Ray Sweeten @ Microscope

Ray Sweeten will be presenting material produced in residency at the Experimental Television Center, followed by a live oscilloscope/audio improvisation.

Most of his videos are driven by audio sources in varying degrees of abstraction. Video Feedback is driven by Sine Wave oscillators. Live, two-channel audio is fed into the X-Y input of an oscilloscope, creating realtime Lissajous patterns.

We’re extremely proud to present this very special visual & sound performance as the 1st of Microscope Gallery’s Events Series, which will continue three times a week, Saturday through Monday, every month, for… until we can no longer resist!

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Sexual Energies School – Quebec City

FREE!!

Join us for our second show on the Brooklyn Waterfront. This installment includes myself, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

ISSUE Project Room celebrates The Brooklyn Heights Association’s 100th Anniversary with an event that will program channel the psychedelic spirit of poet, journalist, humanist and Brooklynite, Walt Whitman, set against the stunning waterfront backdrop on the Pier 1 Harbor View Lawn of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park on July 1st at 5 pm until midnight.

Musicians and bands including the Wingdale Community Singers, Christy and Emily, Prince Rama, and others will perform original work along with new pieces set to a marathon reading of “Leaves of Grass,” recited by some of the nation’s most intriguing poets.

The outdoor concert, closing with a late night program of acoustic music after 10 pm, is part of Celebrating a Century, an exciting year-long series of events highlighting Brooklyn Heights history, famous residents, and the BHA’s past and future.

Featuring:
CSC Funk Band
Rick Moody and Hannah Marcus of the Wingdale Community Singers
Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille
Jonathan Kane’s February
Prince Rama of Ayodhya
Henry Grimes
Christy and Emily
Shannon Fields
Sexual Energies School: Quebec City
Steve Dalashinsky
Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers
Lilah Freedland
Holly Anderson
Alyssa Taylor Wendt
Nicole Peyrafitte, Pierre Joris, Brendan Lorber, Yuko Otomo,Tsaurah Litsky, Linda Lerner, and more..

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Arpege

La Superette 2009 will transform a space at 210 Front Street for three days, creating a temporary store that will present a huge selection of artist-made multiples from around the country. Now in it’s 11th year, La Superette is one of the few crafty events with a non-commercial goal: to support and distribute the works of independent artists and designers. The variety of items include hacked clothes, assemblage accessories, housewares, artists books and CDs. Emerging once a year, just in time for holiday shopping, La Superette offers the most unique and affordable shopping experience for hundreds of shoppers year after year. This year, more than ever, is a time to celebrate the craftiest and be a part of an event that represents the true spirit of New York City.

La Superette 2009 includes live performances by Arp�ge (Nick Hallett and Ray Sweeten), Anwar Pruitt, Maria Chavez, Carrie Dashow, Pixel Form, Todd Bailey, NAUM f/ Antoine Catala, David Linton, and David Galbraith. La Superette 2009 will also feature Rainbow Cloud City (an art installation created by the collaboration HappyFun, Erik Z., and Rachel Nelson), Edible Winter Snowballs, Coal, Icicles, Pine Cones, and Warm Drinks by Rachael Morrison, and a free ScrapCycle gift-wrapping station by Analogous Projects.

This year’s participating artists include: Ann LePore, Amanda Mayoff, Ben Fino-Radin, Carrie Dashow, Secret School and the K.I.D.S., Cindy Yoon, Daphne Bernard, A Rarer Borealis, Daina Platais Ortiz, unxyloid, Hadas Hinkis, deChow, Jennifer Sullivan, kaboom!press, Kimm Alfonso, Katherine Tali Hinkis, Chiu, RingMan, Canine Orthodontia, Lilah Freedland, LoVid, Loren Siems, Melissa Barrett, Michelle Rosenberg, Molly Dilworth, Madeleine Fix, Miss Chief, Neg-Fi, Mustache Sisters, Nathaniel Kassel, Peter Jacobson, Raquel Hecker, Steven Anglin, Samantha Merritt, sallykismet, Sanjay, Susie Reiss, teamtichenor, heartfast

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Ray Sweeten | Nate Boyce

I will be sharing the bill with Nate Boyce.. Boyce is a video artist and musician who lives and works in San Francisco. His audio/visual works investigate the liminal regions of human perception through kinetically charged, visceral abstractions. His work exploits inherent plasticity of electronic sound and image through the use of customized analog and digital tools with which he has developed a formal language informed the history of structural and psychedelic filmmaking. He has performed and exhibited at galleries and film festivals such as the Scope Art Fair, New York (2009) The Luggage Store, San Francisco (2009), New York Underground Film Festival, New York (2008), Deitch Projects New York (2008), The Stone, New York (2008), Center For Contemporary Art Glasgow, Glasgow (2007), Galerie Alt Neu Brukte, Frankfurt, Germany (2007), the Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2006), the Aurora Picture Show, Houston (2006), Club Transmediale, Berlin, Germany (2006), Monkeytown, New York, (2006) Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco (2005), Yerba Buena Center For the Arts (2004)

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Nick Hallett: Voice & Light Systems, Part Four: Auroville

Nick Hallett-singer, composer, and downtown impresario-creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible instrument of sound, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. As such, concepts of drone, repetition, and improvisation prevail over the tropes of traditional song. Each evening is staged using pure light, illuminated objects, and projection methods derived from structuralist film and the psychedelic lightshow to create a live, interdisciplinary synthesis of sound and image. Taking from John Cage’s maxim that “art should not be different than life, but an action within life,” Voice & Light Systems revisits the Zen-Buddhism-inspired methodologies popular among Western artists during the 1960s and ’70s as ritual practices in and of themselves, envisioning their scores much as sacred texts in a pre-literary culture, to be rendered as expressions of devout “art consciousness.” With this experimental tradition as a starting point, Hallett begins to develop new work for contemporary contemplation, with the voice—the most basic instrument of artistic expression-at its core.

