Ikue Mori 3 Day Residency - A 3-day Pass

Event information

Ikue Mori has been a leading figure in New York's experimental music scene for over 30 years. Her unique mix of free improvisation, echoes of popular song, contemporary composition, noise, film music, experimental electronics, and influences from the visual arts and literature has established her as one of the world's most interesting and sought after musicians. She has worked with, amongst others, John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Zeena Parkins (in the Phantom Orchard project), Fred Frith & Hideki Kater (in the group Death Ambient), vocalist Tenko (in the duo Death Praxis), DJ Olive and Dave Douglas.

Her musical journey started in 1977, when visiting New York from her native Japan, she started playing drums and formed seminal No Wave group DNA with fellow noise pioneers Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. DNA enjoyed legendary cult status, creating a new brand of radical rhythms and dissonant sounds, and forever altering the face of rock music.

In the mid 1980s, she started to employ drum machines in the unlikely context of improvised music. While limited to the standard technology provided by the drum machine, she nevertheless forged her own highly sensitive signature style, using a multiple array of dequantified machines augmented by samplers. By trying to make the drum machine “sound broken” she “founded a new world for the instrument, taking it far beyond backing rhythms and robotic fills” (Adam Strohm, Dusted)

In 2000, she started using the laptop computer to expand on her already signature sound, broadening her scope of musical expression, and opening up new worlds of sound and possibilities of musical interaction.

In recent years she has appeared at the Tate Modern, performing specially commissioned soundtracks to the films of American surrealist film maker Maya Deren, revisited dance rhythms on the CD Class Insecta, curated the Music Unlimited festival in Austria, made an animated DVD of the journey of the soul from hell to heaven (Bhima Swarga, Tzadik), and had her musical career celebrated by the Japan Society in New York with a series of events curated by John Zorn.

Thursday: with John Edwards / Evan Parker / John Russell

For the first night of the residency, Ikue is joined for an electro-acoustic quartet by Evan Parker, John Russell and John Edwards, three of the most fluent and powerful musicians working in the field of improvised music today.

“Parker (here on soprano and tenor) seems to defy any logic of uniformity, everything heard from him revealing — in each and every instance — a plethora of alternative solutions and quicksilverish intuitions informed by the flexible intelligence of a performer whose melodic concepts predate the future of decades. The interaction with Russell's guitar is unequivocally brilliant: apparently infinite unidiomatic propagations, consistent dynamism sparkling with radiant harmonics, intricate sonic poetry exuding from the crackles of fingerings and lines. Edwards contributes to this viscerally refined exchange by instinctively inserting splendid arco suggestions between all those splintered statements, or by pummeling the low-frequency bag in an unintentional depiction of his resilient vision, ultimately resulting as the trio's collating factor.” - Massimo Ricci, The Squid's Ear

Friday: audiovisual improvisations with Steve Beresford / Mark Nauseef / Pat Thomas

The visual has always been an important element in Ikue's work, from her cover designs for Tzadik and other labels to composing music for films by Maya Deren, Abigail Child and others. She has increasingly incorporated her own improvised visuals as part of her performances. For the second night of her residency, Ikue will be joined by American percussionist Mark Nauseef and the double piano/electronics of Steve Beresford and Pat Thomas for an evening of audiovisual improvisations.

Saturday: trio with John Butcher / Chris Cutler

Since her days with DNA, Ikue has gradually reduced her kit from acoustic drums to drum machines to laptop computer. The third night of the residency sees her playing with two musicians who also have distinctive approaches to technology and physicality in music. Chris Cutler uses electronics to radically expand the sonic range of his drumkit and generate an almost orchestral barrage of sound. John Butcher pushes both the machinery of the saxophone and his own physical capabilities to the limit, producing sounds which hover between noise and music and which inject a strange and powerful physicality into any musical situation.

Links:
http://ikuemori.com/
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=6082