Summer... in The City.

Finally settling in to life back in The States, & everything has been beautiful. As a break from my normal seasonal back & forth between home & Europe, I’m taking a hiatus from the summer festival circuit this year to work on recorded music, teaching, performance, domesticities, laughter, and light retail at home.

The first of two events surrounding Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within - a week-long residency at Kurimanzutto’s Madison Avenue cabinet space capped by the premiere performance of a commissioned piece for it - went beautifully, and now I get to look forward to playing the piece again (albeit in concatenated form) in an ensemble setting at the Rotunda of the Guggenheim on the 27th of June. But long before then, I’ll be realizing a “Playthrough” as part of fantastic show at the newly re-opened Schoolhouse (i.e. the venue in the living room of the home of Forma’s Mark Dwinell & John Also Bennett; can’t recommend his Shelter Press LP enough, easily one of my favorite records in recent times) on May 18th with a twin-Buchla Music Easel performance by Marcia Bassett & Ted Gordon (featuring real-time video projections by none other than Jeffrey Perkins & Barry Weisblat) and the duo of Cecilia Lopez on synth & Sandy Ewen on guitar. Then, a few weeks later, I’ll be proffering a “Shredding” Generator as part of a great bill at my favorite local metal bar St. Vitus on June 3rd alongside Nuclear Death Wish, Bob Bellerue, & Chris LiButti. Things are just warming up.

Also, on perhaps the note I’ve been asked about the most since moving back; YES I have begun Selling Records again, although, at first, my activities are limited to contending with the sizable collection of second-hand LPs acquired while living down under, then paid to have shipped back to The States after my 1-3 year exclusionary period went into effect, all largely to fund said shipment (just absurd compared to the move over) and/or the monthly expense of it living in an accessible storage space around the corner in Brooklyn. All said & done, if I keep my 200-listings-a-week stride (unlikely) I should have everything up for sale by the end of August, with around 4k really, really great records all ripe for the plucking. If you’re at all interested in (specifically) Early Electronic & Avant-Garde music, Sound Art & “Artists Records”, Modern & Contemporary Classical, regional & genre Electronic Music, and every conceivable & neighboring strand within, you’ll want to check the Alpha State NYC page at Discogs on the regular. Note that I am also open to record fairs & the occasional record-hang, so please get in touch if you’re involved in a going concern.

As of yet I haven’t decided if I’ll launch a canonic replacement of Mimaroglu Music / Sales / Broken-Music, mainly as I’m not convinced that getting my hair tangled into the contemporary reality of all-risk, no-return tangible-object music retail is in any way a viable notion, despite the sudden proliferation of excellent music & editions. That said, I am regularly & consistently nostalgic for the days when this worked (well) and perhaps offering it at a small scale wouldn’t be that much of a hustle on a one-day-a-week scale. To this effect I have reserved the alphastate.nyc domain & have parked the old Broken-Music infrastructure onto it as a placeholder. Have an opinion regarding any of this? Feel free to fill out the poll below; if I get, say, 1,000 swing votes (I love the internet in the 21st Century; so much groveling) on the “for”, I’ll turn the key in the ignition & start it up, whether there’s gas in the tank or not…

Organ Within

Along with a superb team of artists organized by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe including C. Lavender, C. Spencer Yeh, Chuck Bettis, & Victoria Shen, I will be in residence at Kurimazutto’s new NYC space working on a piece for Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within.

I will be working in the gallery from 9am-3pm on May 7th-11th, and there will be a performance at 3pm on the 11th. Then, on the 27th of June, we will all be presenting, performing, and speaking at the Rotunda of the Guggenheim as a unit. Very excited for the promise & prospects of this project; Tarek’s performance at Bar.Laika a few night back was among my favorite listening experiences of the year thus far & I can’t wait to see, hear, and compose for the new instruments in person.

“kurimanzutto presents Tarek Atoui’s project Organ Within at its cabinet space in New York City. Operating as an open sound laboratory, and instrumentarium, Atoui will debut a new hybrid sculptural object that engages numerous technologies in order to re-envision the spatialization, perception and performativity of the traditional organ. The Organ Within is the result of his ongoing collaboration with instrument-makers Léo Maurel and Vincent Martial, and their research into historical church pipe organs, modular synthesizers, and the sonic experiences of deaf people.

For this presentation, Atoui partners with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe from CONTROL, Brooklyn’s leading synthesizer shop. As host and activator of the project, CONTROL has invited a diverse group of sound artists and musicians from New York’s experimental music community to venture and play the organ at kurimanzutto in New York. This group of collaborators will occupy the cabinet space one week at a time, to work with the instrument for research and recording purposes. These residencies will be open to the public, with a weekly performance held every Saturday at 3 pm..

Out of this continuous improvisation, Atoui and CONTROL will curate a final performance in the Rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on June 27, 2019 at 7 pm. To mark the closing of the two month project all resident artists will gather together to perform a simultaneous session. A moderated conversation with Atoui and his collaborators will precede the performance.

