this week in music

BELLA GAIA

Art and science converge in multimedia BELLA GAIA

BEAUTIFUL EARTH: A POETIC VISION OF EARTH FROM SPACE
Eyebeam Art & Technology Center
540 West 21st St. between 10th & 11th Aves.
May 15-16, $25-$30, 8:00
www.bellagaia.com
eyebeam.org

Composer, director, and violinist Kenji Williams has been touring the world with Bella Gaia: A Poetic Vision of Earth from Space an immersive multimedia exploration of the planet as seen by astronauts. Produced in association with NASA, Bella Gaia, which translates as “Beautiful Earth,” features an eight-piece ensemble performing live in front of a large-screen backdrop showing views of Earth, with Deep Singh on tabla, vocals, and percussion, Yumi Kurosawa on koto, Lety Ellaggar on nay and sax, Kristin Hoffmann on vocals and keyboards, and Williams on violin and laptop, with dance by Irina Akulenko, Lale Sayoko, and Kaeshi Chai. Bella Gaia comes to Eyebeam Art & Technology Center for two shows on May 15 and 16 at 8:00, taking viewers on a fantastical and environmental journey across land, sea, and sky, a “living atlas” that travels from the Amazon to the Arctic, revealing natural beauty and man-made wonders as the Anthropocene continues. “Bella Gaia shows you how humans and nature are connected, and how art and science are connected,” Williams explains. “Itʼs an exploration of the relationship between human civilization and our ecosystem.”

VIDEO OF THE DAY ― MAN FOREVER: “SURFACE PATTERNS”

Brooklyn-based experimental drummer and composer John Colpitts, also known as Kid Millions, has played percussion with such groups as Oneida and the Boredoms. Next week he is set to release his second album as Man Forever, Pansophical Cataract (Thrill Jockey, May 15, 2012). Inspired by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, the album consists of two long tracks built around propulsive drum rolls that sound as if they are about to introduce something that never quite arrives. But both the thirty-minute “Surface Patterns” and the forty-minute “UR Eternity” are filled with little surprises as they unfold, electric instruments or bass adding bits of drone, mystery, and nuance here and there. It’s like an audio version of Michael Snow’s avant-garde classic Wavelength, in which a camera makes its way slowly across an apartment, oblivious to anything that happens in the room as it approaches the wall ― and then beyond. For the “Surface Patterns” video, Colpitts recruited a group of musicians who have played with Man Forever, including Sarah Richardson, Richard Hoffman, Brad Truax, Shahin Motia, Leah McManigle, and Brian Chase; on May 15, Richardson, Hoffman, Motia, and Chase, along with James McNew, Bryan Devendorf, Ryan Sawyer, Greg Fox, and Oran Canfield, will join Kid Millions for an album release party at (le) poisson rouge, with the Colin Langenus Orchestra and Nymph opening the show. Man Forever then heads out across the country before returning for performances June 29 at Issue Project Room and July 11 at the Stone.

SUNDAY SESSIONS: TARYN SIMON

Taryn Simon examines her new photography installation at MoMA and will discuss it on May 13 at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A LIVING MAN DEAD AND OTHER CHAPTERS I-XVIII
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, May 14, $10, 12 noon – 6:00
718-784-2084
www.ps1.org

As it prepares for its summer Warm Up series, MoMA PS1’s final Sunday Sessions program will be held on May 13. In addition to your last chance to see the exhibitions “Darren Bader: Images” and “Kraftwerk ― Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” both of which close on Monday, legendary DJ Afrika Bambaataa will pay tribute to the German electronic music pioneers from 3:00 to 6:00 in the Performance Dome. Also at 3:00, artbook @ moma ps1 will host the book discussion group “A Short Course on Resistance.” Food will be available from Long Island City favorites M. Wells, and the exhibitions “Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out,” “Max Brand: no solid footing ― (trained) duck fighting a crow,” “Rania Stephan,” and “Frances Stark: My Best Thing” will also be open. We’re most looking forward to the 2:00 conversation between native New York artist Taryn Simon and MoMA PS1 associate curator Jenny Schlenzka on the occasion of the publication of Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII, the catalog to the exhibition currently on view in MoMA’s photography wing. Native New Yorker Simon, whose “Contraband” filled the Lever House lobby in late 2010 with thousands of photos of items that were confiscated at JFK International Airport, has now turned her attention on bloodlines, cataloging families from around the world, organizing them in very specific order, accompanied by photos of documents and other paraphernalia relating to their story. Nine of the chapters can be seen at MoMA, including the Indian Yadav clan, which is fighting to regain land they lost when Shivdutt Yadav was wrongly listed as being deceased; the Ondijos of Kenya, where HIV/AIDS doctor Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo has nine wives, thirty-two children, and sixty-three grandchildren; the sadly small Mehićs and Nukićs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims of genocide; the Chinese family of Su Qijian, declared by China’s State Council Information Office as the best representative of multigenerational Chinese bloodlines; and a large group of children living in a Ukrainian orphanage. Simon also spends one chapter depicting dozens of Australian rabbits used for experimentation that ultimately died during the tests or were later euthanized. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, which continues at MoMA through September 3, is a fascinating, involving collection of photographs of life and death, of science and politics, of the known and the unknown, intricately organized and arranged to create a complex, compelling visual narrative.

