Lea Bertucci

AUDITORIUM is an extended evening of site-specific electronic and electroacoustic performances organized by artists/curators Lea Bertucci and Tristan Shepherd. The focal point for this event is a custom 10-channel sound system installed throughout the 50,000 square feet of Knockdown Center. This system will act as the point of departure for multichannel works by innovative sound-based artists Nate Wooley, Sabisha Friedberg, Marina Rosenfeld, Woody Sullender, Phill Niblock, and Katherine Liberovskaya. Bertucci and Shepherd commission new works from the composers, instrumentalists and audio artists to develop works uniquely suited to the site.

Nate Wooley is an idiosyncratic trumpet player, prominent in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. His work combines vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor that border on “exquisitely hostile” sound. Wooley's work has been featured at the SWR JazzNow stage at Donaueschingen, the WRO Media Arts Biennial in Poland, Kongsberg, North Sea, Music Unlimited, and Copenhagen Jazz Festivals, and the New York New Darmstadt Festivals. In 2011 he was an artist in residence at Issue Project Room and Cafe Oto in London. He is the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music, the editor-in-chief of their online quarterly journal Sound American, and lead organizer of Pleasure of the Text. For his Auditorium residency, Wooley develops antiphonal music works from the model of Giovanni Gabrieli's polychoral style. Wooley uses an 8 speaker set up at Knockdown Center as two slowly twisting and disintegrating brass choirs; each in themselves become less and less recognizable and consonant. The result is an acoustic mix of decaying consonance. Live trumpet provides dissonant underpinning by adding a third improvising choir.

Hailing from Johannesburg, Sabisha Friedberg's composition, performance and installation work draws on the phenomenological and phantasmagorical, exploring perceptual delineation of space through sound, and low-end experiential thresholds. She has performed and presented installations widely in Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, and the US, and recently received commissions through residencies at ISSUE Project Room, EMPAC, and The Clocktower Gallery. In 2013 she presented the solo exhibition Levitation at Audio Visual Arts. In 2014 she was included in MoMA/ PS1's first record There will Never be Silence. The Hant Variance, recorded with Peter Edwards has been released in 2015 as a double-vinyl on ISSUE Project Room's new label Distributed Objects. Friedberg received her MFA from Bard College following undergraduate studies at San Francisco Art Institute.

Woody Sullender is an artist who examines the social construction of the music performance space and how it reinforces specific rituals and modernist ideologies of listening. By minor interventions and reconfigurations in existing spaces, not only can these habits be ruptured but larger notions of social relations can be explored. Sullender has performed at venues such as the Kitchen, Issue Project Room, the River to River Festival, Sculpture Center, and Les Instants Chavirés. He has held artist residencies at art technology hubs STEIM, Harvestworks, and Brown University’s MEME program. He has worked in collaboration with electronic composers Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher, among others. Sullender teaches new media at institutions in the New York area and co-edits the music/sound publication Ear | Wave | Event (with Bill Dietz). For his Auditorium residency, Sullender's project Furniture Music consists of multiple arrangements of cardboard origami forms outfitted with audio transducers. These formations imply different social spaces such as a living room, a café, a sculptural exhibition, playing on notions of interior/exterior. The project explores, highlights, and confuses differences in public vs. domestic modes of reception.

Known equally as a composer of large­scale performances and an experimental turntablist working with hand­crafted dub plates, Marina Rosenfeld explores the hybridization between the domains of visual art and music. Rosenfeld has created chamber and choral works, including the performances Teenage Lontano, Cannons, and roygbiv&b; a series of acclaimed "orchestras" for floor­bound electric guitars and other quasi­sculptural scenarios; works notated in video, including WHITE LINES and My red, red blood; and since 2008, a series of installation/performance works, often mounted in monumental spaces, such as the Park Avenue Armory in New York and Western Australia's Midland Railway Workshops, deploying complexes of unamplified live performers and custom loudspeaker installations.

Tristan Shepherd is a composer, improviser, and turntablist. His work includes installation pieces for multichannel audio, appearances as an improviser in group ensembles and compositions for solo turntable. Using a combination of modified records and custom dubplates as source material, his compositions consist of a sonic counterpoint and bricolage that hinge on the decontextualization and reanimation of the musical gestures 'frozen' on the records. Shepherd has curated Incidental Music, an exhibition of site specific installations and performances at the Fragmental Museum's project space: a 4 story, 50,000 sq. ft. former zipper factory. Tristan has performed at Roulette Intermedium, Harvestworks, The Emily Harvey Foundation, MoMA PS1, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Minimalist composer and multi-media musician Phill Niblock's work is characterized by multiple tones sounding simultaneously for long stretches, creating a very dense, seemingly static sound. Niblock has worked as the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York since 1985, which he participated in as an artist/member since 1968. He has produced music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973, and is the curator of EI's XI Records label. He has collaborated with a wide range of musicians including David Gibson, in the cello works of the 1970s; Petr Kotik, Susan Stenger, and Eberhard Blum, on Four Full Flutes; Rafael Toral, David First, Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore, Susan Stenger, and Robert Poss on Guitar Too, for Four (G2,44+1x2) and many others.

Katherine Liberovskaya is a video/media artist based in Montreal and New York. Her work dynamically combines sound, images, and objects in an exploration of their collective potential. With the collaboration of varying composers and sound artists she creates improvisatory "music" for the eyes. Liberovskaya has been involved in experimental video installations and performances since the 1980's. Frequent collaborators include Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If, Bwana, Zanana, Kristin Norderval, Hitoshi Kojo, David Watson, David First and o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi). Recent projects have involved: Leslie Ross, Shelley Hirsch, Chantal Dumas, Richard Garet, Dorit Chrysler, Emilie Mouchous, Erin Sexton, Corinne Rene, and Philippe Lauzier. Concurrently she curates and organizes the Screen Compositions evenings at Experimental Intermedia and the OptoSonic Tea series at Diapason, NYC. For her Auditorium residency, she collaborates with Phill Niblock to create a video installation.

Jake Nussbaum hosts composers and event organizers including Lea Bertucci, Tristan Shepherd, Marina Rosenfeld, and Sabisha Friedberg, to discuss AUDITORIUM, an epic evening of immersive music and sound at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens. Topics include how to compose for a 50,000 sq. foot space and how to prepare yourself for a day of continuous sound.

Composer Lea Bertucci's composition Double Bass Crossfade positions two double bassists at opposite corners of the Knockdown Center’s 50,000 square foot main room. The instruments are wirelessly amplified, allowing the performers to slowly move across the room over the course of 40 minutes, meeting in the center and then crossing to each other's original starting positions. As the performers change their position, the sounds they play are dynamically routed from speaker to speaker according to their location, creating in their wake a mutable, engulfing sound-field. With James Ilgenfritz and Sean Ali. This performance was part of AUDITORIUM, an extended evening of site-specific electronic and electroacoustic performances organized by artists/curators Lea Bertucci and Tristan Shepherd on April 12, 2015. The focal point for the event was a custom-installed 10-channel sound system hung throughout Knockdown Center's cathedral-like space . The project commissioned new works from composers, instrumentalists, and audio artists to develop works uniquely suited to the site.