thingNY‘s Immediacies Series continues with an evening of music from Jonathan Zorn and thingNY’s Dave Ruder. Zorn presents his three-part work Language as Dust, an essayistic sound poem exploring the consequences of electronic mediation within spoken and written language. thingNY performs a short, mostly absurd vocal sextet by Ruder, who additionally offers up an extended piece for strings based on relative time frames of reading the English language off a page.
Program:
Jonathan Zorn - Language As Dust (2012)
-Jonathan Zorn, Voice and Electronics
Dave Ruder - Puppies and Kitties (2009/2013)
-thingNY, Voices
Dave Ruder - Mvt. no. 2 for string quartet (2007)
-Jeffrey Young, Violin; Karen Waltuch, Viola; Isabel Castellvi, Cello; Andrew Livingston, Bass
Dave Ruder is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, clarinetist, guitarist, electronicist, composer, songwriter, writer/librettist, interdisciplinary collaborator, etc. Dave is a key member of the band Why Lie?, the storytelling project Dave & Woody’s Chicken Slaughtering LLC, and the ensembles Varispeed, Sweat Lodge, thingNY, Gamelan Kusuma Laras, and co-organizes Performers Forum at Exapno. He has regularly worked with Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Aaron Siegel, Andrew Lafkas (Eidolon), Kimberly Bartosik, Abigail Levine, Joanna Kotze, Dušan Týnek, and Panoply Performance Laboratory. For two years, Dave curated and ran the Flowering Inconsistencies performance series in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Since 2013, Dave has been the driving force behind Gold Bolus Recordings. As a composer, his work has been featured in Experiments in Opera and his WHY LIE? project, 100+ open scores, is available online. Dave holds degrees from Wesleyan University and Brooklyn College.
Jonathan Zorn is a composer, performer, and curator of experimental, electronic, and improvised music. His electronic music pairs improvising musicians with interactive computer systems to create hybrid, human-machine ensembles. Zorn’s interest in vocal utterance has resulted in a series of pieces in which spoken language is interrupted by electronic forces, drawing attention to the gap between speech and sound. He is currently working on a suite of electroacoustic sound/text performance pieces. Zorn has been active as an improvisor on bass and electronics for 15 years and has performed at Red Cat, the Walker Art Center, the Verona Jazz Festival, the Library of Congress, the Seattle Festival of Improvised Music, Line Space Line Festival, and the Chelsea Art Museum. He has performed under the direction of Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, Fred Frith, and Alison Knowles. His work has been published in Ord und Bild, the SEAMUS Journal, Notations 21, and UbuWeb.
