TRACES | OUR PAST OUR PREDATOR
September 6th, 2010
Coming soon to the Netherlands…
May 5th, 2010
for a few Guilders more
Scott Haggart narration, modified Califone turntable, dubplate, diatonic accordion
Kara Bohnenstiel harmonium, slide projectors
Drew McDowall modular synthesizer, metronomes
Lary Seven string bass, Morse code, invention(s)
The four artists from New York City create a radio play redesigning historical blunder for your pleasure. The story of Dutch relations with the Island of Manhattan. Fake histories and imagined authorities meet in what could be described as a spaghetti, seafaring libretto.
Biographies:
Scott Haggart was born on a wooden plank in the east coast of Scotland. His work and label Diskono challenges the listener with the phenomenological sounds of particular environments. His work has been shown broadly and he has toured with Diskono throughout Britain, Europe and the US. Diskono has released music by figures such as Felix Kubin, JaDa, People Like Us, Francisco Lopez, Goodiepal, V/Vm, Hrvatski, and Aavikko. Others have described Diskono as a “Scottish multimedia cabal masquerading as a record label.” After 29 years in Northern Britain, Scott moved to New York City to amalgamate with his wife Kara Bohnenstiel before their son, Myat Moondog Haggart, was born in 2005. In NYC, Scott Haggart has continued fine-tuning his synesthesia and sound pieces. His 1′17″ 12″ record was released by Diskono in 2008.
Kara Bohnenstiel was born an auslander during the Cold War on a military base in Frankfurt, Germany. She recently completed her Master of Fine Art at Brooklyn College, studying under David Grubbs and Vito Acconci. She has exhibited in and curated many shows in New York City. Holland Cotter, art critic for The New York Times, called her last show “pretty good” – the ultimate compliment in the world of
overly-restraint journalism. Her work crosses many mediums: film, music, sewing and physical computing.
Drew McDowall was born in Paisley, Scotland and very soon after began making music and organizing shows. In 1978, Drew formed Poems, an art-punk trio with his then-wife Rose McDowall. During the 1980s he was a member of Psychic TV. He performed and recorded with Coil, the highly influential and truly experimental UK group, during some of their most critical years. Drew McDowall moved to New York City after living in London for many years and has released three records of limite dedition 7″ with Kara Bohnenstiel under the moniker of Captain Sons and Daughters. Many people believe he secretly holds an honorary PhD for his genius.
Lary Seven is a multimedia alchemist able to coax profane, inscrutable sounds and images from numerous and mysterious devices. His work has been described as that of a magician or scientist — one who may not always be certain of the outcome, but who is determined to see it through to its (il)logical end. Since the late seventies, Lary has been building, soldering, photographing, recording, mixing, filming, playing, collecting, re-interpreting and creating in order to make something happen. He’s the founder of the Analogue Society and co-founder of Plastikville Records and Directart Productions Ltd. Lary has released work on Touch, Diskono, Ectoplasm, Plastikville and Plastiktray records. He has performed in many countries in Europe as well as in the U.S. and Canada. Mr. Seven lives and works in Manhattan’s East Village and is one of the last remaining vestiges of a once-vibrant community.
Felix Kubin Artist Lecture
November 3rd, 2009Utopia: A lack of compromise
Monday November 23rd 2009 4–5 pm
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College Library (Ground Floor)
2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn New York 11210
2 or 5 Train to Flatbush or Q train to Newkirk Avenue
Felix Kubin is a Hamburg-based artist, whose various experiments and epithets include radio playwright, composer of futurist + dadatronic experimental pop as well as chamber orchestra music, filmmaker, incendiary performer, record label owner, lecturer and curator. He has made artwork in all sorts of fields since the 1980s, after studying illustration and animation at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg (Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften). He has given workshops and lectures across Europe at numerous universities, just completing a masterclass at the University of Arts in Berne, Switzerland and is currently a guest lecturer at the University for Music and Theatre in Leipzig. For the first time in the USA, Felix will talk about his artistic processes and projects, including the highly controversial KED (Kommunistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands—Communist Unity Party of Germany) and Liedertafel Margot Honecker. KED was a fake dada-socialist party, utilizing idealized German youth in uniform and the musical Liedertafel’s propagandized subversions of the German Democratic Republic. This is performance art that perverts apathy or complacency. Felix will discuss how the political and the social have affected the German Underground and the influence of “utopia” on its most active participants. Utopian thinking as a starting point for economics, social and artistic movements, and for an 11 year old kid sitting in a bedroom with a Korg MS-20 synthesizer, free enough with self-confidence to destroy music, will all be covered. Open to all, free event.
