May 2014 at The Stone, NYC, curated by Okkyung Lee
 

Okkyung Lee will have a week residency at The Stone in May in which Kim Gordon will be collaborating heavily (and I predict beautifully).

Preliminary info taken from Okkyung Lee's official facebook:


happy to announce the line up for my week residency at the stone this may...!!! it's 90% confirmed let's say...

5/6 tuesday
8 pm: okkyung lee
10 pm: ches smith & okkyung lee - premier of okkyung's new compositions for cello and drums

5/7 wednesday
8 pm: ikue mori, vijay iyer and okkyung lee
10 pm: kim gordon and okkyung lee

5/8 thursday
8 pm: theo bleckmann and okkyung lee
10 pm: chris corsano, bill nace and okkyung lee

5/9 friday
8 pm & 10 pm: perpetual stranger (part 1 & 2) - liberty ellman, ches smith, okkyung lee

5/10 saturday
8 pm: michelle boulé and okkyung lee
10 pm: c spencer yeh and okkyung lee

5/11 sunday
8 pm: craig taborn, tyshawn sorey and okkyung lee
10 pm: okkyung lee

interesting.

Speaking of Okkyung Lee, she's one of the artists featured in the next installment of Lasse Marhaug's fanzine, "Personal Best". Other notable figures of the noise/avantgarde spheres interviewed in this issue are Marco Fusinato, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Årabrot, Jim O'Rourke...

"Personal Best #4" can be pre-ordered now:
http://marhaugforlag.no/personalbest4.html

it's always the same people at the stone, innit?

i mean they are great and all (and i love okkyung lee), but overall it's a bit of a closed garden/inner circle of initiates. no? i'm honestly asking.

Do you mean it all seems a bit too close to the Tzadik aesthetic than to anything else?

These shows would see the debut of new compositions and new collaborations (Okkyung Lee & Kim Gordon have not performed together as far as I know, for instance); so I wouldn't see any reason to expect "more of the same".

i'm not saying it's the same music, but the same people. in other words, the curators tend to curate each other rather than seek out new & unknown talent in the wild. no?

I understand what you mean, then. I guess that would have to do with logistics and budget in this case. Given that most of them live in New York (Okkyung not so much these days, though) or the USA, and there aren't many funds for these types of shows at The Stone (even tickets are kinda cheap), that would make sense. Sometimes there are exceptions and people like Keiji Haino have played there.

I do have the impression Okkyung Lee tends to play with any musician from any scene if she happens to have the chance (whether they are widely known or not). Festival Music Unlimited 27 "The Most Beautiful Noise in the World" she curated in November of last year looked pretty interesting and revelatory from here. She has just performed for the first time with JD Zazie in Berlin a couple of days ago. Here's a video of her with Irena Tomažin, which is really awesome. Not sure it would illustrate my point, but I think you might like it if you've never seen it before:
http://vimeo.com/29248889

Maja Ratkje will be curating a week residency at The Stone in November. Whether or not she'll bring some people from the Norwegian scene or end up playing with those New Yorkers, it all would look pretty interesting to me (just in the same way as these Okkyung Lee curated performances).

yeah, i was thinking along the same lines (budget and logistics forcing a local kind of thing). it was a question not a criticism, so i guess your answer is more or less a "yeah"? (you know more than i do).

thanks for the replies/videos/links! i'm on a throttled connection so i have to schedule watching it for the free hours.

It is indeed a "yeah", but (again) sometimes there are remarkable exceptions. Also a good thing that there are boundaries being pushed despite the fact that it is for the most part the same musicians more often than not (so curious about "Perpetual Stranger" especially, I hope there is a record in the works as well).

"It’s the most critical listening room in the city, as far as experimental music is concerned".
-Thurston Moore

The Stone profile on The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/ny...usic.html?_r=2

Okkyung Lee interviewed by Radio Panik from Brussels, Belgium; on the evening of February 25th:
http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/...-25-02-at-8pm/