Past Events
Results
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Artists Studio
Dawn of Midi
February 18, 2017
Dawn of Midi may share the instrumental makeup of a traditional jazz piano trio, but the Brooklyn-based acoustic ensemble have made a name for themselves by discovering entirely new avenues of sound that are focused on rhythm and dismantling jazz with the tools that built it. They come to the Veterans Room to play a set based on their acclaimed album Dysnomia, utilizing sophisticated rhythmic structures from North and West African folk traditions to weave a sonic tapestry of trance-inducing grooves.
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Artists Studio
Alvin Curran
March 14, 2018
A founding member of the radical collective Musica Elettronica Viva, experimental composer Alvin Curran has shaken up the music composition world with his radical take on sound—tinkering with synthesizers, instruments, natural sounds, and using non-musical objects as instruments to challenge notions of form and performance in his startlingly original work. Whether they are solo performances, urban sound events, or large-scale installations, his avant-garde compositions flow organically between contemporary classical music, improv, free jazz, and all points in between, yet forge a very personal language through recombinant invention. The iconoclastic sound artist performs “The Alvin Curran Fake Book,” combining his Shofar Shoals, a work that features one of the most archaic music instruments—the ram’s horn—plugged into a computer to create sonic fireworks out of its few humble tones, with works that include his Endangered Species, Era Ora, and Unstandard Time.
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Artists Studio
Matana Roberts
April 24, 2018
“Panoramic sound-quilting” is the term internationally renowned composer, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner Matana Roberts uses to describe her combination of instrumental music, singing, text, and visual imagery. Exploring themes of American history, memory, and ancestry, her very personal and improvisatory body of sound work is startling in its originality and gripping in its historic, political, and social power. She brings her creative practice as a musician merged with social consciousness to the Veterans Room for a site specific performance in her ongoing anthropological examination of music, storytelling, and the long, diverse history of her birth country.
Matana Roberts’ visual work will be on view at Fridman Gallery March 25–April 25, 2018.
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Artists Studio
Charlemagne Palestine
September 14, 2018
A pioneer of experimental music, Charlemagne Palestine creates intense, resonant music centered on layered overtones, electronic drones, and dense hypnotic rhythms created by percussive repetition to playfully defy the conventions and contexts most associated with modernist composition. He also explores the world of experimental sound through performance and immersive installation, incorporating bears and other plush toys viewed as representations of the soul that are either hand-made by the artist or found—into truly unique performance environments that are often shamanistic and overtly spiritual in nature. The multifaceted artist creates an immersive, site-specific installation in the Veterans Room that invites audiences into his colorful, fantastical world.
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Artists Studio
Juliana Huxtable
October 10, 2018
Juliana Huxtable straddles the worlds of art, fashion, and night life, exploring the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and sexuality through a fluid mix of media including self-portraiture, text-based prints, club music and parties, poetry, and social media. Throughout her practice, Huxtable combines and reinvents cultural histories, questioning the presentation and perception of identity in artworks that often reference her own body and history as she examines socio-political issues. The art icon and powerhouse DJ creates a new work combining video, sound, spoken word, and performance in her ongoing exploration of what it is to be human and the resistance to the caging of people within fixed selves, private bodies, and prescribed identities.