Felix Kubin will also be performing at the following during his New York visit: Issue Project Room on Sunday 11/22 at 8 pm with Scott Haggart and Lary Seven
http://issueprojectroom.org/2009/10/16/scott-haggart-lary-seven-felix-kubin-trio/
Santos on Tuesday 11/24 at 9 pm with DJ JG Thirlwell and DISKONO
http://www.santospartyhouse.com/index/event/id/1111
Organized by:
Kara Bohnenstiel
MFA Candidate, 2009
Performance and Interactive Media Arts, Brooklyn College, CUNY
David Grubbs
Assistant Professor, Conservatory of Music
Director, Programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA), Brooklyn College, CUNY
Felix Kubin live with guest DJ JG Thirlwell and DISKONO
October 25th, 2009
Nov 24, 2009
downstairs
Doors @ 9 PM
$12.00
FELIX KUBIN
Felix Kubin, born in 1969, lives and works against gravitation.
His activities comprise futurist pop, electroacoustic and chamber orchestra music, radio plays, performance projects, workshops and cultural activities as a curator. In 1998 he founded his own record label Gagarin Records. For 20 years, he has released a vast number of albums and played more than 70 international festivals for electronic contemporary music, among them Sonar, Mutek, Ars Electronica, ISEA, Donaufestival and Wien Modern. He likes to move between hi and low culture, clubs and concert halls, as his main concern is the shifting of contexts and expectations.
“Refreshingly perverse” (WIRE, UK)
“Felix Kubin is a Devil in Gods clothes. He plays organs like Jussi Tennilä (Siilinjärven Ponnistus) does slalom, fastly but surely, strongly but lovingly. If there’d be one man to send to the aliens as an example of the mankind, that’d be Felix Kubin.“ (Aavikko, Finnland)
“Wearing a fetching green suit, an endearing glint in his eye and surrounded by antique technology (not a laptop in sight), Kubin’s concise, offbeat pop songs each contain more tunes than an entire bierkeller jukebox“ (Tom Mugridge, MZK magazine, UK)
“Noise, rhythm, melody and madness“ (These Records, UK)
“Hamburg’s purveyor of dadatronic experimentalist pop music”
(Radio CBC, Brave New Waves)
“There’s a twinkle in his eye when Retro-Futurist Felix Kubin, born 1969 in Hamburg, invites you to embark on a tour of his unique world of Avantgarde-Electro-Pop. Dada-Humor is the cherry on his cake, NDW and Kraftwerk his rearguard as he rushes to meet the future, a whirlwind on the manual, a futuristic ambassador of light, a hammering fist in the garden of fear. In his luggage there’re the old synthesizers and the new problems that he negotiates in film music, short films, sound installations, multiphonic concerts and audio plays. It’s not for nothing that his own label is named, after the Russian cosmonaut, Gagarin Records.” (Someone)
JG THIRLWELL
JG Thirlwell is a composer / producer / performer based in Brooklyn who works under many pseudonyms including Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Manorexia, Baby Zizanie and Wiseblood.
If there is a common thread to his varied musical styles it is a dramatic intensity and an evocative, cinematic quality.
