Buy Tickets | Admission: $10 ($9 advance, $8 members)

Bill Baird

Bill Baird is a multi talented musician from Austin, Texas. Known to most for his prolific songwriting and pop productions under the names Sunset and Sound Team, Baird is at heart a musical experimenter without boundaries. The dynamic nature of his approach to songwriting leads to an always-evolving sound, constantly reaching for its true shape yet never settling in on form. With his album Silence! (an August 2010 release on the Austin label Autobus) he has created a rich, analog ambient recording akin to the Folkways records of Craig Kupka and the meditations of early Kranky releases. Silence! is awash with the heavy sonic textures of pianos sent through 24 stereo delays, french horn, and a variety of acoustic instrumentation. For this special ISSUE Project Room performance, Bill Baird will perform live arrangements of the pieces from the album in ensemble with Erica Dicker, Tucker Dulin, Dave Ruder, Nathan Stein, Alexander Waterman, Karen Waltuch, Kenny Wang, and Katherine Young.

Loren Connors

Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors’ singular adpation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors’ three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O’Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Issue Project Room homepage

• Carl Stone has a very interesting half-hour live broadcast concert coming up on February 24th via the unitedArtscene website.  Note: all their broadcast times are in Pacific Standard Time. Stone will also be performing March 5th at 7:30pm at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum (link).

• Lubomyr Melnyk will be performing two concerts in North America in the coming weeks.  The first is at the University of Victoria on February 27th (link), which will hold the world premiere of “Windmills”, for multiple taped and live pianos.  Following that will be a jaunt over to Seattle for a March 2nd concert in the Wayward Music Series.

• Elodie Lauten has a couple of charity events to benefit Haiti in March featuring a new program of tango compositions for keyboard inspired by the French songs of her childhood in Paris and her experience of New York and Argentinian Milonga.  The first takes place at Public Assembly in Brooklyn, NY on March 12th.  The next is March 27th at the Lafayette Bar in NYC.

Lauten will also be performing piano compositions from her soon to be released 2CD Piano Works Revisited in April at the Gershwin Hotel.  More details on that to come.

• “Blue” Gene Tyranny will perform in NYC on April 15th at Roulette with violinist Conrad Harris, premiering new 4 new electro-acoustic works (link).

ONE NIGHT SPECIAL EVENT

Fifteenth Street Friends Meetinghouse (Manhattan)
15 Rutherford Place
New York, NY 10003

Thursday
November 12, 2009
7:00pm – 9:00pm

Cost: $15 / $10 Students and Seniors
Advance tickets

On Thursday evening, November 12th, 2009, Unseen Worlds presents a night of piano music at 15th Street Friends Meetinghouse in Manhattan, only 3 blocks walking distance from 14th Street Union Square.

Composers “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Lubomyr Melnyk will each perform full sets of their own piano works.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny’s piano work, well-known in the Downtown New York scene since the 1970s and proven beautifully in the Lovely Music releases The Intermediary and Take Your Time, has only become more and more well loved and revered with each passing year. His appearance at this concert is very special and greatly appreciated.

Lubomyr Melnyk’s reputation has been slowly and quietly building. Over the last 30 years Melnyk has crafted a massive catalog of artistically demanding and aesthetically beautiful works, outpacing a means of documenting and publicizing them. Recently, with public admiration from popular musical figures like James Blackshaw and Jim O’Rourke, Melnyk’s reputation and fan base is larger than ever. This event is only his second New York appearance ever and his first in 20 years since he first performed at the Ukrainian Institute in 1989. Please join us in welcoming his music back into the States.

It’s with great honor and excitement that we present these two artists in a truly rare meeting. We look forward to seeing all who attend. Special thanks to the Arts Committee at the Meetinghouse for making this event possible.

LINK TO FULL PRESS RELEASE

The Society for Music and Minimalism is preparing to host their second international conference on minimalism September 2-6, 2009 in Kansas City, Missouri.  Part of their impressive lineup of performance and lecture includes a performance of Elodie Lauten’s “Adamantine Sonata” by Sarah Cahill during her Friday program.  The original recording of the work was included on her 1983 LP, Piano Works, soon to be reissued on an Unseen Worlds 2CD of Lauten piano works.

Of unique interest also will be the reemergence of piano works by Harold Budd (of ambient Eno fame) and Dennis Johnson (of lengthy La Monte Young fame).  More details on all this can be found at the official website and within some of Kyle Gann’s working blog posts on Arts Journal.

In advance of the piano works retrospective we are working on with Elodie Lauten comes this performance, June 13th, 2009 at Issue Project Room in New York.  Elodie Lauten will perform works of her own selection from the past 25 years including:

Revelation
Adamantine Sonata
Alien Heart
Cat Counterpoint
Sonate Modale
Reason and Blue
Variations on the Orange Cycle
Habanera (mp3)
Tango (mp3)

Please don’t miss this special event.  Performances start at 8pm with Bing and Ruth opening.

Renowned flutist Andrew Bolotowsky will be performing “ORANGE:  Modular Music from the Deus Ex Machina Cycle” by Elodie Lauten as part of his Where are the Women? concert program on Saturday, May 9 at 3:00 PM at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, 135 Broadway at the corner of Bedford, right next to the Williamsburg Bridge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York.  Admission is $10.

Other composers on the program include Ruth Crawford Seeger, Jennifer Post, Joyce Suskind, Sorrel Hays, Tui St. George Tucker, Deborah Sandival Thurlow, Lenore Von Stein, Beth Anderson, Lynn Wilson, Judith Sainte Croix and Anne Tardos.

Find a copy of the now out-of-print Deus Ex Machina Cycle on 2CD via Amazon.