WFMU DJs are curating Friday and Saturday nights at Brooklyn's ISSUE Project Room all month, and we have a couple great shows coming up this weekend:
Friday September 5th
The Brother Lucy Show with Kurt Gottschalk presents: A Neil Peart Birthday Celebration with Brown Wing Overdrive and Sean Meehan / David Watson duoSaturday September 6th
Tony Coulter presents Sterling Basement (John Roach, John Hudak, Shawn Onsgard, Matthew Rohrer) performing "Songs of the Gowanus Canal" + If, Bwana and Michael Peters, sounds and texts
The full schedule's here. ISSUE Project Room is located at 232 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215 [directions]. All shows open at 8pm, $10 at the door.
More info and artist bios after the jump
Artist Bios for Sept 12th w/ Kurt Gottschalk
- Brown Wing Overdrive is Chuck Bettis (electronics + vocals), Mikey IQ Jones (electronics + jaw harps + percussion + objects + vocals) and Derek Morton (electronics + banjo). They cite as influences pollution, angry shamans, burning circuitry, lonely poltergeists, sandpaper, dental work, alarm clocks, hallucinogenic banjo claw hammer, trash trucks, beat box'in, synthy modular meltdown and chaotic analog. Their CD "ESP Organism" will be released in October on Tzadik.
- Sean Meehan has been active in improvised music in New York since the late 80s. He plays a single snare drum, sometimes augmented with cymbals or other objects, in a manner that sheds conventional usage and reconstructs the conception and function of the instrument. His concerts around the world are often staged in unobserved and unconsidered outdoor locations. He has recorded solo and with Sachiko M, Ellen Fullman, Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura and others. His artistic output also includes the construction of "performance objects" that serve as "compositional things," such as "gift iii'" which musically activated a sink full of dishes, and a boxed set of four sculpted cassettes to be played in the mind.
- Guitarist and bagpiper David Watson hails from New Zealand, where he was a member of Primitive Arts Group and co-founded Braille Records. He released three LPs on Braille, and did much to create an improv/noise-music scene where previously there was none. In 1987 he moved to New York and has performed in clubs, new music and concert venues throughout New York, Europe, Australia, NZ and Japan. He has worked with Ikue Mori, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Kato Hideki, Cecil Taylor, Andrea Parkins and others, and has curated music series at Roulette, Experimental Intermedia, St. Marks Church, Greenwich House, Bang-on-a-Can, PS 1, and PS 122. In 2007, he released "Fingering an Idea" (XI), a two-disc set for multiple guitars and bagpipes, and "Throats" (Ecstatic Peace) with Shelley Hirsch and Makagami Koichi.
- Kurt Gottschalk writes about, talks about, thinks about, listens to and plays (on the guitar, on the radio) music. He still likes every band he ever liked.
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Artist Bios for Sept 13 w/ Tony Coulter
STERLING BASEMENT
In this performance, Sterling Basement presents an homage to the
Gowanus Canal. The ensemble includes the multidisciplinary artist John
Roach on his homemade Band-O-Fly instrument, sound artist John Hudak
with homemade thumb pianos, pianist and composer Shawn Onsgard with his
mockingbird Melodica, and the poet Matthew Rohrer delivering texts
related to the once thriving shipping hub.
Sterling Basement are John Roach, John Hudak, Shawn Onsgard, Matthew Rohrer:
John Roach is a Brooklyn-based artist working in many media, including sculpture, video, installation, internet collaboration, and sound art. He is usually not happy unless he is jamming things together that don't seem to fit. Collaboration is a key component of his work, as can be seen in the Free103.9 Wavefarm project Trailhead, realized with the artist James Rouvelle and poet Matthew Rohrer, as well as in his ongoing networked performance project Simultaneous Translation. His work has been exhibited at many venues at home and abroad, including Parkers Box in Brooklyn, Flux Factory in Queens, the Saint Stephen Museum and 2B Galeria in Hungary, and the ZAIM gallery in Yokohama, Japan.
Shawn Onsgard
Composer and performer Shawn Onsgard is currently developing an improvisatory solo piano repertoire that explores imbalanced harmonic structures inspired by Alexander Scriabin and Vijay Iyer. When not at the piano, he composes for all sound-producing things, from ice cream trucks, to hundred-meter piano wires, to snoring grandparents. His work, which explores politics, metaphor, narrative, and perception of space through sound, has been performed and exhibited internationally. Onsgard has collaborated with composers Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier, filmmakers Pierre Huyghe and Jane & Louise Wilson, choreographer Mollie O’Brien and media artists Woody Vasulka and Aaron Davidson & Melissa Dubbin.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and "The Next Big Thing." His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994.
John Hudak has been interested in sound and music from the age of four, when he began to play a variety of instruments. At the University of Delaware (BA, English 1981) and Naropa Institute for the Arts (1979), he studied video, photography, creative writing, and dance. He then began to create taped soundtracks for his solo performance-art/dance pieces that later developed into sound-only pieces. In recent years, he has concentrated solely on sound, particularly natural sounds. Hudak’s current work focuses on the rhythms and melodies that exist in our daily aural environments. These sounds usually remain hidden, as we tend to overlook their musical qualities, or their musical qualities are obscured through mixture with other sounds. In simplified terms, what he is doing could be considered “re-framing what is already there so that it can be admired.”
If, Bwana and Michael Peters, sounds and texts
IF, BWANA
Since the 1980s, Al Margolis has earned an international reputation for his experimental music recorded under the name If, Bwana. Realized with a range of collaborators, If, Bwana music is a fusion of ambient, industrial, and musique concrete, featuring strange soundscapes that are both soothing and unnerving, often at the same time. Margolis has also been very active as the owner of two prolific labels, the cassette label Sound of Pig and, since the 1990s, Pogus Productions, a CD label with a focus on experimental contemporary classical music.MICHÆL PETERS
Michael Peters is the author of Vaast Bin (Calamari Press, Fall 2007). Various manifestations of his written-sound-images have appeared in journals and books like Sleepingfish, Word for/Word, LUNGFULL!, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, SPELL, Spinning Jenny, and Richard Kostelanetz's Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. His visual poetic structures can be found in various special collection libraries like the Sackner Archive; they have also appeared in numerous galleries and anthologies, such as the recent Ohio State Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts' Vispoeologee. Most notably with Poem Rocket and the Be Blank Consort, aural manifestations of his sounds have appeared on recording labels such as Atavistic, PCP Entertainment, Magic Eye, and Luna Bisonte Prods. This appearance at Issue Project Room will be his third collaboration with Al Margolis.
Tony Coulter has been on the radio in the New York City area continuously since 1985 -- at one point, on three stations at once. His only excuse for hogging the airwaves is that he likes everything from Pierre Henry to America. He has also occasionally written about music for magazines such as Ear, i/e (later e/i), and the Rail. He has way too many records.
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