From Fire Over Heaven curator Che Chen: A few days shy of the vernal equinox, Fire Over Heaven preempts the slow trudge out of winter with a doozy of a bill featuring Okkyung Lee, Lea Bertucci and David First’s Western Enisphere. Heavies one and all, we can’t believe we’ve got them all on one night… Cellist Okkyung Lee has played with everyone from Laurie Anderson to Cecil Taylor, but she’s probably flipped the most switches with her seat-of-the-pants-force-of-nature solo improvisations, and she’ll be doing just that this evening. Electro-acoustic alto saxophonist, Lea Bertucci just dropped a new LP on NNA Tapes of music for horn extended in just about every possible way — via technique, architecture, magnetic tape, etc. I caught her amazing duo set with Tashi Dorji last November, and her alto playing was all pulsating ribbons of sound. Thrilled at the prospect of hearing her dig into this sonic territory solo. Last but not least, microtonal, long tone juggernaut and FOH perennials, Western Enisphere will close out the night. They played an absolutely stunning set to a practically empty room at FOH back in July (Fushitsusha was playing in Redhook that night…) and I immediately vowed to have them back. It’s a great ensemble and they’ve been going deep with these intervals for a good long while now, so they’re sure to get the room humming.
7:30pm doors
8:00pm Lea Bertucci
9:00pm Okkyung Lee
10:00pm David First’s Western Enisphere
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Lea Bertucci is an American composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her instrumental practice, (alto saxophone and bass clarinet), her work often incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique and tape collage. Deeply experimental, her work is unafraid to subvert musical expectation. Her discography includes a number of solo and collaborative releases on independent labels in the US and Europe, including I Dischi Del Barone, Obsolete Units, Telegraph Harp and Clandestine Compositions. In 2017, she released All That is Solid Melts Into Air: Works for Strings, on NNA Tapes. She has performed extensively across the US and Europe at venues such as The Kitchen, PS1 MoMA, The Drawing Center, Anthology Film Archives, Abrons Arts, The Walker Museum, Madison Square Park, ISSUE Project Room, Pioneer Works, The Queens Museum, Artists’ Space, Caramoor, The High Zero Festival, and Experimental Intermedia, among many others. She is a 2016 MacDowell Fellow in composition and a 2015 ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residence.
http://lea-bertucci.com/
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Okkyung Lee:
Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between of artistic disciples and contingencies. Since moving to New York in 2000 she has worked in disparate contexts as a solo artist and collaborator with creators in a wide range of disciplines. A native of South Korea, Lee has taken a broad array of inspirations—including noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and the traditional and popular music of her homeland—and used them to forge a highly distinctive approach. Her curiosity and a determined sense of exploration guide the work she has made in disparate contexts.
https://www.okkyunglee.info/
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David First’s Western Enisphere is:
Jeanann Dara – viola
Sam Kulik – trombone
Danny Tunick – percussion/conductor
Will Stanton – laptop
David First – guitar/harmonica/slide whistle/composer/laptop programming
The Western Enisphere was formed in the spring of April 2012 by David First and Jeanann Dara with the intention of developing a body of hyper-minimalist, audio/video just intonation/microtonal works steeped in First’s concepts of Gestural Improvisation, which he defines as a set of procedures that isolates those musical elements traditionally considered ornamentation or aspects of expression and elevating them to the level of most significant extrapolative detail. It is a virtuosity of slowness and safecracker focus, with the goal of both resonating with, and attempting to subvert, the laws of nature.
David First has always been fascinated by opposites and extremes. At 20 he played guitar with renowned avant-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor in a legendary Carnegie Hall concert. Two years later he was creating electronic music as an artist-in- residence at Princeton (released in 2013 on Dais records) and leading a Mummerʼs String Band in Philadelphia parades. He has played in raucous drunken bar bands, semi-legal DIY basements and in pin-drop quiet concert halls with classical ensembles. As a composer First has created everything from finely crafted pop songs to long, severely minimalist microtonal droneworks. His AIDS crisis opera, The Manhattan Book of the Dead, was staged at LaMama’s Annex Theater (NYC) in 1995 and in Potsdam, Germany in 1996. His 2011 song, We Are (featuring TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone), was released to much acclaim in the Occupy Movement and was officially released on the compilation Occupy This Album which also featured tracks by Patti Smith, Willie Nelson, Yoko Ono a.o. First’s performances often find him sitting trance-like without seeming to move a muscle, unless he is playing with his psychedelic punk band, Notekillers, at which time he is a whirling blur of hyperactive energy. He has been called “a fascinating artist with a singular technique” in the NYTimes, and “a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young” in the Village Voice. First’s most recent project, Same Animal, Different Cages (Fabrica records), is a series of solo LPs on a variety of instruments, including acoustic guitar, analog synth, the most recent, Civil War Songs for solo harmonica, and sitar (TBR spring 2018).
Excerpt video from recent show:
https://vimeo.com/253707346
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