Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?): March 2012

Saturday, March 24

Recreate the 2/17/12 Silver Mt Zion Show in Your Own Mind at Setlist.fm

The set list, with full album track links, has been assembled here.

Thursday, March 22

Check Out "Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s" at the Albright Knox

On view Friday, March 30-Sunday, July 8, 2012:

Featuring more than three hundred works made almost exclusively in Buffalo during the 1970s, Wish You Were Here is structured thematically around the venues and organizations that galvanized the period: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Artpark; the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA); the Center for Media Study at the University at Buffalo and its downtown, independent counterpart, Media Study/Buffalo; the experimental music of the Creative Associates from UB's Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, as well as the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; the English Department at UB and the synchronous grassroots poetry movement; and Hallwalls.

Read about it here.

Wednesday, March 21

Watch Luvstep Tour Recap (Dirty South Joe B@B Flufftronix w/ Clicks & Whistles)... there's some Buffalove in there.

Check it out. Footage from DJ sets by Dirty South Joe & Flufftronix aka Luvstep w/special guest Clicks & Whistles, following the release of Luvstep 3. 2/14/2012-2/18/2012.   Included songs:  Hellfire Machina feat. Infuze - Good Love . Kaskade feat. Mindy Gledhill - Eyes (Alvin Risk Remix).  Usher - Climax (prod. Diplo)  . Shot by Petey Clicks and Fluff in Buffalo NY, Indianapolis IN, Virginia Beach VA and Philadelphia PA. Edited by Fluff. Huge thanks to all the venues, promoters, other performers and of course THE FANS. ❤ ❤ ❤ Luvstep played Soundlab on Valentine's Day, 2/14/12.

Tuesday, March 20

Read "Percussive pianists: UB students’ performance features a retrospective of John Cage’s music for ‘prepared piano"

By Mary Kunz Goldman for the Buffalo News:

"Late on a sunny afternoon, when sane people would be outside, UB pianist Eric Huebner and three of his students are in Lippes Concert Hall gathered around a beat-up Steinway grand piano.

It is not just any old Steinway grand.

Wedged under and between its strings are…objects. Felt. Bolts. Oddments.
On Wednesday, Huebner and his students are performing an hourlong retrospective of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. And preparations are finally complete.

Cage (1912-1992) was known for his experimentation. One of his most famous innovations was the “prepared piano”—a piano adjusted to produce unusual
sounds.

It was born out of necessity. Cage came up with the idea in the 1940s so he could get the sound of a percussion ensemble. (In keeping with his shoestring spirit, Wednesday’s concert is free.)

The composer was working a lot with dance troupes, and dance, along with Indian philosophy, inspired him. There are shards of the Baroque — trim little ornaments, tiny trills — and dance rhythms. The items among the piano strings produce soft jingles and gong sounds. There are African beats and twinkling treble lines.

You could debate whether the pieces are actually music, or if they are instead montages of sound effects. Arguments over that break out frequently on YouTube.

You could also call prepared piano “quaint.” UB, after all, has a history of the avant-garde. Cage himself was no stranger to our town.
But there is no denying the instrument’s entertainment value. And if the prepared piano never caught on among other composers, Huebner says, that is because Cage owned the concept.

“Cage got there first,” he says. “He was like an actor in a TV show.”"

Read the rest here.

Get Your Tickets for Tokimonsta April 19 at Soundlab

From the press release:

Born and raised in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, TOKiMONSTA (Jennifer Lee) was an unfocused pupil of classical piano. However, she has come to use this background to create vast textural soundscapes through utilizing live instruments, percussion, digital manipulation, and dusty noise. Through her musical creations, she is able to fuse vintage sounds with progressive styles into something unique.

Her music has been recognized and praised by the very best in avant-garde and mainstream media. TOKiMONSTA has been featured on various large scale radio programs such as: BBC Radio1, NPR, BBC World Service, J Wave (JP), Studio Brussels (BE), Radio Nova (FR), KCRW (USA) to name a few. Subsequently, she has been featured in print by DJ Mag, Pitchfork, XLR8R, URB, Paper, LA Times, SPIN, and more. LA Weekly ranked her as 2010's #1 female DJ in Los Angeles. Additionally, Resident Adviser did a full feature on her for their "Breaking Through," an RA series which focuses on the next big artist.