CAGE TRANSMITTED

John Cage centennial celebration continues at Triple Canopy on May 10

Triple Canopy
155 Freeman St.
Thursday, May 10, $5 suggested donation, 7:30
canopycanopycanopy.com

John Cage, who died in 1992 just short of his eightieth birthday, would have turned one hundred this September. Brooklyn’s Triple Canopy continues its centenary salute to the highly influential musician, composer, artist, and theoretician on May 10 with the fourth part of Cage Transmitted: Celebrating + Playing John Cage, examining Cage within the context of his relationship with Marcel Duchamp, a friend and collaborator as well as a major inspiration. On Thursday night, Robert Whitman, whose work was recently featured at the Pace Gallery’s fine “Happenings” exhibition, will present “Inside Out,” a multimedia performance first staged at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1987 and based on Ulf Linde’s lectures on Duchamp. That will be followed by the first-ever public screening of Cage at the Dwan Gallery in 1982 reading his radio play, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, in which Cage meets the ghosts of Duchamp, Joyce, and Satie as well as thirteen other characters, from Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol to Brigham Young and Mao Zedong. It should be a fascinating evening.

CALYPSO

Bushwick Starr
207 Starr St., Brooklyn
May 9-12, $10-$15, 7:30
646-361-8512
thebushwickstarr.org

Last spring, Brooklynites Paul Rome and Roarke Menzies presented the one-act Calypso at the Storefront Gallery in Bushwick. This week they’re back with an extended evening-length version of the production, running May 9-12 at the Bushwick Starr. Calypso sets a modern-day romance against elements from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. As a young man and woman bond over Haruki Murakami and old calypso records in the West Village, Penelope waits for her husband, and Aeneas considers his future atop Mount Olympus. The show is written by Rome, inspired by such monologists as Joe Frank and Spalding Gray, with experimental electronic music supplied by Menzies. Rome and Menzies, who will read alternating narratives, have previously collaborated on And Once Again . . ., about a jazz record collector about to make a big score, and The You Trilogy.

VIDEO OF THE DAY — JASON URICK: “AGELESS ISMS”

Portland experimental musician Jason Urick has taken listeners on sonic adventures into extraterrestrial space and beyond on such albums as 2009’s Husbands, 2010’s Fussing & Fighting, and 2011’s Title King collaboration with Cex, citing such wide-ranging influences as John Cassavetes, Pavement, Marco Ferreri, Sebadoh, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Bee Gees, and Jah Shaka. On his latest album, I Love You (Thrill Jockey, January 2012), he continues his exploration of ambient sound on five tracks ultimately put together on his laptop. “I began to use the phrase ‘I Love You’ as a mantra of sorts while working on this material,” Urick says about the album. “Running the phrase over and over in my head until the words started to break down and render the phrase foreign again. In these meditations I became more at peace with the music making process and more unsure/unfamiliar with it at the same time. This feeling spilled over into my understanding of myself going from feeling very in tune in body and mind to completely adrift in a large universe, again in very rapid succession until all that remained was a vibration.” Consisting of “Don’t Digital,” “Ageless Isms,” “The Crying Song,” “Syndromes,” and the title track, the album imbues the technology with an emotional resonance that results in hypnotic multilayered sonic excursions with a heartbeat all their own. Urick will be featuring songs from the new album at Cameo Gallery on May 8 on a bill with Doe Paoro, Future Shuttle, and a DJ set by Ital.

JOHN CHAMBERLAIN: CHOICES

John Chamberlain, “SPHINXGRIN TWO,” aluminum, 2010 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through May 13, $18 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

It is a shame that Indiana-born, Chicago-raised sculptor John Chamberlain didn’t live long enough to see the revelatory career retrospective at the Guggenheim, on view through May 13. While working with the museum on the exhibition, Chamberlain passed away in December at the age of eighty-four, but he left behind a legacy that flourishes at this outstanding show. Chamberlain’s most familiar oeuvre, twisted metal sculptures made from car parts, along with splendid works made from other materials, are laid out chronologically through Frank Lloyd Wright’s twisting passageway, with the first thing that jumps out at visitors being the color. Chamberlain’s automobile sculptures are like three-dimensional Abstract Expressionist and Pop paintings that have jumped off the canvas, breathing with an inner life that is intoxicating. The works, lush with blues, greens, yellows, and reds, are not mere mash-ups of fenders and front quarter panels but are carefully constructed and painted steel sculptures with such playful names as “Lord Suckfist,” “Miss Lucy Pink,” “Hatband,” “Sugar Tit,” and “Rooster Starfoot.” Chamberlain said, “It’s all in the fit,” and the works at the Guggenheim fit together extremely well. “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” resembles a quartet of Balzac-like figures. A series of untitled square collages from the early 1960s hang on the walls like oil canvases, except their various elements jut out into space.

John Chamberlain takes a seat in his studio (photo by Robert McKeever, courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

In the mid-1960s, Chamberlain began experimenting with lacquer, Formica, and foam, resulting in such works as “Untitled #7,” a sculpture of fruit made from urethane foam, cord, cloth, paint, and wooden beads, and “Couch,” a foam installation on which visitors can take a seat or lie down. Chamberlain continued working through to the very end, using materials from vintage cars to create such pieces as “HAWKFLIESAGAIN” and “PEAUDESOIEMUSIC” over the last two years, in addition to the twisted aluminum “SPHINXGRIN TWO,” which stands in the museum’s rotunda, and the steel “C’ESTZESTY” that rises outside on Fifth Ave. In some ways Chamberlain can also be seen as an early recycler, his works reusing materials that were not merely found objects but specifically chosen, now gathered at the Guggenheim in a dazzling display that justly celebrates this great American artist. In conjunction with “John Chamberlain: Choices,” on May 8 artist Amy Sillman will lead an Eye to Eye private gallery tour of the show, on May 10 the Divine Ricochet Music Series concludes with a performance in the rotunda by Zola Jesus with JG Thirlwell, and on May 12 artist and conservator Corey D’Augustine will teach the all-day workshop “AbEx3D: Abstract Expressionism in Sculpture.”