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Event
ISSUE Year-End Party: Wetware / Shelley Hirsch & Marcia Bassett / James Hoff
Saturday, December 15th, ISSUE commemorates the close of the 2018 season with a special year-end event featuring avant-garde industrial duo Wetware, as well as a rare collaborative performance between vocal artist, composer, and writer Shelley Hirsch & artist/musician Marcia Bassett. Cross-disciplinary artist and 2013 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence James Hoff DJs around the performances. Entrance and drinks are free for ISSUE Members.
Revitalizing the urgent energy of early experimental industrial music alongside contemporary urban malice, Wetwares music has quickly become revered within NYCs underground. The project thrives on unease, with Roxy Farmans prowling, anxious vocalizations ranging from deadpan poetics to humming, whispering, and screeching. Matthew Morandis tense sound design -- at-once decidedly abstract and constantly visceral -- establishes a truly alien sonic backbone that exists at the edges of rhythm. The result is an uncompromising, dystopic sound -- like street garbage caught in an updraft -- using both technology and the human voice and body to create a devastating portrait of a society in peril.
Shelley Hirsch and Marcia Bassett reprise their collaborative performance after a first meeting, brought together by Katherine Liberovskaya, at the monthly Abasement series earlier in 2018. A compelling amalgamation of Hirschs virtuosic command of extended vocal techniques with Bassetts shimmering, dense, and often dissonant arrangements, the duo yields an expansive sound that weaves freely between their respective practices. Both artists are accomplished improvisers with extensive histories within NYCs underground and downtown scenes, each contributing immensely to the development of new subversive sounds, styles, and positions within vocal and textural music. Together, Hirschs unique storytelling and free improvisation blends openly with the caustic textures of Bassetts various tools and techniques.
Formed in 2015, Wetware eased into its performative role with their live shows around their home base of Brooklyn, NY. Vocalist Roxy Farman, whos familiar voice was last heard on Drew McDowalls Unnatural Channel album, stole audiences attention immediately, using her body in tandem with her voice as a weaponized vehicle for the bands anxiety filled performance. Matthew Morandi cut his teeth in the electronic music world through his solo tech-industrial project Jahiliyya Fields and partner to Inhalants, the techno collaboration of Morandi and Max Ravitz (Patricia). The synergy thats developed between Farman and Morandi has been explosive. Wetwares live antics and behavior has caused alarm amongst their local audiences, making Wetware the group to not be missed on any particular bill that they are allowed to take part in. Wetware stepped out from their live persona and self-recorded a selection of songs that viewers had grown accustomed to and were debuted on the flawlessly curated Primitive Languages imprint. Shortly following their recorded premier was an EP collection of demo recordings on the much praised Bank NYC label. Once the band reconciled with documenting their work, they set out, with the help of engineer Kris Lapke (Alberich / Hospital Productions) to formalize their most recent output in the context of their first full length album entitled Automatic Drawing.
Hailed as a woman of a thousand voices by The New York Times, Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries for decades with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory, and her vivid imagination. Hirschs mostly solo multimedia performances, compositions, improvisations, electronic music pieces, sound installations, collaborations and radio plays have have been produced and presented in concert halls, clubs, festivals, theaters, museums, galleries and on radio, film and television on five continents. Hirsch has performed hundreds of concerts of improvised music in NYC and internationally with a Whos Who list of internationally renowned musicians including Anthony Coleman, Fred Frith, Phill Niblock, Billy Martin, Butch Morris, Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Michael Evans, Marcia Bassett, David Watson, Hans Tammen, Brian Chase, Sarah Bernstein, Kazuhisa Uchihashi (Japan/Berlin), Alexei Pliouisnine (St Petersburg Russia); Baba Sissiko (Mali Africa) Joke Lanz (Switzerland/Berlin); Koch/Schuetz/Studer (Switzerland) and with the live projected video of Ursula Scherrer and Katherine Liberovskaya. In 2018, The Fales Library at NYU acquired decades of her work to be archived for their Downtown Collection; and, Hirsch became an artist-in-residence at QueensLab in Ridgewood where she will be exploring ways to perform her text in ways she has never done before. She is also the 2017 recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellowship and remains both internationally renowned as an essential figure of New Yorks avant-garde downtown scene.
Marcia Bassett works in areas of sound, improvisation, live composition and visual creations. Equal parts trance and critique, her work threads the needle between the conceptual and the sensual, between ritual invocation and cold semiotic gaze. Bassett deftly wields philosophical systems to produce heady, experiential clouds; pushing through drones into provocative soundscapes the intangible narratives of dreams. What seems clear one second can become perplexing the next. You need to lose yourself to find yourself, and Marcia Bassetts music is a potent facilitator. As a co-founder of Philadelphias shambolic psychonauts un, tectonic drone pioneers Double Leopards and pysch-folk trio GHQ, Bassett is deeply entwined with the American noise underground, and has mapped regions still only dimly understood by subsequent sonic travellers. In the mid-2000s she joined Matthew Bower in Hototogisu, where her mastery of cacophonous eardrum shred reached monolithic proportions. She has been an active member of Andrew Lafkas large ensemble Alternate Models, and contributed to Gen Kens Supergroup performing at PS1 Solid Gold and Experimental Intermedia. Some collaborations include work with Helga Fassonaki, Margarida Garcia, Bridget Hayden, Samara Lubelski and Barry Weisblat. Recent solo and collaborative presentations of her work include Interwoven a site-specific installation and performance in collaboration with Ursula Scherrer at Interference 2018, Tunisia; Survival Of Laments a live improvisation with Margarida Garcia and Manuel Mota at Festival Oude Muziek 2018, Utrecht; "Transitory Freezing of Perpetual Motion" improvised sound performance with Jenny Graf and dancers at Here-10 Evenings Festival, Sweden; Field Recording with Zaïmph, BOMB Magazine and "Out of Line: Narcissister" live improvised sound interaction with the performance, High Line, NYC. Her latest Zaïmph solo release, Rhizomatic Gaze is currently available through Drawing Room Records.
James Hoff is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His work encompasses painting, sound, writing, and performance. He has maintained a strong focus on distributed forms and experiments with language, including cross-disciplinary investigations that address orally-transmitted syndromes, computer viruses, and ear worms. He has exhibited and performed extensively throughout Europe and the United States. He has released two records on PAN, with a forthcoming release scheduled for winter 2019.
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LocationISSUE Project Room (View)
22 Boerum Place
Brooklyn, NY 11201
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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