JG has recently completed commissions for Kronos Quartet, Bang On A Can and League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots and is also a member of the “freq_out” sound-art collective, who create on-site sound and light installations. He performs with a chamber ensemble version of Manorxia and also scores “The Venture Brothers”, a hit cartoon show on Adult Swim/Cartoon Network.
DISKONO
Founded in the spring of 1998 and described as a “a Scottish multi media cabal masquerading as a record label,” DISKONO was initially based in Central Scotland but befitting its constitution as a complex carbohydrate, the constituent pieces of its chemical structure are now strewn all over the globe; New York, London, Brussels, etc. The known and affiliated elements of DISKONO were/are Klaus Oldanburg, Ruth Random, Findo Gask, Dr. Barnes Advocaat, Gunter Saxenhammer, Ttocshagg Forfib, Joel Ongthorne, Kosten Koper; although these may be pseudonyms for the same person or persons. Together or alone, they/he/she operate a record label releasing sound art & “avant-garde flicks of the wrist” as well as curated savory and pretentiously artistic projects such as the exhibition Revisionland by Alejandra and Aeron of Lucky Kitchen (which won an Award of Distinction in Digital Music at Prix Ars Electronia 2002) and physical remix series of 7″ records with Aerospace Soundwise, The British Composer of the Year Winner for Sonic Art (2008) Janek Schaefer. DISKONO also released music by figures such as Felix Kubin, Alejandra and Aeron, Pimmon, JaDa, People Like Us, Francisco Lopez, Boards Of Canada, Goodiepal, V/Vm, Hrvatski, Aavikko.”
Tickets available at:
OTHER MUSIC
15 East 4th St
New York, NY 10003
We Like the Good (June 2009)
May 31st, 2009
We Like the Good
Live with Animals Gallery
210 Kent Avenue Brooklyn NY 11211
June 5th – 28th
Saturdays & Sundays 3-8pm (or by appointment)
Opening June 5th 7-10pm
Panel Discussion June 7th 4pm
The Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist & The Next Omelet Should Be Made By A Carpenter. – Lawrence Weiner
Kara Bohnenstiel and Melissa Rocha curate a receptive and responsive exhibition: an installed space that forgets to be boring. We Like the Good is constructed in a movable format. All the walls are on wheels, freely moving around the space; a choreography performed by sybaritic women dressed in perfect French maid costumes during the opening night. All successive days and nights can be arranged by the visitors of the gallery. There is a note upon entering the space: “Please arrange this space. Everything is on wheels as this organization is only temporary: Adjust to suit.”
The curators, artists themselves, deploy artists who work within a broader realm of art-making; artists who do not stick to a classic “body of work” approach, in favor of the moment, yet somehow remaining timeless. This “somehow” is the interest of the show. How is anyone making anything interesting anymore? Often it starts with a sort of humor of dissent. Sometimes serious Art can only be approached, revealed from a denial of the formal protocols of “Art-seriousnessness.”
This work, from the ambitious failures of Jim Sharpe’s Robot Movie (with a quintessential Lary Seven soundtrack) to the framed, studied disasters of a Todd Fisher print, avoids the obvious pretensions fatal to the concept behind the conceptual. We get it, all of us do, but seldom does art get a chance to pull it together. Art too often must prove its legitimacy. In taking cue from Seth Price’s description of an artist as “amateur inventor” in his essay “Dispersion”, We Like the Good mounts a Patrick Resing futile robot on a portable pedestal—its programmed mission being only to find its way off. Art is as important as your morning coffee and donut; that is important, surely, but just a cardinal fact of existence. All that is required is our innate curiosity and need for stimulation, in both cases. Laughter implies an afterthought. The exhibition facilitates that thought for the viewers/participants.
The show features an international pool of artists: Jan Van Den Dobbelsteen & Danielle Lemaire (JaDa) [The Netherlands], Fabio Roberti, Jim Sharpe & Lary Seven [USA], James Clauer [USA], Scott Haggart & Kara Bohnenstiel [Scotland + USA], Todd Fisher [USA], Jack Plug [England], Melissa Rocha [USA], Patrick Resing [USA], and Ryan Lauderdale [USA]. An artist panel will be held to discuss issues of hilarity, failure, large and small meanings, as well as contradictions. The dialogue is also considered to be Art.