Not only has she caught ears of many as a different dimension of Los Angeles-based music, TOKiMONSTA is notably the first female to join crew/label BRAINFEEDER headed by Flying Lotus- celebrated as the most exciting LA music label by LA Weekly. In addition, she is also a 2010 Red Bull Music Academy alumni, allowing her to join the ranks of other elite taste maker alumni.

Her live performance is engaging as well as intricate-using a laptop, other pieces of instrumentation and multimedia to orchestrate a truly interactive experience. She is a fearless and energetic performer who tours regularly around the world from LA to NY, London to Tel Aviv, Singapore to Tokyo. Some notable past performance were at DEMF, Sonar Barcelona. With the positive exposure and increasing movement surrounding her, she is scheduled to perform at Coachella, WMC, SXSW, Sonar Tokyo, Wakarusa, and more in 2012.

Sunday, March 11

Contribute to "Tactical Sound Garden: Buffalo"

From the Squeaky Wheel Buffalo Media Resources general email: Calling Buffalo Sound Artists: Come help shape the sonice topography of the Buffalo Waterfront! The Tactical Sound Garden is coming to Buffalo as part of the 2011-2012 Fluid Culture program of the UB Humanities Institute. Join artist/architect Mark Shepard for a workshop focused on producing sounds to be planted in a virtual sound garden along the Buffalo waterfront. Interested? Please send an email introducing yourself with links to samples of your sound work to buffalo@tacticalsoundgarden.net by March 15th.

As space and resources are limited we may not be able to accommodate everyone, but we'll certainly try!

Selected participants will be notified by March 22th.

Thursday, March 1

Read "An Interview with Shigeto"

By Cory Perla for Artvoice:

Sometimes it feels like the EDM scene has lost some substance, but then an artist like Zach Saginaw a.k.a. Shigeto comes along and puts out a piece of music so personal and genuine that it revitalizes a genre. That record is Lineage, his latest “mini LP” released last month on Ghostly International. Saginaw uses his instinctual drumming skills to combine live percussion with jazz structures, hip hop tempos, and atmospheric flares that sonically express the sorrowful story of his ancestors, including his great grand-father Shigeto. This week I chatted with the Ann Arbor, Michigan native about his live performance style, the meaning behind Lineage, and the source of his urbanized soundscapes, as he worked on a new track at his home in Brooklyn.

Read the interview here.

Read "Parts and Labor Bid Farewell"

I am sad. I have nothing but fond memories of the shows Parts and Labor played at both Soundlabs starting back in the old warehouse in our first year (2002). In fact, they played the very first show at the current space, as a kind of pre-opening where they set up on the floor a week before the stage was installed. They stayed at my house a bunch of times and really were one of the pillars of what we were trying to do, as the "brooklyn" sound evolved, over the course of the last decade, from experimental art-rock made by lower east siders and outsider artists who couldn't afford Manhattan anymore to a kind of hipster brand that still produces great things but well you know. Anyway, P&L played their last show last Friday, with Neptune and Oneida, 2 other Soundlab veterans. In fact, the first time Neptune and P&L ever played together was at the old Soundlab in 2002. Both groups were looking for dates around the same time, so we put them together on a bill that also included sound/video duo Lo/Vid, who were responsible for instituting tons of art/music/noise events in NYC at the time. Afterward, P&L, Lo/Vid and Neptune exchanged numbers. They had crisscrossed each other's tours and knew each other by reputation but had never intersected. After this fateful night in Buffalo, they all played together regularly.

Here is the story from the Village Voice blog Sound of the City "Waste of Paint" by Jamie Peck:

"Friday we solemnly visited 285 Kent for Parts and Labor's sold-out farewell show, which featured strong opening sets from pals Neptune and Oneida. P+L has been one of the great workhorses of New York's scene for the past ten years, putting out consistently good albums and touring extensively without ever reaping the financial rewards of colleagues like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV On the Radio. This type of dedication inspires a special type of love in scene diehards (see also: the Melvins), and as such the place was packed front to back with everyone who'd ever appreciated them over the years, including BJ Warshaw's parents. The two-hour-plus show included songs and members from every era of the band, plus some horns and an actual bagpipe player, and at one point they passed around a video camera so the proceedings could be shot from every angle by members of the audience. "Pretty much everyone I love or have loved for the past ten years is in this room tonight, so, with too many people to thank, thanks everyone in this room for being here for us," Warshaw said before launching into an epic encore in which all four drummers played at once. In the end they demolished the drum kit, the cardboard backdrop, and the paper stalactites hanging from the ceiling as BJ made feedback with his bass. "Thank you so fucking much," he said before making his exit. Dan Friel lingered a bit over his processors, drawing out the noise and the moment for as long as possible."

