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

We’re celebrating the fifth Unseen Worlds Records release – Elodie Lauten “Piano Works” 2CD collection - with a listening party on some of the very sublime sounding stereos at Whetstone Audio at 5pm. The audio will be enhanced by the inclusion of some Paris Manhattan cocktails, given that Lauten is a Parisian living in Manhattan, along with the usual beers or byo. Tips will be appreciated but not required, and we’ll of course have albums for sale.

Following the listening party we’ll have a concert at Baby Blue to celebrate.

Starting at 8pm:

Nick Hennies performing his Psalms solo-percussion works and a piece by Alvin Lucier

followed by

J.D. Emmanuel, whose 1982 private-press, meditative synth improvizations LP “Wizards” will soon be reissued by Important Records

Proceedings should be over by 10pm so you can have successfully prepartied for whatever comes next that night (i.e. R U FIT at Cheer Up Charlies)

The Baby Blue show will have a $5 suggested cover at the door and there will be drinks on hand to make it worthwhile.

We recommend riding your bike to and from these events, though parking is available.

RSVP on Facebook here.

Come on out if you’re in the Austin area.

With this we also bring you the second installment of video from Lauten’s 1985 performance at Music Gallery in Toronto.  This is video of the extended piece Sonate Modale which is featured on Piano Works Revisited. Also available to view on YouTube.

This past November we produced a joint solo-piano concert for “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Lubomyr Melnyk.  The concert was a great success in large part for the gift of “Blue” Gene Tyranny composing a new piece in honor of the occasion. The piece, entitled “George Fox Searches,” was inspired by the beautiful 15th Street Friends Meetinghouse of Manhattan where the concert was held.

Our professional live recording came out terrific, but we’d love to have the opportunity to document a performance on a piano of our choosing, since the piano at the Meetinghouse had some bad keys. Tyranny has other new pieces, as well, which we would document in studio at the same time.

We are humbly asking for your contributions to make this happen.  In return for your generous support of the studio time, we’re sharing the audio and video documentation from the November 12, 2009 concert, as well as opportunities to receive advance recordings from the studio sessions we aim to book.

Please note that the Lubomyr Melnyk portion of the evening will be made available separately at a later date.

Thank you all for your interest and support.

• 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).

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Set for release in March 2010 is the fifth installment of Unseen Worlds releases, Elodie Lauten Piano Works Revisited.

Piano Works Revisited is a 2CD collection that includes, for the first time on CD, the complete Piano Works (1983) and Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory (1984) Cat Collectors LPs with original artwork, Lauten’s solo piano magnum-opus Variations on the Orange Cycle, and other previously unreleased music.

A preorder option is available here.