04/04 @ 8pm - Andrea Belfi / David Grubbs / Stefano Pilia trio + Scott Haggart (DISKONO)
March 28th, 2009
D I S K O N O I T I S O N J A N 2 5 2 0 0 9.
January 7th, 2009
23 “the new collection curated by Max G. Morton”
October 23rd, 200823 23 23 23 23 23 23 23
Been a while, young patient lovers. We have much to catch up on.
-23, the new collection curated by Max G. Morton is now available. 23 is an anchor in our world, an absolute necessity, a Heartworm Reader, if you will. 23 was compiled over the last year by Max G. Morton, author of the now vanished/banished Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard. 23 features over 10 new pieces by Morton as well as new writing and artwork by Wesley Eisold, Eric Paul, Chris Leo, Mark McCoy, Elgin James, Dominic Fernow, Kid Congo Powers, Howie Pyro, Sara C. Gross, JW Buckley, William Pym, George Hirsch, Jeremy Gaulke, Tony(Da Neck) DeCou, J. Benoit, Arty the Greek and Matthew Gallagher.
150 page paperback in an edition of 1,000.
Vital Weekly 644/ Frans de Waard said…
September 17th, 2008DISKONO 017 (LP by Diskono)
Things have been quiet on the release front of Diskono, but here they are back and headache it is, again. Not the music, but the concept. I’ll try. On side A there is Scott Haggart’s original 1:17 second composition - well, or so it seems. Maybe they are lock grooves? Maybe there is something wrong with my turntable? Apparently ‘years to make’, this one. On the b-side a bunch of artists use this piece to expand on it further. If I am right, probably not, then the original is a bunch of downsampled sounds, into a monotone block of sound, erm, composition perhaps. Its used and expanded by Lary Seven, Evol, Felix Kubin, White Daughter, Charlie McAlister and Jan van den Dobbelsteen - and yes, that is mystery times confusion = more mystery. Their remixes make things more heavy. As I was trying to listen to this, someone outside is using some machinery to clean his house, and those sounds mingled nicely with the tonal blocks and sustained machine rhythms that are part of this record. Each of the remixers seems to share Haggart’s interest in deep resonating sounds from below surface, and together they form a monolithic drone piece that makes a unified impression on the listener. If only I could solve this puzzle and find out about those 1.17 seconds. (FdW)
Address: http://diskono.net
ps. this is a picture of Frans de Waard.
Ttocs recommendations for JG Thirlwell’s September curation at The Stone…
September 14th, 2008September 2008 at the Stone
9/13 Saturday/ 10 pm
David Grubbs
David Grubbs (vocal, electric guitar)
Playing material from the forthcoming album “An Optimist Notes the Dusk,” which will be released on Drag City at the end of September.
9/18 Thursday/ 8 pm
Jacob Kirkegaard
Jacob Kirkegaard (electronics)
Danish sound artist will present a site specific performance inspired by the sounds of The Stone.
10 pm
Lary 7
Lary 7 (objects)
Lary 7 is an audio explorer using self invented sound producing objects involving the detritus of the twentieth century. With special guests.
9/21 Sunday/ 8 pm
Tony Conrad
9/24 Wednesday/ 8 pm
Dorit Chrysler
Dorit Chrysler (theremin, vocals)
9/25 Thursday/ 8 and 10 pm
JG Thirlwell’s Manorexia
Manorexia
JG Thirlwell’s avant-chamber ensemble will present arrangements from the first two Manorexia albums.
9/26 Friday/ 8 pm
Captains Sons and Daughters
Drew McDowall & Kara Bohnenstiel (electronics)
Featuring Drew McDowall (Coil) and Kara Bohnenstiel