Ensemble Pamplemousse:
The Chance & Circumstance Festival
September 19 - 21, 2019
OFFSITE: The Chocolate Factory Theater | 5-49 49th Ave, Long Island City, NY
OFFSITE: The Chocolate Factory Theater | 5-49 49th Ave, Long Island City, NY
As part of JACK’s Out and About series -- with performances around the city as the new JACK space is under construction -- Ensemble Pamplemousse curates and produces a three-day festival of experimental music and performance from September 19 - 21, 2019 at The Chocolate Factory. The festival was created to bring together American collectives and sound/media artists working in the field of experimental arts, music, and music theater, with a strong focus on the community of New York City.
PROGRAM:
Thursday, September 19 (7 pm doors, 7:30 pm concert)
Daniel Silliman
Zach Rowden/Robert Black
Erin Rogers
Friday, September 20 (7 pm doors, 7:30 pm concert)
Stepancic.Gidron
Ben Bennett/Michael Foster
yarn|wire
Saturday, September 21 (7 pm doors, 7:30 pm concert)
Bromp Treb
Ensemble Pamplemousse
TICKETS: $10 advance at www.jackny.org, $15 cash only at the door
MORE INFO:
The third iteration of the now-annual festival follows in the tradition of the Annual Avant-Garde Festival, which took place between 1963 and 1980, advancing the careers of hundreds of young musicians and artists while deeply expanding the repertoire of the disciplines featured.
The first night features two Brooklyn-based composer/performers presenting rigorous solo material. Daniel Silliman’s emerging solo practice juxtaposes harsh electronic feedback with idiosyncratic networks of magnetic tape and esoteric sound synthesis. Erin Rogers applies a multivalent approach toward the saxophone family and theatrical music, often bridging rigorous compositional detail with playfully virtuosic narratives. Balancing the program is a duo of two New Haven-based bassists, Zach Rowden (Hyperion Ensemble, Tongue Depressor) and Robert Black (Bang on a Can All-Stars) performing a new work written with Pamplemousse’s own Natacha Diels.
Teodora Stepancic & Assaf Gidron (curators of the eclectic and cerebral Piano+ series) will open the second night with a minimal set for Casio keyboards and electronics, paired with the explosive, shape-shifting duo of saxophonist Michael Foster and percussionist Ben Bennett. The evening concludes with a rare performance of Berlin-based Catherine Lamb’s Curvo Totalis, an experiential, long-form work for resonant metals and synthesized sound featuring the dynamic piano percussion quartet, yarn|wire.
The final night is a double bill of Turner Falls-based noise-ician Bromp Treb, self-described as “clumsy body music and/or noise of eager uncertainty”, alongside a performance by Ensemble Pamplemousse, featuring 6 brand new works written by each of the collective’s members. Expect absurdist theatre, re-mappings of Classical repertoire, electromechanical inventions, arcane tuning systems, and more. This event doubles as a record release for Pamplemousse’s newest album, produced and released by TAK editions.
BIOS:
Composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse was founded in 2003 to provide a focal point for like-minded creators with a thirst for sonic exploration. The ensemble is a close-knit group of divergent artistic personalities, emergent from training in disparate musical fields. Their collective love for the exquisite in all sonic realms leads the ensemble to persistently discover new vistas of sound at the frayed edges of dissective instrumental performance technique. Compositions aggregate each member's unique virtuosic talents into extraordinary magical moments. In the flexible moments of performance, the ensemble weaves together shapes of resonance, clusters of glitch, skitters of hyper action, and masses of absurdity into impeccable structures of unified beauty. For a full listing of Ensemble Pamplemousse’s 2019/20 concerts, please visit:http://www.ensemblepamplemousse.org/upcoming.html.
Daniel Silliman is a musician living and working in NYC. His work often incorporates a variety of elements including improvisation, experimental notation & tunings, and electronic instruments of his own design. Speculative by nature, the work is situated somewhere between performance and installation, narrative and non-narrative. Long durations, resonant harmonies, multi-speaker setups, and walls of noise are often employed to explore a dual notion of “space” as both an abstraction of time and as a physical entity in itself. Recent collaborations include projects with pioneering brass and electronic musicians Matt Barbier & Weston Olencki (RAGE Thormbones), the sax & percussion/composer duo Popebama, the New York Youth Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, violinist Clara Kim, and others. His work has been presented internationally at venues including Carnegie Hall, The Kitchen, Palacio de Bellas Artes (CDMX), nyMusikk Bergen (NO), Studio LOOS (NL), and The Stone.
