are people like Reggie Workman walking around who you can run into in a hallway at the New School (after our last Elder Ones rehearsal). How crazy is that?  

What is influencing your work right now?

Two things… my summer in India last year had an enormous impact on what I am doing. I felt unbelievably connected to my roots, speaking my language and going to temples. I was there to study music and took vocal lessons daily with an amazing guru named Karaikal R. Jaishankar. I can really feel the traces of that in my voice, but also in how I’m thinking about music. We had some very philosophical conversations about music and the divine, what it is to express oneself and all kinds of things. I also saw a concert almost every day of the week, so what I was putting in my ears was unbelievable virtuosic Carnatic improvisation. It was just a mind-blowing summer that was life-changing in many ways. I can really feel its influence, particularly in my solo work.

How did your interest in your work begin?

I came to New York for grad school and got increasingly interested in new music and started working with a lot of composers. As I was doing that, I was also improvising and learning a lot about my own voice, not just as a singer but as an artist. I learned a lot about myself through collaboration with other amazing artists in New York and eventually wanted to break free from always interpreting the work of others and write my own. I had been writing “songs” on and off for years, but they never really felt totally right. At Brooklyn College we had this amazing little cadre of performer-composers called the Sweat Lodge, where we wrote and performed each other’s work. That was when I first started using harmonium outside of the Indian music context and started to write music that sounded more like “myself.” Free improvising with other musicians taught me so much and continued to expand my vocal vocabulary and through adapting to the individuality of others, I started to find myself in juxtaposition. The more I focused on improvising, the more apparent my inclinations and my vision as a composer started to gain some clarity and momentum. I started writing pieces for voice and harmonium and then through the Roulette commission in 2014, I started writing the music for Elder Ones and we did our record in 2016 and having been active since then.

Who would you ideally like to collaborate with and why?

Honestly, I am so happy and excited about the people I am collaborating with now that it’s hard to say. Mary Halvorson, Charlie Looker, Darius Jones, Lea Bertucci, the amazing improvising vocalists I’m going to work with for the second residency concert in June, Emilie Lesbros; Anaïs Maviel; Charmaine Lee; Jean Carla Rodea and of course my band Elder Ones with Max Jaffe and Matt Nelson, who have been in the original line-up and the powerful additional of Nick Dunston; the folks in the Ashley project; Dave Ruder, Gelsey Bell, Aliza Simons, Brian McCorkle and Paul Pinto…I couldn’t be more excited about the people I already get to work with. The collaborations have literally everything to do with who I am as a musician and what I’m doing. If I had to say someone new…I would say Jen Shyu. I think what she does as a vocalist is very in line with what I want to do in my own way. She is so inspiring!

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

Nine years, which is crazy! I came under the guise of going to school, which was great, but really just to do music and work with people in the scene here. Also pizza?

Gemma Peacocke: Erasure

What: New solo and chamber works by New Zealand composer Gemma Peacocke exploring themes of gender, identity and marginalization.
When: Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Where: Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, 2/3/4/5/A/C/G/D/M/N/R/B/Q trains & the LIRR
Cost: $25 Door, $20 Online
Info: www.roulette.org / (917) 267-0368
Tickets: http://bit.ly/SP180606

Brooklyn, NY – Composed by Gemma Peacocke, directed by Benita de Wit, and featuring string quartet Schiele, saxophonist Shelley Washington and a unique ensemble of performers, Erasure explores the marginalized experiences of women through a new program of solo and chamber works. Gender and identity themes are reflected and refracted across different instruments in a performance that blends live music and electronics, and shimmers with the potential of a new and uncharted cultural landscape.

The evening comprises five works: “Quiver” pierces the undercurrent of rage resulting years of marginalization and abuse; “Mothertongue,” a new work for solo violin and electronics, splinters and reforms under the tension between individual and collective experience; “Erasure” explores how ordinary and extraordinary women have been written out of history; “Skin” looks at the experience of being born a woman into a world where gender, race, size, age and appearance can determine one’s safety; “Aglow” flickers between shadow and light with the hope for change created by the #MeToo movement. These five works make up a tapestry of interconnected themes as we move fluidly through the world of Gemma Peacocke’s compositions.

Program:
Erasure – for amplified string quartet (NYC Premiere)
Quiver – for piano, bass, and percussion (NYC Premiere)
Aglow – for piano, bass, and baritone saxophone
Skin – for saxophone and electronics (NYC Premiere)
Mothertongue – for violin and electronics (World Premiere)

Shelley Washington – baritone and alto saxophone

Schiele String Quartet
Adrianne Munden-Dixon – Violin
Michelle Painter – Violin
Carrie Frey – Viola
Molly Aronson – Cello