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Who is Morton Feldman? (And Why Should I Care)?

A towering figure in 20th-century New Music, Morton Feldman radically re-imagined the possibilities of musical form through an approach to sound correlated with abstract painting. In 1973, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, a title he retained until his death in 1987. Feldman's tenure is emblematic of a renaissance period of progressive creative activity that brought Buffalo's cultural affiliations international acclaim.

What Would Morton Feldman Do? situates its speculations on multiple levels, firstly imagining the artist as an angry young man contemplating his social calendar. But WWMFD also addresses a larger crisis of relevance facing experimental culture in the 21st century. WWMFD builds on the city's radical legacy, but views history as a challenge to the present - what are you going to do NOW? WWMFD imagines its avant-classical hero wandering the crumbling streets in search of the new and the now, not through escapist longings for another era's modernisms but in concert with the cause of action necessitated by absence.

In this regard, WWMFD begins where Basta! Or Too Much! (We Will Always Know Ourselves), an avant-pop zine published locally from 1997-2001, left the page for the "stage." Collecting de facto proposals for civic reinvention utilizing the fractured experiments of Buffalo's postmodernist cultural community as blueprints, Basta! concerned itself not with art dialogue per se, but with changing what it means to grow up in a shrinking city. From these proposals (which tended to embrace rather than resist post-industrial existential crises) emerged a series of large scale multi-media events (Murder the Word) and ultimately, the performance program at Big Orbit Gallery. Big Orbit's "Soundlab" series, for which the venue of the same name was founded, was conceived of as a multi-faceted, continuously evolving "workshop" for the exploration of contemporary post-cultural incentives. Coming full circle, WWMFD hopes to re-contextualize Soundlab's explorations, and to include other relevant local sound and performance activities in its critical orbit.

"In 1962, 3 seminal actions conspired to change Buffalo's cultural destiny in the 20th Century. The Albright Art Museum added Knox to its name and hundreds of post-war masterworks to its collection; the private University of Buffalo, absorbed into the public SUNY network, flooded its halls with the best and brightest of contemporary artists, writers and musicians; and The Buffalo Philharmonic, seeking a maestro who would infuse its programming with youthful charisma, hired Lukas Foss, a “wunderkind” pianist and composer whose recent embrace of the avant-garde promised a sharp break from his predecessors’ traditional repertories.

"Under Foss’s direction, the Philharmonic quickly gained an international reputation for meeting head-on the challenges of contemporary new music, which typically required classically-trained musicians to explore unconventional techniques such as “preparing” a piano by stuffing its strings with random objects, or manipulating contact microphones to generate electronic feedback.

"Soon the BPO was among the most adventurous major orchestras in the world, boasting multiple world premiers; releasing recordings of compositions by John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and more; performing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Momente and Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition on TV ; and embracing a rigorous touring schedule that brought them to Carnegie Hall for the first time in its history.

"'Can this be Buffalo?' Life magazine asked on the occasion of 1968’s Second Festival of the Arts Today, a multi-disciplinary celebration of contemporary experimentation that spotlighted the BPO, UB’s arts departments and the Albright-Knox, and featured a staggering array of visiting participants (among the muscians: Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Cage, Henri Pousseur, Xenakis and LaMonte Young). Life continued: 'Buffalo exploded in an avant-garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York.'

"National acclaim was not without precedent during this period. Time magazine expressed similar disbelief when covering the first Festival of the Arts in 1965, calling it 'perhaps the most all-encompassing, hip, with-it, avant-garde presentation in the U.S. to date.'"