Robert Black tours the world creating unheard of music for the solo double bass, collaborating with the most adventurous composers, musicians, dancers, artists, actors, and technophiles from all walks of life. He is a founding and current member of the Bang On A Can All Stars. Current and recent commissions/projects include John Luther Adams, Marcel Zaes, Natacha Diels, Philip Glass, and a 10 channel audio/video installation with sound artists Brian House and Sue Huang, filmed at the Freshkills landfill in NYC. He has made several solo recordings for Orange Mountain Music, Cantaloupe Records, New World Records, Mode Records, and O.O. Discs. Robert teaches at the Hartt School/University of Hartford.
Zach Rowden explores the performative and sonic thresholds of the double bass/electric bass, fiddle, and tape loops. These instruments are put through lenses such as drone, spectralism, American folk traditions and harsh noise. He is currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. Current projects/collaborators include Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble as a member & soloist, Tongue Depressor with Henry Birdsey, Leila Bordreuil, Tyshawn Sorey, Robert Black, Charmaine Lee, John McCowen and Paul Flaherty.
Erin Rogers is a composer and saxophonist based in New York City. Named a “rising star” (Broadway World), her music has been described as “whimsical, theatrical” (Brooklyn Vegan), “a wild ride” (An Earful), and “so complex, it’s primitive.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Rogers’ works have been featured at Lincoln Center, Prototype Festival, Carnegie Hall, MATA Festival, wasteLAnd, French Quarter Festival, Nief-Norf, Ecstatic Music Festival, Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Resonanzraum (Hamburg), Musikhochschule (Freiburg), International Festival of New Music "Manuel Enríquez" (Mexico), NyMusikk Bergen, and the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Rogers is co-artistic director of thingNY, Hypercube, New Thread Quartet, and Popebama. She has collaborated with ensembles such as yarn/wire, Contemporaneous, International Contemporary Ensemble, wildUp, Talea, and Decoder. Her work crosses genres from theatre-to-improv-to-installation-to-silence, through collaborations with Orange Theatre, Varispeed, Experiments-in-Opera, Panoply Performance Lab, Harvestworks, HERE Arts Center, and Music for Contemplation. Her solo album Dawntreader drops Fall 2019 on Relative Pitch Records.
Stepančić.Gidron are Teodora Stepančić and Assaf Gidron. Based in Brooklyn, they actively curate concerts and events of new, experimental and rarely heard music in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, in established and underground new music venues. They play electric keyboards, piano, found objects, sine tones and field recordings performing written and improvised music and DJ sets that seeks to draw the audience into an inclusive and generous mode of listening. Inspired by the reductive aesthetics of the Wandelweiser group, they seek to create spaces where evocative sounds are distinctly delineated within existing sounding environments. They often work with musicians whose activities are at the fringe of the institutional new music scene, who form their own alternative communities, networks and perspectives. Several composers had written for them: Jürg Frey, Maya Verlaak, Sam Sfirri, Laura Cetilia, Evelyn Emile, Jack Callahan. They are part of the Brooklyn based LCollective, a group dedicated to presenting new works in permeable intimate setting. Together with Martin Lorenz they released Michael’s Pisaro's work Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation which they took on tour to Switzerland, Berlin, New York and California. They play regularly at Klangraum festival in Düsseldorf. Teodora Stepančić is a pianist, organizer of the Piano+ and Shared Space concert series in New York and a founding member and pianist of the Dutch new music ensemble Modelo62. Assaf Gidron is a film sound designer. They met in the Netherlands where they both studied composition at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague.
Michael Foster is a Brooklyn based saxophonist, improvisor, multi-instrumentalist, and curator working within the fields of free improvisation, composition (both graphic and notated), Jazz, noise, punk, and industrial music and video. His work explores the overlap of instrumental preparation, noise, and queer theoretical practices, focusing on methods of queering improvisational practice and his approach to the saxophone and extensive preparations. In addition to his work as a performer, Michael founded Queer Trash, a series focused on supporting LGBTQIA+ artists engaged in experimental performance. Queer Trash was awarded the 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship at Issue Project Room, where they will be hosting performances and workshops throughout the year. His current projects include duos with Leila Bordreuil, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking), and Ben Bennett. Other projects include collaborations with Sarah Hennies, Marina Rosenfeld, William Parker, Steve Swell, Weasel Walter, Brandon Lopez, Psychic TV, a new quartet with Nate Wooley, Brandon Lopez, and Ben Bennett, and many others.
