Sabisha Friedberg

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.

Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist, composer and improviser who works with installation, sound, and video. As an instrumentalist, she focuses on the bass clarinet in an electro-acoustic context. The timbre of the bass clarinet is amplified and abstracted by the creative use of microphone feedback. This is an essential part of the extended technique, as the body of the instrument becomes a resonant chamber and the pitch of the feedback is controlled with key work. Tape collage contributes structural and textural elements. Lea has been an artist-in-residence at The Wave Farm, Smack Mellon, LMCC, and The Queens Museum of Art. She was awarded a Young Composers' commission from Roulette in 2012. Her debut solo LP, Resonance Shapes was released in 2013 on the Obsolete Units label. She has performed solo and collaborative works at venues such as Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, Artists' Television Access in San Francisco, St. Marks Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Wave Farm, Galapagos Artspace, Roulette, The Queens Museum of Art and the High Zero Festival.

On April 1, 2011, the Clocktower presented The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere by audio artist and composer Sabisha Friedberg. The event was held in front of a studio audience at the Clocktower Gallery and was streamcast live to the Web through ARTonAIR.org. Composed during her residency at the Clocktower Gallery, The Starry Garter is a sonic poem for radio that combines elements of sound art, radio theater, film, and music to examine themes of transmutation and redemption. Friedberg’s work is based on Etidorhpa, or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey, the tale of an unknown man’s quest into the center of the earth, which divulges arcane secrets in a process of initiation, and reveals a journey to an ethereal plane of non-material existence. Following Etidorhpa’s narrative arc, Starry Garter updates traditional radio theater by emphasizing the text’s sonic elements with atomized dialog, an electro-acoustic process, and interludes of acoustic cello, piano, and chorus. The live performance of The Starry Garter transforms this 19th Century hermetic tale into an aural soundscape further textured by effects generated by vintage foley work (old-fashioned, handmade radio sound effects). Radio Actors:

In this residency at the Clocktower Gallery, Sabisha Friedberg paired her visual practice in drawing and painting with music composition to address the theme of interstice - that which intervenes between things, or breaks what is continuous. Drawings and songs are presented as renderings of a thematic existence of an in-between; an effusive emotive state existing between defined lines is explored in a musical performance presented by Friedberg in the Clocktower’s Upper Gallery. The performance, taking place as a concert in the Upper Gallery in the Fall of 2012, alludes to a period in the early part of the Century, circa 1912, characterized by curious societal tensions, and odd and contradictory movements artistically and musically. Friedberg performed, with five New York-based musicians, both constructed and improvisational melodies and interstitial musical weavings presented as a single passage. The original songs hark to the craft of the ‘teens music, contorting the arrangements of then-popular ballads while introducing experimental arrangements and acousmatic treatments.

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.

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.

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.