--Craig Reynolds, from "Could This Be Buffalo? 40 Years of Experimental Music in Buffalo" (Buffalo Spree, May/June 2005)

"Those years—1965-1973—were the American High Sixties. The Vietnam War was in overdrive through most of the period; the U.S. economy was fat and bloody; academic imperialism was as popular as the political kind. Among Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s ambitions was to establish major university centers at each end and the middle of the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway (Stony Brook, Albany, Buffalo) as a tiara for the Empire State’s 57-campus university system. SUNY/Buffalo therefore was given virtual carte blanche to pirate professors away from other universities and build buildings for them to teach in. At one dizzy point in its planning, Gordoh Bunshaft’s proposed new campus complex for the school was reported to be the largest single architectural project in the world, after Brasilia. Eighty percent of the populous English department I joined had been hired within the preceding two years, as additions to the original staff, so numerous were our illustrious immigrants from raided faculties, troubled marriages, and more straitlaced life-styles, we came to call ourselves proudly the Ellis Island of Academia. The somewhat shabby older buildings and hastily built new ones, all jam-packed and about to be abandoned, reinforced that image.

"The politically active among our faculty and students had their own ambitions for the place: the Berkeley of the East. They wanted no part of Mr. Gunshaft’s suburban New Jerusalem rising from filled-in marshland north of the city ('All great cultures,' my new colleague Leslie Fiedler remarked, 'are built on marshes'). In some humors, as when our government lied with more than usual egregiousness about its war, they wanted little enough of the old campus, either. They struck and trashed; then the police and National Guard struck and trashed them. Mace and peppergas wafted through the academic groves; the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchism were literally waved at English Department faculty-student meetings, which—a sight as astonishing to me as those flags—were attended by hundreds, like an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading with harmonium and Tibetan finger-cymbals.

"Altogether a stimulating place to work through those troubled years: Pop Art popping at the Albright-Knox Museum; strange new music from Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, and their electronic colleagues; dope as ubiquitous as martinis at faculty dinner parties; polluted Lake Erie flushing over Niagara Falls ('the toilet bowl of America,' our Ontario friends called it); and, across the Peace Bridge, endless Canada, to which hosts of our young men fled as their counterparts had done in other of our national convulsions, and from which Professor McLuhan expounded the limitations, indeed the obsolescence, of the printed word in our electronic culture."

—John Barth, introduction to "The Literature of Exhaustion," from The Friday Book (1984)

"During a period when there was not yet any university which was explicitly devoted to media art, at the same time as making its theoretical analysis a component of the curriculum, Gerald O'Grady founded the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973. The entire spectrum of media art—ranging from photographic images to slide installations, from music to film and video performances, from film to film installations, from videotape to video environments, and from computer graphics to interactive installations—was investigated, made a reality, and taught about in the 1970s and 80s, by the structuralist avant-garde film makers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits; the documentary film maker James Blue; and the legendary video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, as well as Peter Weibel—all of whom have subsequently been canonized. In the course of this process, media's role in society [especially that of television] and their participatory possibilities were recognized and used for artistic, and also partly politically democratic, projects. All Buffalo faculty members were not only practicing artists, but also capable of theoretically accompanying the development of and issues around their media, in lectures, essays, and publications. The Department of Media Study's significance for the media era is therefore comparable to that of other historical art schools such as the Bauhaus, WChUTEMAS in Moscow, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The title MindFrames indicates that during this time [the 1970s and 80s] and in this place [Buffalo], a frame of reference for media art was established. During that period, masterpieces were produced—from perceptual issues to machine aesthetics, from word games to mathematical structures—which provided the horizon and set the standards for media discourse's visual codes."

--Excerpt from text accompanying MindFrames: Media Study at Buffalo 1973-1990

"When Robert Longo and Charles Clough, together with a loose collection of like-minded friends, turned a former ice house into an artist-run alternative space in Buffalo, New York in 1974, they were well aware that similar organizations were springing up all over the United States and Canada. But they could not have known that within ten years, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center would be herladed in the art press as "the birthplace of post-modernism," with a reputation for presenting challenging work by artists, mediamakers, performers, musicians, and writers like Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Bloom, Eric Bogosian, Jonathan Borfsky, Lester Bowie, Glenn Branca, Chris Burden, Yoshiko Chume, Tony Conrad, Robert Creeley, Nancy Dwyer, Karen Finley, Eric Fischl, Philip Glass, Mike Glier, Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, John Greyson, Group Material, Holly Hughes, Robert Irwin, Isaac Julien, Mike Kelley, Komar & Melamid, Robbie McCauley, Tim Miller, Joseph Nechvatal, Tony Oursler, Rachel Rosenthal, David Salle, Andres Serrano, Paul Sharits, Cindy Sherman, Michael Snow, Sun Ra, David Wojnarowicz, and Michael Zwack (among literally thousands of others), often early in their careers."

