2018
New Ear Festival 2020
Monday, January 6 – Sunday, January 12

ONGOING INSTALLATION
Curated by Aki Onda
Presented with Wave Farm
Made possible by the UP Center for Ethnomusicology
2–5pm daily and before performances
José Maceda’s Ugnayan was an expansive audience participatory work for radio to be broadcast at 6 PM on New Year’s Day, 1974. Arguably the most ambitious, provocative, and controversial work in his repertoire, the fifty-one-minute-long piece consisted of twenty separate tracks, each to be played on a different public radio frequency simultaneously, producing a musical atmosphere at the scale of the city. All thirty-seven radio stations in the metropolitan Manila area turned over their channel for Maceda’s sound diffusion, with some tracks playing from multiple stations. Millions of listeners tuned in. Manila’s parks, plazas, and street corners were converted into what the composer called “Ugnayan Centers”—142 locations in all. In one of the biggest, 15,000 people congregated, their personal radios creating a stunningly knotted mass of sounds.
During the festival, Aki Onda will restage this piece at the front of the gallery space. In addition to the 20 transmitters and 20 radios installed at the gallery, visitors are encouraged to bring their own FM transistor radios and contribute to the installation by tuning into one of the transmitting frequencies.
PERFORMANCES
Tuesday, January 7
8pm
Adelaide Damoah
Into the Mind of the Colonizer
Adelaide Damoah is a British artist of Ghanaian descent working at the intersection of painting and performance within the context of colonialism, identity, sexuality and spirituality. Damoah has spent years searching for books, stamps, photos, and maps relating to the British Empire. Recently she found an archive of out of print books relating to the Empire printed between the mid 17th and mid 19th century and will bring these documents to life through a participatory performance.
9pm
Theodore Darst and Kevin Carey
Collected Sessions
Darst and Carey will premiere their improvised animations and sound in a live public setting.
Theodore Darst is an artist living and working in New York City. He makes video diary animations and prints about his relationship to projective geometry.
Kevin Carey is a Massachusetts-based musician. His work spans film scoring, sound installation, and audio-visual performance.
10pm
Victoria Keddie
We'll Melt Away Before We Land
Two performing bodies in real time will transmit a multichannel video and sound score exchange between Copenhagen (Keddie) and New York City (Mariangela Lopez).
Victoria Keddie is an artist working in varying media and broadcast. Keddie’s work explores electromagnetic systems, media ecologies, and the machinic body. For over 7 years, she has been the Co-Director of E.S.P. TV, a 501(C)3 nomadic TV studio, and episodic cable access serial, that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance.
Wednesday, January 8
8–11pm
Dario Calmese presents Gabriel, an experiential extension of the artist’s ongoing project The Art of Black Men Loving Black Men. Invoking Marlon Riggs’ proclaimation that “Black men loving Black Men is the revolutionary act,” Gabriel fuses black and queer ideologies with the Abrahimic archangel’s proclamations of creation (Islam), political turmoil (Judaism), and salvation (Christianity).
Headlined by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter of The Roots, the evening also features artist Zachary Tye Richardson, South African singer Vuyo Sotashe, violin duo Onyx Violins, and Brother Paul Daniels II.
Thursday, January 9
8pm
Sa’dia Rehman
The story of the tracings of all the persons before us and after them
Sa'dia Rehman projects images from her archive—family photographs from the 1960s to the present, mass media images from U.S. news outlets, and a variety of other sources. She traces them on the wall as a live drawing, exploring how these public and private records communicate, consolidate, and contest ideas about race, power, and gender.
9pm
Model Home
Emergence
Model Home (Patrick Cain, electronics, and Nappy Nappa, vocals) will present an improvised performance for voice, tape, and electronics, as part of an ongoing inspection into creativity, discovery, and emergence of new ideas. Through a lens of real time re-arrangement of ideas and sounds, the artists create spaces that open possibilities of communication and world-building discovery.
10pm
Brandon Lopez and TAK Ensemble
Commission premiere
Brandon Lopez is a New York–based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times).
TAK Ensemble is Laura Cocks (flute), Lester St. Louis (clarinet), Charlotte Mundy (vocals), Marina Kifferstein (violin), and Ellery Trafford (percussion).
Friday, January 10
8pm
The Dream Mapping Project
Seeing Through Corners
The Dream Mapping Project presents its latest art film Seeing Through Corners, featuring members of the troupe and a 15 minute performance, Kanika, involving spoken word, original music, and dance.
The Dream Mapping Project is a group of international artists and researchers exploring the archetypal language of dreams through analysis and improvisational embodiment.