Ben Bennett is an improvising percussionist who plays drums, percussion, and membranophones, which are combined with each other in various mutable arrangements, and played by striking, friction, breath, and other techniques. His instrumentation and his music are a radical distillation of the modern drumset and the diverse traditions of improvised music. He has toured in extensively in the U.S. and Internationally, playing with different groups, ad-hoc collaborations, and solo. Recent collaborators include Leila Bordreuil, Tashi Dorji, Sandy Ewen, Michael Foster, Judith Hamann, Travis Laplante, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Brandon Lopez, Ilan Manouach, Bhob Rainey, Jacob Wick, Nate Wooley, and Jack Wright.
Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, percussion / Laura Barger and Ning Yu, pianos). Described by The Brooklyn Rail as “fascinating and exciting, with playing that is precise and full of purpose,” the ensemble is admired for the energy and precision it brings to performances of today’s most adventurous music. Founded in 2005, Yarn/Wire is dedicated to expanding the repertoire written for its instrumentation, through commissions and collaborative initiatives that aim to build a new and lasting body of work. Influenced by its members’ experiences with classical music, avant-garde theatre, and rock music, the ensemble champions a varied and probing repertoire. To this end, Yarn/Wire has commissioned hundreds of genre-spanning artists, and works to represent a wide spectrum of voices. For more information, please visit: www.yarnwire.org
Neil 'Cloaca' Young is an artist who makes sounds, images, and events. An active improviser and collagist, Young's output takes many forms as experimental cinema, audio recordings, compositions and performances, utilizing a variety of tools and media such as percussion, electroacoustic synthesis, coding, magnetic tape, and celluloid film. Bromp Treb is his long-running solo project, an idiosyncratic maze of crooked rhythms and tangled textures that celebrates refined dysfunction and awkward interstices. Solo and in collaborations, Young has exhibited and performed at High Zero, ICA Boston, EMPAC, Block Museum of Art, IFFR, Ann Arbor Film Festival, SXSW, CPH:DOX, Anthology, Kunstencentrum Belgie and Instants Chavirés. He co-directed the feature-length portrait film MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS, which has screened all over North America and Europe to critical acclaim. He lives and works in Western Massachusetts, North America.
PROGRAM:
Thursday, September 19 (7 pm doors, 7:30 pm concert)
Daniel Silliman
Zach Rowden/Robert Black
Erin Rogers
Friday, September 20 (7 pm doors, 7:30 pm concert)
Stepancic.Gidron
Ben Bennett/Michael Foster
yarn|wire
Saturday, September 21 (7 pm doors, 7:30 pm concert)
Bromp Treb
Ensemble Pamplemousse
TICKETS: $10 advance at www.jackny.org, $15 cash only at the door
MORE INFO:
The third iteration of the now-annual festival follows in the tradition of the Annual Avant-Garde Festival, which took place between 1963 and 1980, advancing the careers of hundreds of young musicians and artists while deeply expanding the repertoire of the disciplines featured.
The first night features two Brooklyn-based composer/performers presenting rigorous solo material. Daniel Silliman’s emerging solo practice juxtaposes harsh electronic feedback with idiosyncratic networks of magnetic tape and esoteric sound synthesis. Erin Rogers applies a multivalent approach toward the saxophone family and theatrical music, often bridging rigorous compositional detail with playfully virtuosic narratives. Balancing the program is a duo of two New Haven-based bassists, Zach Rowden (Hyperion Ensemble, Tongue Depressor) and Robert Black (Bang on a Can All-Stars) performing a new work written with Pamplemousse’s own Natacha Diels.
Teodora Stepancic & Assaf Gidron (curators of the eclectic and cerebral Piano+ series) will open the second night with a minimal set for Casio keyboards and electronics, paired with the explosive, shape-shifting duo of saxophonist Michael Foster and percussionist Ben Bennett. The evening concludes with a rare performance of Berlin-based Catherine Lamb’s Curvo Totalis, an experiential, long-form work for resonant metals and synthesized sound featuring the dynamic piano percussion quartet, yarn|wire.
