Outpost Artists Resources is a non-profit arts organization located in Ridgewood, Queens. We have been serving the arts community since 1990 providing access to video, sound services and new media assistance at well below market rates. In 2003, we began the Cuts and Burns Residency Program, which provides artists with free access to our facility including personal assistance by our staff of video editors, audio engineers, and computer programmers
Outpost Artists Resources supports new creative work through its residencies, and events – its mission is to serve artists in need of technical assistance with video, audio, and physical computing based art projects and to foster a dialogue between visual art and experimental music. Outpost hosts gallery exhibitions, artists talks, screenings and events that pair visual art, video, experimental music, and performance in an effort to bring adventurous audiences challenging interdisciplinary projects.
Che Chen will be joined by guest-curators Mika Lungulov-Klotz, Ian Douglas-Moore and Lesley Mok. This season will consist of four shows: November, January, March and May.
Join us for the March iteration of Fire Over Heaven, curated by Che Chen. Organizer Che Chen writes:
Drummer Ryan Sawyer has been a long time stalwart of NYC’s creative music scene, especially in the community centered around Union Pool and the old Max Fish. He has honed his propulsively free style behind the kit by improvising with some of the finest players, poets and dancers in this city (and beyond) while also doing time in the drummer’s chair of many of the more intriguing rock outfits of the last couple of decades. Recently, he’s found a slightly surprising but no less intense preoccupation: maracas. Gifted a pair of Columbian maracas as a thank you for helping a friend move, Sawyer started finding subtle phasing patterns that caught his ear, and the ears of those he’d have over at his practice space to play. A loose group of players and a practice began to form–instrumentalists playing and singing harmonically dense chords, guided and framed by Sawyer’s pulsing and phasing maracas and structures–and things took off from there. At this point the Shaker Ensemble has had a number of public outings, including the excellent and recently released LP For Those Who Wish to Sing Will Always Find A Song on Lobby Art Editions. The group’s membership varies from one iteration to the next but it’s no surprise that it attracts some of the best improvisers in town. This is trance music though, and it’s nice to hear musicians like these opening themselves up this way.
Saxophonist/percussionist Jamal Moore has made some recent appearances in town with Konjur Collective and Luke Stewart’s Silt Remembrance Ensemble, but I first heard him when MANAS shared a bill with Mojuba duo (w/ drummer Nik Francis) in Baltimore last year. With a combined battery of gongs, drums and homemade instruments on stage and a general attitude of “going for it”, there was an immediate connection between the two groups, though I have to say that Mojuba blew us away. Jamal and I have been talking about doing something together since then and I’m thrilled we’ll be doing our first duo at the series.
It’s hard to represent vocalist/poet Shara Lunon’s emotional/conceptual range in words without sounding ridiculous, but I’d offer History Dog, her collaborative improv group with Chris Williams, Leslek Mok and Luke Stewart, and the full out punk band she fronts, Blasé, as sign posts. She’s also a frequent collaborator with jazz heavies like Ches Smith, runs the excellent series Heavy Florals (at Sisters in Brooklyn) and plays solo under her own name, which is what she’ll be doing here. A sampler, a microphone and a keen sense of history can be expected.
You can purchase advanced tickets for the show HERE.
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We are please to announce our second show of the 2025-2026 season, curated by Ian Douglas-Moore, read from him below:
“Outpost Artists Resources is home to a number of treasures. One of the most intriguing to me has been the 88-key Fender Rhodes electric piano that was gifted by Steve Reich to our very own David Weinstein for work David did for the composer in the 80s. The instrument came out of storage in 2018 and a few months later, Fire Over Heaven programmer Che Chen put the Rhodes into a Just Intonation tuning he describes as “a mathematical found object, closer to the language of gongs than keyboards,” full of heady consonances and intense beating dissonances that are enhanced by the unruliness of the instrument.
For the January 22nd FOH concert, I’ve invited Ka Baird and Henry Birdsey to present music for our microtonal Rhodes. They’ve been coming to the Outpost to spend time listening and exploring its possibilities, and I’m very excited by what I’ve overheard.
In 2020, Ka played the Rhodes in a small ensemble that Che and David put together to record for a WFMU fundraiser CD, and I quite liked Ka’s approach to the instrument. Ka’s recent music has focused on electronics and extended microphone techniques (their Mobile Microphone work is particularly revelatory), so it will be a rare treat to hear them play the keyboard.
Henry’s wonderfully melancholic album “Laments for Rhodes Piano in Just Intonation” is what got me thinking of putting this evening together in the first place, and his patient approach to coaxing unusual but beautiful sounds from the many instruments he plays is always great to listen to. Our Rhodes is in a different tuning than the one he used on the album, so attendees of the concert will get to hear music created just for this occasion.
Breaking with the otherwise solo keyboard format of the evening, Che will lead a trio with himself on the Rhodes and long-time collaborators Talice Lee on violin and Barry Weisblaton electronics. Together they’ll take the instrument outside of the “idealized (and frequently fetishized) space of just intonation, into a messy reality of simultaneously intuited trajectories.” I will begin the concert with a brief exploration of the lowest notes on this piano, which seem to oscillate according to their own agenda.”
– Ian Douglas-Moore
Ka Baird is a performer, musician, sound artist and composer based in New York City. Using extended voice and microphone techniques along with electronics, field recordings and traditional instrumentation, they explore the outer dimensions of sound through performance. Baird’s performances seek new hybrids of expression that expand notions of hearing, feeling and being present. They have collaborated with many other artists, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation.
Henry Birdsey is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and recording engineer from Vermont, primarily working with bagpipes, harmonicas, pedal steel, and lap steel. His music is often drone-based, slow-forming, and usually involves altered and expanded tunings.
Our first show is on November 20th, featuring Love Free Spirit, Grout, Kira McSpice and Sean Brennan, curated by Mika Lungulov-Klotz. These four artists all work in beautifully layered ways, weaving imaginative, intimate, haunting, playful, contemplative and harsh textures together.
Grout is the moniker of Mallie Sanford, based in NYC and embedded in the experimental music scene for over a decade. They use bells, tapes, manipulated field recordings, voice, synthesizers and effects processors to create textural fragments of sound, hypnotic drones, and sonically woven swells of chaotic dissonance. Grout’s music is intrinsic to their interdisciplinary practice that also involves lamp and object making. They rework and activate discarded objects with light and movement in an attempt to playfully reveal the spirit.
Love Free Spirit
To Be Free Spirited in Love
Love For a Free Spirit
A Spirit Free of Love
Love Free Spirit is a new project of Ariel M (Chicago Research). The project eschews previous attempts at rhythm-oriented and conventional song structures in favor of abrasive freeform compositions, incorporating live tape loops and electronic treatments reminiscent of first wave industrial.
New York based singer-songwriter, Kira McSpice crafts a haunting and deeply personal strain of dark folk, gothic art-pop, and experimental music. A classically trained cellist, McSpice now performs on guitar, omnichord, and voice, weaving dense, layered loops that evoke a soundscape both ethereal and deeply visceral.
Sean Brennan is an accomplished arranger and cellist hailing from Chicago, IL, and currently based in Queens. A longtime member of Brooklyn avant-rock and chamber-pop ensemble Sloppy Jane, he has been a fixture of the Brooklyn scene for the past 7 years. As a solo performer, his practice reimagines the concerto form using amplification as accompaniment, blending the DIY spirit of early industrial and ambient music with a deeply personal harmonic language.