Organ Within is an itinerant exhibition organized in different movements. Beginning at kurimanzutto, New York and culminating at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the project will later travel in successive movements to The Hepworth Wakefield, England during Yorkshire Sculpture International (June 22 –September 29, 2019) and will extend to the Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates, in March 2020.

Residency program curated in collaboration with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe:
May 7 – 11: Keith Fullerton Whitman
May 14 – 18: C. Lavender
May 28 – June 1: C. Spencer Yeh
June 4 – 8: Chuck Bettis
June 18 – 22: Victoria Shen”

Lifetime Achievement

Woke up this morning to see my ugly mug (hovering over a 64-channel Midas in Amsterdam’s Paradiso last month) staring back from the BandCamp homepage, which was a nice surprise. Thanks to Daniel Dylan Wray for the thorough (thorough!) rundown of my recorded oeuvre, which has been just thriving on their ecosystem for the last year. For as much as I’m at odds with the ca. now reality of music retail (after fighting in the trenches, the front line, and finally in the war room of it all for a good two decades) I do feel that BandCamp offers the best blend of user optimization & customization and a fee & payment structure that actually benefits the musician first & foremost.

To commemorate, I have resumed placing recent music for sale up on their platform in native, often high-resolution formats (generally 24-bit, 96khz uncompressed) including a 10-year anniversary set of ca. now “Generators” (up for pre-order now for a 4/1 release), a pair of recent “Playthroughs” (ditto, 5/1) and even a slight 80s General MIDI “Table Music” read of the “Imaginary Film Score” spec (endlessly indebted to the genius of not just the Bands, but Brenda Hutchinson & Slava Tsukerman, Brad Fiedel, Kinuyo “James Banana” Yamashita, Jay Chattaway, etc.)

This is perhaps an opportune moment to point out that the Yearly Subscription is now a clean $60 ($5 a month!) which grants you full streaming AND download access to everything already up, plus all new releases as they’re posted & even cut rates on physical releases. I highly recommend the free iOS / Android BandCamp app; it’s stellar & even allows for offline listening if you so choose.

Absalom, Absalom!

Over the past few years, I’ve been exploring the various late-capitalism revenue streams available to musicians with a steady internet connection. There’s the YouTube channel (which I’m currently rethinking), the BandCamp page (which has been doing extremely well), and now I’ve started a Reverb shop for the shifting & exchange of, largely, Eurorack Synthesizer Modules, of which I’ve amassed something of an embarrassment of a backlog, with around 100-120 sitting tidily in their OEM boxes and/or saddled neatly in bubble-wrap following their initial romance-phases.

I will try to keep about 30 items up at a time, and will list new ones as things sell, which has been happening with frightening regularity since the move back to the States. I’m not trying to throw some kind of delusional touched by the hand of God shapes here, but these are all items that I have used to either perform live or record music, and their sale essentially means I get to acquire other items that enable me to perform, record, & release music, which is a nice Yin/Yang result of their time in my life. Plus, clearly due to some clerical error I have just been promoted to Power Caller status, which is kind of nice; everything ships via Priority Mail from Brooklyn, and my 20+ years of mail-order service have my box-packing & fulfillment chops work at phantom-limb levels of muscle-memory.

Relocation.

As of early November, I will be based in the US again; Brooklyn, specifically, for the next few months at least. In many ways this feels like returning, tail between my legs, to the small town in which I grew up after forging a series of domestic (mis-) adventures out in the world that never quite materialized into a State-sanctioned bread-winning situation; only the small town in this case is New York City.

I will kick off my newfound second-borough residence in style with a pair of “Redactions” & “Generators” at e-Flux’s new Bar Laika space in Clinton Hill on January 13th; please come down if we haven’t seen each other for a while, or of course Get In Touch if you’d like to grab a coffee, etc. at some point over the next few months.

As has been the case over the last few years, my main focus for the near-future is in on performing Live Electronic Music; I’m currently seeking opportunities starting in February 2019, and I’m now working with Pedro Gomes for bookings in Europe, so please either get in touch with him, or with me Directly. Similarly, if you’re interested in hosting a reprise of the wonderful A/V collaboration with Pierce Warnecke that we premiered at Semibreve last month, please get in touch with Pedro or Pierce’s agent Remco at DISK Agency.

During the weeks of limbo leading into being reunited with my family here in the States, I’ve made major strides in wrapping up a number of long-delayed recording projects, including a new studio-suite of Playthroughs pieces and a somewhat definitive, private-issue set collecting the first wave of Redactions. There are also a number of recordings for which I’ve yet to find homes; an amazing set of noisy, post-Industrial Grime & Radiophonic Bleep captured at ADDAC in Olaias, several very nice Drone Pieces & Complex Automations recorded on the Synthi 100 at Knobs in Vancouver, and even an un-apologetically melodic set of scattered poly-rhythmic Machine Music recorded right here within the the last week.