--Back cover blurb for Consider the Alternatives, edited by Ron Ehmke with Elizabeth Licata

"I arrived in Buffalo just shortly after Hallwalls got started and also, an organization that's now gone the way of so many Buffalo institutions, Media Study/Buffalo, and it was an exciting time because of the gush of Rockefeller-inspired state financing for culture. Of course, the idea was that culture money would keep the Left busy and prevent any of that nastiness Rocky had witnessed in the sixties, and it worked to some extent. Now that all of that has been nipped in the bud, it's easier to see that the culture money really didn't sink too deep into the local population. And the result is that nowadays Hallwalls is really bringing in people in big numbers with a somewhat different kind of fare...

"One of the things that Buffalo has preserved, in all of us here, is a feeling of being real, and in fact we call it the City of No Illusions and make a dead cliche out of that by repeating it so often but it's really true. We have everybody here: we've got geniuses and fools, we've got successes and failures––and people who think they are successes but aren't––and we have such a powerful set of ethnic mixes and hatreds that we really stand as a mirror to the country. In the mean-time, we're always bringing outsiders in and discharging ourselves into the rest of the country like some kind of uh, well I don't want to say toxic waste [laughs] . . . like some kind of additive––an additive. And I find Buffalo people everywhere I go! It's astonishing how they wind up in just the right places, whether it's The Kitchen . . . or The Cabaret . . . whether it's a CEO or a uh, comeback musician. And we, in some ways, manage to preserve . . . somehow, this mix that we have is like a preservative that prevents any of us from really going too far in one direction or another. We have aspirations but we don't sacrifice them on the altar of success too much. We run out and make money and have our success but we don't give up our ideals. And so, I guess that this is one of the things that makes Buffalo, for me, a real American laboratory.

"Now I want to turn around and face your question head–on as a media academic: I think Buffalo's demography is one of its great assets. We're full of people who are overqualified, people who will pay attention and who hate their jobs. We may be at each other's throats sometimes––black versus white, suburbs versus urban, adults versus children, the blue versus white collar and so forth but somewhere in all of this, in each part of this, there's a sense of pride and identity which gives me hope that each aspect of the community authorizes its own cultural identity and, sure enough, we can explore all kinds of different directions in music and art and writing and commerce and for that matter, pet shows and tractor-pulls and last but not least, football teams. I'm just bringing all of this up because I think it's fascinating that even the most unusual cultural objects in Buffalo find their own level at some point and the person who lives next door is as likely to be a jewel thief or a symphony oboe player as they are to be an office worker or a street worker."

--Tony Conrad, from "The Basta! Interview" (Basta!, 1998)

Craig,

Your long article on Beckett, Buffalo and Maximillian inspired me to do my first visual piece since late '96. And I'll sell it to you for $8,000 out of my studio or $16,000 from my dealer/gallery in Venice:

© BUFFLUXUS

Most people think of Venice's heyday as somewhere between the end of the fourteenth and the end of the sixteenth centuries. Between 1600 & 1797 (the fall of the Republic), Venice consisted primarily of pimps, gamblers, whores, politicians, thieves . . . and artists. No glory, just misery. And the artists were visionary liars––if only there existed a Venice such as they portrayed it! Napoleon––and later, the Austrians––justified conquering Venice by emphasizing the low degree of moral fiber consistent with its being a capital-driven society––just as in America the rust-belt stigma justifies ignoring older industrial, commerce-driven cities like Buffalo––or worse, conquering them with corporate "sophistications" like chain stores. The similarities between the 2 cities do not end there: originally, the prestige associated with Venice's heyday stemmed from its strategic––and ultimately accidental––location, which made it an ideal east-west sea-port, very much like Buffalo in its time. Further, peopled with sea-merchants and governed by commerce, with a constant influx of foreigners arriving from east and west, Venice's importance declined when in 1497 Vasco da Gama's newly discovered sea-route to the east (around Africa's Cape of Good Hope) rendered the city obsolete––just as the Welland Canal sealed Buffalo's fate at the apex of its prominence. As Venice had done over three hundred years before, Buffalo soon fell into the hands of artists and thieves. Unfortunately, now Venice is the cultural center of the 3 richest regions in the world; however, as the rest of N. Italty is embracing succession or autonomy, the city of Venice remains firmly to the left, having just re-elected a mayor who is endorsed by all of Italty's major Socialist and Communist parties.