Hallett’s monthlong residency ends tonight with a new multimedia ritual created by Auroville, a “tribute band” to the experimental community dedicated to the guru Sri Aurobindo on the southeastern coast of India, founded by his spiritual partner, known as the Mother. Auroville is performed as an immersive, audiovisual travelogue by a collective of musicians and multimedia artists, featuring Hallett, Ana Matronic, Seth Kirby, Zach Layton, Brock Monroe, and Ray Sweeten. A wraparound projection design will set the stage for Hallett’s chanting and electronic music while Matronic performs on the glass armonica, an integrated series of glass bowls, popularized as a musical instrument by Benjamin Franklin. Hallett and Matronic, alongside performing artists Caitlin Kirby, Renée Soucy and Juan-Carlos Castro, act as celebrants for a universal ritual of art, devoid of specific icons or dogmas (much like its namesake in India). Sound design and electro-acoustics by Jeff Cook. This performance will make heavy use of stroboscopic imagery.

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Nick Hallett: Voice & Light Systems, Part Three: Whispering Exercises Premiere

Nick Hallett—singer, composer, and downtown impresario—creates a four-part series at the New Museum theater connecting the human voice to multimedia ritual. In collaboration with a rotating cast of performers and artists, Hallett presents original music and performance alongside new interpretations of celebrated vocal works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The singing voice is seen here in its rawest state, stripped of its language-based sensibilities, and more as a flexible instrument of sound, capable of producing protosemantic, acoustic phenomena. As such, concepts of drone, repetition, and improvisation prevail over the tropes of traditional song. Each evening is staged using pure light, illuminated objects, and projection methods derived from structuralist film and the psychedelic lightshow to create a live, interdisciplinary synthesis of sound and image. Taking from John Cage’s maxim that “art should not be different than life, but an action within life,” Voice & Light Systems revisits the Zen-Buddhism-inspired methodologies popular among Western artists during the 1960s and ’70s as ritual practices in and of themselves, envisioning their scores much as sacred texts in a pre-literary culture, to be rendered as expressions of devout “art consciousness.” With this experimental tradition as a starting point, Hallett begins to develop new work for contemporary contemplation, with the voice—the most basic instrument of artistic expression—at its core.

Tonight Hallett premieres a new composition, Whispering Exercises, for women’s voices (Katie Eastburn, Rachel Henry Rachel Mason, Daisy Press), harp (Shelley Burgon), and electronic pulsations generated from customized software created by Ray Sweeten, with sound design by Zach Layton. This is a concert version of music currently being developed for a new opera created by Hallett and the video and performance artist Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, to premiere at The Kitchen in Spring 2010. Folk song forms such as rounds and hockets are layered over electronic arpeggiations, in addition to acoustic phenomena such as Shepard Tones (a series of rising pitches which elicits feelings of weightlessness), while lumia and oscillographics float throughout the space.

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Issue Project Room Fundraiser

Loosely inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece of psychedelic cinema The Holy Mountain, ISSUE Project Room and Galapagos Art Space will collaborate to host a sumptuous event for the senses. Marking ISSUE’s sixth anniversary, the event will be part costume party and part benefit, with raffles, prizes, photobooths, auctions and some wild performances.

The evenings Delights and Highlights:

JG Thirlwell (FOETUS) with Ed Pastorini and Owen Bloedow
Ray Sweeten – live video and performance
Brock Monroe – live visuals (member of Joshua Light Show)
“Straight and Narrow” (1970), Film screening by Tony Conrad with soundtrack by John Cale and Terry Riley
Films by Martha Colburn & Marie Losier
Elysian Fields
MV Carbon
members of Excepter
DJ Fabio from WFMU’s “Strength through Failure”
And others TBA

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Unity Gain

Another Unity Gain approaches. I don’t know what this one will have in store, but I do know I will be doing a duet with Zach Layton. As usual there will be two show times, 7:30-ish and 10. Reservations are recommended!

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Darmstadt – Classics of the Avant Garde

This one is something of a homecoming for me, since I used to work as a ‘sound guy’ at Galapagos and also bartended EVERY Darmstadt show since its inception back in… 2005? 4? ..when the big G was on North 6th. I have not been to this new Galapagos, but I hear it’s actually pretty cool. It probably doesn’t even have that New York bar smell yet which, depending on your inclinations, is great or terrible. I will be performing scope and video feedback jams fresh from playing at the SFEMF. Possibly with guests. Possibly not.

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