9pm
Allard van Hoorn
072 Urban Songline (Ellis Island Film Filters)| Latitude: 40.690012° N – 40.702417° N / Longitude: -74.016910° W – -74.046767° W
Allard van Hoorn presents a new series of images shot from Battery Park facing Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty using Rosco cinematic gels, applied in the film-industry and theater to create specific moods, of which he will play the wavelength-patterns as musical scores by mapping them in a graphical Moog synthesizer.
10pm
Susie Ibarra and DreamTime Ensemble
Fragility: An Exploration of Polyrhythms
Drummer/composer Susie Ibarra’s immersive performance uses polyrhythms as a model for human interdependence. She conceives the musical structure of Fragility as a ‘game piece’ in which the rules require performers to take turns conducting action: shifting roles and perspectives in live experimentation. Ibarra leads the audience into a mesmerizing musical environment as multi-layered, expansive sonic textures flood the room.
DreamTime Ensemble Jennifer Choi (violin), Yves Dharamraj (cello) Yuka Honda (electronics), Jake Landau (guitars/keyboards), Claudia Acuña (vocals), Susie Ibarra (drumset & percussion)
Saturday, January 11
8pm
Sophia Petrides
BREATHING WITH THE ROOM
A deep listening experience and sonic journey through the outer/political and inner/existential space, from the unreality of the seen to the reality of the unseen. The scenes follow unidentified characters who take trips daily from the privacy of their intimate space—Home, Mother, Father and Child figures—to the public space of the sociopolitical domain. As an exercise in withdrawal into one’s self through the aural properties of space and time, the work strives to rekindle the cognitive, emotional, and moral properties that have atrophied under capitalism.
9pm
William Hooker
Symphonie Excerpts
The legendary composer and drummer brings his quartet to play excerpts from his new record, Symphonie of Flowers.
"William Hooker is an artistic whole, a vast circle of vision and execution. A body of uninterrupted work beginning in the mid-seventies defines him as one of the most important composers and players in jazz. As bandleader, Hooker has fielded ensembles in an incredibly diverse array of configurations. Each collaboration has brought a serious investigation of his compositional agenda and the science of the modern drum kit. As a player, Hooker has long been known for the persuasive power of his relationship with his instrument. His work is frequently grounded in a narrative context. Whether set against a silent film or anchored by a poetic theme, Hooker brings dramatic tension and human warmth to avant-garde jazz. His ability to find fertile ground for moving music in a variety of settings that obliterate genre distinctions offers a much-needed statement of social optimism in the arts.”
— Thomas Stanley.
10pm
Joanna Mattrey
veiled
Album release
An album release celebration for veiled out on Relative Pitch Records exploring solo improvised and prepared viola.
Joanna Mattrey is a violist active in both the new music and free improvisation communities who's playing often incorporates textural gestures, preparations, and electronic alterations. She is searching for moments of ceremony and ritual in a modern soundscape. Mattrey has played with such luminaries as Marc Ribot and the Young Philadelphians, Mary Halvorson, John Zorn, Erik Friedlander, Nick Dunston and others among New York City's Downtown scene.
Sunday, January 12
8pm
MV Carbon/Muyassar Kurdi
16mm films
MV Carbon and Muyassar Kurdi present their short films: Carbon’s The Bridge (2002); Fear Implantation Vapor Theory (2003); and The Pillow (2019); and Kurdi’s Travelling (2017); A Song for Many Women (2018); and Field Dances (2019).
Muyassar Kurdi is a New York City–based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, analog photography and film. MV Carbon’s work encompasses live performance, sound art, film, multimedia installation, and music. Her work amplifies the level of ritual, rhythm, and momentum in sound and movement.
9pm
Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.) + Ting Ding
Her Velocity; like a foreign (after)image, renders her opaque
Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.) presents Her Velocity; like a foreign (after)image, renders her opaque in collaboration with statistical analyst/visual designer Ting Ding. Attuning to a vibrational ontology through an empathetic “touching of frequencies,” Her Velocity... figures a coda to Speaker Music's debut album of desire, longing. Speaker Music decontextualizes digital audio in real-time, extending sonic narratives previously innovated by electronic and jazz musicians such as Les McCann, Urban Tribe and James Stinson.
The annual New Ear Festival fulfills one of Fridman Gallery's core missions—to help restore creative, experimental spirit on the ground floor level of downtown Manhattan. The festival showcases time-based art in all its forms—from sound installations and video screenings to storytelling and physical movement. Each evening will be live-streamed via Wave Farm / WGXC-90.7 FM.
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