***

This fall working at the Guggenheim I was required to give a presentation to the faculty and other interns on whatever topic I desired. Knowing only that I did not want to follow the paths of my European peers, whose ground-breaking formal analyses of Kandinsky and Cubism nearly drove me to fire a pistol indiscriminately into an unsuspecting crowd, I decided on Fluxus (certainly you know about it, but if not, I tell you, it's more Dada than Dada and is all about destruction of construction, and of art and medium––it was perfect because I was researching the movement when I got Basta!. What you wrote about Buffalo living its own death and the artist's role in confronting the silence associated with this death made perfect sense to me; thus I have named this activity Buffluxus (or Neo-Fluxus, or Neo-Neo-Dada [as Fluxus is the most Dada of Neo-Dada]).

5 Propositions for the New Neo-Dada (Buffluxus)

1. Find a building about to be destroyed (in Buffalo, simply close your eyes and point). Sign your name to it (after all, you are the artist!) moments before it is to crash to the ground.

"It's true, Anyone can be a Dadaist [or do Fluxus], but even preconception is ephemeral. I'm part of a generation of true Dadaists."

2. Sign your name to everyone listed as "terminal" at the E.R.

3. Mom and Dad are better Buffluxusists that you or I.

4. I've said the word "Buffluxus" several times already and now it's beginning to mean something.

5. The Movement is now over.

---Kevin Reynolds, personal letter (published in Basta! 1997)

"Murder the Word (“A Multi-Media Celebration of the Unreal”) [conceived of by Craig Reynolds in collaboration with Michael Bauman and Betsy Frazer, at the suggestion of Jason Pfaff], developed into a series of multi-media events (“An All-Over Hypertextual Environment”) that attempted to actualize Basta!’s proposals for fun and funds. The event soon transcended its initial “benefit” function, providing an annual locus for hundreds of “experimental” and boundary-pushing musicians, DJs, poets, visual, video, sound and performance artists. The basic premise was to create temporary “all-over” audio-visual environments awash in hyper-media information chaos, textural drift and ritual noise—that is, to meet dead on the promise of collapse predicted for the turn of the millennium."--CR

"The Soundlab series at Big Orbit Gallery [overseen by Executive Director Sean Donaher, and directed by CR, at the suggestion of Gallery Associate Leah Rico, in 2001] grew out of the need to unpack the annual avant-garde holiday and spread its contents over the course of a year. In the beginning, the programming was defined by meta-presentation—investigations of the act of presentation--and ultimately, the employment of oblique strategies reminiscent of the larger conceptual structure of Murder the Word. The earliest Soundlab Series events, the first of which was an “all-over ambient noise” environment celebrating the release of what would turn out to be the last issue of Basta!, were homespun and experimental, activating conceptual blueprints whose actual outcomes were largely unforseeable (as opposed to the presentation of “rehearsed” works, or suites of music by touring bands)."--CR

"The first dedicated Soundlab space was established in 2001 [by CR-- featuring programming overseen by SD--in collaboration with Betsy Frazer, and with significant help by Michael Bauman, LR, Aaron Miller, Ben O'Brien, John Long and others] on the first floor of the building where the last Murder the Word was thrown. "Dedicated to the music, media and performance of Big Orbit Gallery," Soundlab "references club culture in order to collapse traditional presentation methods, but challenges the contemporary entertainment status quo through its dedication to unconventional, experimental, genre-elusive and avant-garde work.""--CR

"In 2003, the Soundlab program once again relocated, this time to its current home, in the basement vaults of the historic Dun Building [venue established by CR and SD in collaboration with MB and BF, and with the help of many volunteers]. Reconsidering avant-garde practice in the era of post-millenial spectacle, Soundlab hopes to advance strategies that promote action--artistically, the production of music, media and performance--as essential to authetically engaging absence (the Buffalo dilemma) and the deafening silence of modern media noise. It's also a good place to have fun."--CR

Crippled Symmetry (What Would Morton Feldman Do?)

Choose Your Own Adventure