The Brooklyn Rail

September Listings

• ISSUE Project Room: September at ISSUE is one important and exciting event after another. Particular highlights are the live bill of William Basinski, Kara-Lis Coverdale, and Yatta (9/7); the panel “Butch Morris & Radical Black Composition,” part of the Brooklyn Book Festival (9/12); and at the end of the month the two day FOR/WITH series that puts together avant-garde composers and performers like Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, and Nate Wooley.
• Roulette: Intrigued by Cisco Bradley’s article in our previous issue (“The Emergence of a New Black Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Text”)? Then check out these performers he featured: Matana Roberts with “breathe…” on the 14th, and James Brandon Lewis with electronics on the 18th. Start the month there too, with the Resonant Bodies Festival (Sep. 5–7), new and avant-garde music for the voice and vocal performers, with Theo Bleckmann, Joan La Barbara, Kamala Sankaram, Hai-Ting Chinn, and the absolutely uncategorizable and dazzling Jennifer Walshe.
• September 6–7: Ryoji Ikeda supercodex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The opening nights of the Crossing the Line Festival (produced by the French Institute Alliance Fran¸aise), are a live performance from Ikeda, master of the sublime in digital media. Ikeda transforms data into exact and starkly beautiful sounds and abstract images, this is a unique opportunity to see his process in all its glory.

• September 8: Upper Wilds at Secret Project Robot. Upper Wilds is a new trio featuring Dan Friel, Zach Lehrhoff, and Aaron Siegel with a debut record out on Thrill Jockey, Guitar Module 2017. Hyperactive and hyper-melodic, Friel’s songs get a more guitar-forward treatment after his 2015 largely electronic solo record Life; live, Lehrhoff and Siegel add a human touch on bass and drums. YVETTE, Sunwatchers, and GOLD DIME round out the bill.

• September 9: WFMU’s Transpacific Sound Paradise at Issyra Gallery Rob Weisberg will be broadcasting from the Hoboken space from 6 to 9 p.m. Admission is free. The evening features live percussion-driven music from the likes of Martin Vejarano and the NYC Gaita Club, Tuk Buki Trio featuring Smokey Hormel, Akoko Nante Ensemble, and Maracatu NY.
• September 8–9: 50th Anniversary of JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW at NYU Skirball. Way back when the current olds were young, psychedelia was, at its best, a way to get the mind of of the learned strictures of consumerist, bourgeois models. Take a trip there, and hopefully remain, via Boss Hog, Man Forever, and the wonderful electronic musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith—keep an ear out for the October 6 release of her gorgeous new album, The Kid.

September 15: Protomartyr at Monty Hall. Detroit’s Protomartyr mark the release of their latest record Relatives in Descent. On their first record for Domino, the band still sounds like the musical equivalent of a Jim Jarmusch movie, one of the early black-and-white ones; or maybe also an imaginary film by a hypothetical American Wim Winders, Der Himmel über Detroit, with Vincent D’Onofrio in the Peter Falk role. The Gotobeds and Big Quiet open.

September 16: Sara Serpa at the Drawing Center. Serpa moves easily between traditional jazz vocalism, improvisation, and new music, and has one of the most elegant and beautiful voices on the scene. She’ll be performing her own piece, Recognition, as part of John Zorn’s The Stone at the Drawing Center series.

September 21: Chris Lightcap’s SuperBigmouth at Shapeshifter. Lightcap is a superb bassist, with a handle on some of the heaviest grooves out there. And by evidence of his albums with his ensemble Bigmout, he’s a superb bandleader as well. This gig will be the premiere performance for his new SuperBigmouth, a mashup of Bigmouth and his other group, Superette.

September 21–25 and 27: Blank Out at the Park Avenue Armory. The unique space at the Armory means one-of-a-kind experiences, and composer Michel van der Aa’s opera loosely based on the life and work of South African poet Ingrid Jonker promises just that. Soprano Miah Persson will be the sole live performer, accompanied by a 3D film that features baritone Roderick Williams and the Nederlands Kamerkoor.

September 27–30: Jonathan Berger’s My Lai, featuring Rinde Eckert, Kronos Quartet, and Vân-Áhn Võ at BAM. Kronos Quartet and Vietnamese musician Vân-Áhn Võ, along with tenor and all around astonishing performer Rinde Eckert, perform Berger’s monodrama, which approaches the Vietnam War massacre from through the lens of Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., who tried to intervene to stop the murder by the U.S. government, imagined in Harritt Scott Chessman’s libretto as looking back from his deathbed.

September 29–30: Maryanne Amacher’s Adjacencies at The Kitchen. The late Maryanne Amacher is primarily remembered, if only by a few, as one great electronic composers of the 20th century. Put the emphasis on composer: she created music for a variety of mediums through a variety of means, and these concerts are the posthumous realization (via Blank Forms and Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz) of a score not heard since 1966. Yarn/Wire percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg play, Daniel Neumann and Woody Sullender manipulate the signals.