The final night is a double bill of Turner Falls-based noise-ician Bromp Treb, self-described as “clumsy body music and/or noise of eager uncertainty”, alongside a performance by Ensemble Pamplemousse, featuring 6 brand new works written by each of the collective’s members. Expect absurdist theatre, re-mappings of Classical repertoire, electromechanical inventions, arcane tuning systems, and more. This event doubles as a record release for Pamplemousse’s newest album, produced and released by TAK editions.
BIOS:
Composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse was founded in 2003 to provide a focal point for like-minded creators with a thirst for sonic exploration. The ensemble is a close-knit group of divergent artistic personalities, emergent from training in disparate musical fields. Their collective love for the exquisite in all sonic realms leads the ensemble to persistently discover new vistas of sound at the frayed edges of dissective instrumental performance technique. Compositions aggregate each member's unique virtuosic talents into extraordinary magical moments. In the flexible moments of performance, the ensemble weaves together shapes of resonance, clusters of glitch, skitters of hyper action, and masses of absurdity into impeccable structures of unified beauty. For a full listing of Ensemble Pamplemousse’s 2019/20 concerts, please visit:http://www.ensemblepamplemousse.org/upcoming.html.
Daniel Silliman is a musician living and working in NYC. His work often incorporates a variety of elements including improvisation, experimental notation & tunings, and electronic instruments of his own design. Speculative by nature, the work is situated somewhere between performance and installation, narrative and non-narrative. Long durations, resonant harmonies, multi-speaker setups, and walls of noise are often employed to explore a dual notion of “space” as both an abstraction of time and as a physical entity in itself. Recent collaborations include projects with pioneering brass and electronic musicians Matt Barbier & Weston Olencki (RAGE Thormbones), the sax & percussion/composer duo Popebama, the New York Youth Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, violinist Clara Kim, and others. His work has been presented internationally at venues including Carnegie Hall, The Kitchen, Palacio de Bellas Artes (CDMX), nyMusikk Bergen (NO), Studio LOOS (NL), and The Stone.
Robert Black tours the world creating unheard of music for the solo double bass, collaborating with the most adventurous composers, musicians, dancers, artists, actors, and technophiles from all walks of life. He is a founding and current member of the Bang On A Can All Stars. Current and recent commissions/projects include John Luther Adams, Marcel Zaes, Natacha Diels, Philip Glass, and a 10 channel audio/video installation with sound artists Brian House and Sue Huang, filmed at the Freshkills landfill in NYC. He has made several solo recordings for Orange Mountain Music, Cantaloupe Records, New World Records, Mode Records, and O.O. Discs. Robert teaches at the Hartt School/University of Hartford.
Zach Rowden explores the performative and sonic thresholds of the double bass/electric bass, fiddle, and tape loops. These instruments are put through lenses such as drone, spectralism, American folk traditions and harsh noise. He is currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. Current projects/collaborators include Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble as a member & soloist, Tongue Depressor with Henry Birdsey, Leila Bordreuil, Tyshawn Sorey, Robert Black, Charmaine Lee, John McCowen and Paul Flaherty.
Erin Rogers is a composer and saxophonist based in New York City. Named a “rising star” (Broadway World), her music has been described as “whimsical, theatrical” (Brooklyn Vegan), “a wild ride” (An Earful), and “so complex, it’s primitive.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Rogers’ works have been featured at Lincoln Center, Prototype Festival, Carnegie Hall, MATA Festival, wasteLAnd, French Quarter Festival, Nief-Norf, Ecstatic Music Festival, Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), Resonanzraum (Hamburg), Musikhochschule (Freiburg), International Festival of New Music "Manuel Enríquez" (Mexico), NyMusikk Bergen, and the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Rogers is co-artistic director of thingNY, Hypercube, New Thread Quartet, and Popebama. She has collaborated with ensembles such as yarn/wire, Contemporaneous, International Contemporary Ensemble, wildUp, Talea, and Decoder. Her work crosses genres from theatre-to-improv-to-installation-to-silence, through collaborations with Orange Theatre, Varispeed, Experiments-in-Opera, Panoply Performance Lab, Harvestworks, HERE Arts Center, and Music for Contemplation. Her solo album Dawntreader drops Fall 2019 on Relative Pitch Records.
Stepančić.Gidron are Teodora Stepančić and Assaf Gidron. Based in Brooklyn, they actively curate concerts and events of new, experimental and rarely heard music in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, in established and underground new music venues. They play electric keyboards, piano, found objects, sine tones and field recordings performing written and improvised music and DJ sets that seeks to draw the audience into an inclusive and generous mode of listening. Inspired by the reductive aesthetics of the Wandelweiser group, they seek to create spaces where evocative sounds are distinctly delineated within existing sounding environments. They often work with musicians whose activities are at the fringe of the institutional new music scene, who form their own alternative communities, networks and perspectives. Several composers had written for them: Jürg Frey, Maya Verlaak, Sam Sfirri, Laura Cetilia, Evelyn Emile, Jack Callahan. They are part of the Brooklyn based LCollective, a group dedicated to presenting new works in permeable intimate setting. Together with Martin Lorenz they released Michael’s Pisaro's work Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation which they took on tour to Switzerland, Berlin, New York and California. They play regularly at Klangraum festival in Düsseldorf. Teodora Stepančić is a pianist, organizer of the Piano+ and Shared Space concert series in New York and a founding member and pianist of the Dutch new music ensemble Modelo62. Assaf Gidron is a film sound designer. They met in the Netherlands where they both studied composition at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague.
Michael Foster is a Brooklyn based saxophonist, improvisor, multi-instrumentalist, and curator working within the fields of free improvisation, composition (both graphic and notated), Jazz, noise, punk, and industrial music and video. His work explores the overlap of instrumental preparation, noise, and queer theoretical practices, focusing on methods of queering improvisational practice and his approach to the saxophone and extensive preparations. In addition to his work as a performer, Michael founded Queer Trash, a series focused on supporting LGBTQIA+ artists engaged in experimental performance. Queer Trash was awarded the 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship at Issue Project Room, where they will be hosting performances and workshops throughout the year. His current projects include duos with Leila Bordreuil, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking), and Ben Bennett. Other projects include collaborations with Sarah Hennies, Marina Rosenfeld, William Parker, Steve Swell, Weasel Walter, Brandon Lopez, Psychic TV, a new quartet with Nate Wooley, Brandon Lopez, and Ben Bennett, and many others.
Ben Bennett is an improvising percussionist who plays drums, percussion, and membranophones, which are combined with each other in various mutable arrangements, and played by striking, friction, breath, and other techniques. His instrumentation and his music are a radical distillation of the modern drumset and the diverse traditions of improvised music. He has toured in extensively in the U.S. and Internationally, playing with different groups, ad-hoc collaborations, and solo. Recent collaborators include Leila Bordreuil, Tashi Dorji, Sandy Ewen, Michael Foster, Judith Hamann, Travis Laplante, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Brandon Lopez, Ilan Manouach, Bhob Rainey, Jacob Wick, Nate Wooley, and Jack Wright.
Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, percussion / Laura Barger and Ning Yu, pianos). Described by The Brooklyn Rail as “fascinating and exciting, with playing that is precise and full of purpose,” the ensemble is admired for the energy and precision it brings to performances of today’s most adventurous music. Founded in 2005, Yarn/Wire is dedicated to expanding the repertoire written for its instrumentation, through commissions and collaborative initiatives that aim to build a new and lasting body of work. Influenced by its members’ experiences with classical music, avant-garde theatre, and rock music, the ensemble champions a varied and probing repertoire. To this end, Yarn/Wire has commissioned hundreds of genre-spanning artists, and works to represent a wide spectrum of voices. For more information, please visit: www.yarnwire.org
Neil 'Cloaca' Young is an artist who makes sounds, images, and events. An active improviser and collagist, Young's output takes many forms as experimental cinema, audio recordings, compositions and performances, utilizing a variety of tools and media such as percussion, electroacoustic synthesis, coding, magnetic tape, and celluloid film. Bromp Treb is his long-running solo project, an idiosyncratic maze of crooked rhythms and tangled textures that celebrates refined dysfunction and awkward interstices. Solo and in collaborations, Young has exhibited and performed at High Zero, ICA Boston, EMPAC, Block Museum of Art, IFFR, Ann Arbor Film Festival, SXSW, CPH:DOX, Anthology, Kunstencentrum Belgie and Instants Chavirés. He co-directed the feature-length portrait film MILFORD GRAVES FULL MANTIS, which has screened all over North America and Europe to critical acclaim. He lives and works in Western Massachusetts, North America.
