Ezekiel Honig is a NY based music producer, sound artist and founder of two respected labels – Anticipate and Microcosm – well known in the circles of music connoisseurs and art enthusiasts. Many people, including myself, have fully embraced his solo work with the beautiful and enigmatic “Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band” (Anticipate, 2008). Aside from having released six studio albums and an equal amount of singles/EPs and splits/collaborations since 2003, Honig has also been producing sound for picture as well as being a constructive audio thinker.
Ezekiel has generously shared his latest release with me on a rainy Thursday afternoon of April. From the first seconds of this recording I immediately sensed that I am entering a very private territory. It brought me to a place that was warm, organic, and, strangely enough, familiar. The sounds coming from Honig’s latest album blended exceptionally well with the moody cityscape outside my window as if they were the reflecting voices of the neighboring buildings or the sighs and the pulses of the passers-by. “Folding In On Itself” carries Honig’s signature sound but its textural palette tells a more personal story that ties the artist to the city he inhabits and the city respectively becomes the skin and bone of Honig’s aural canvas. A minor difference worth noting compared to his earlier offerings is that Folding In On Itself is released under the Type imprint, home to artists like Xela, Helios, Goldmund, Deaf Center, Mokira and Rene Hell among others.
Folding In On Itself Record Release Party is on May 12 at Littlefield. The bill also includes a DJ set by John Xela (founder of Type) as well as a set by Borne. More info about the event can be found here.
MP: Does “Folding In On Itself” summarize your personal soundprint within the collective memory of this city and its past?
Ezekiel Honig: Well, it’s a tiny sliver of that, an example of moving through cities. I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling it a summary, but more a version of it. Similarly, although New York City dominates the album, there are moments from Torun, Poland, and Milan, Italy as well. In a way, any city serves the purpose and the symbolism, even though the heart of it and the majority of the outdoor sounds do originate in New York. I recorded all the original sounds so it’s all remapping experience, wherever I was when the recordings happened. Continue Reading More »
"Don't Tread on Me" Three Channel Video installation. Performance still, Momenta Art, 2011 (Photo: Alesia Exum)
Chelsea Knight is a New York based video artist. She recently completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a 2007 Fulbright Fellow in Italy. She is a current resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Her video installations tackle the dynamics of political and social control. Her narratives blend fiction and reality in a singular fluid motion. Her subjects have included professional dancers, military instructors, prison inmates and the artist’s own parents. She encourages her characters to improvise, creating a tension between the personal and the scripted. The artist’s videos examine the ways in which both governmental and domestic forces control our emotional, political and social reality. It is Chelsea’s great strength to lay bear the wires by which humans manipulate and entrap one another. I recently had a chance to stop by her studio in lower Manhattan to chat about her work, recent projects and future plans. Continue Reading More »
Clarisse d’Arcimoles is a 25-year-old French artist living in London. Her work can be found at Saatchi Gallery until April 30th as part of NEWSPEAK: BRITISH ART NOW and in Tel-Aviv at the Alfred Gallery until April 31st. A solo show in London just closed at Degree Art Gallery and she had a busy 2010. BOOM! That’s Miss d’Arcimoles blowing up – and rightfully so. Her powerful images and projects bring to mind a dozen other positive adjectives. The power in her work partially lies in the multiple jumping off points for the viewer. You’re viscerally thrown off guard with emotion, intimacy, humanity, and history. Artcards Review digitally jumped the pond to talk with Clarisse. Continue Reading More »
Behind the alias of Deaf Center are Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland, too pals from Norway. They are equally fascinated and inspired by the lights of the cities, an atmospheric walk in the empty forests of Norway, the dark yet disarming emotional contour of the movies of David Lynch or Kubrick. Erik has recently moved to Berlin where Deaf Center recorded, within three days, their latest album Owl Splinters, in Nils Frahm’s studio. He also runs Miasmahone of the most distinguished labels of experimental music and has being releasing solo work under a variety of monikers, the most prominent Svarte Greiner (Black Leaves in English). Otto has also been actively producing work for Nest, among others, as well as taking care of his home in Norway. I first encountered their music when exposed to the beautiful sincerity of Pale Ravine (Type Records, 2005). I was impressed by the density of their modern classical-ambient soundscapes, knowing that both considered themselves classically untrained or to be more specific self-taught musicians.
I had the chance to see them perform live here in New York as part of this year’s Unsound Festival’sBeyond the Dark – a tribute event for the music of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki at Judson Church in Manhattan. Erik has also performed as Svarte Greiner with Polish-German percussionist Paul Wirkus on the live soundtrack for Murnau’s German Expressionist classic “Nosferatu”.
In the following questions I try to focus on Deaf Center’s creative process, their thoughts about computer sequencing as opposed to live instrumental performances, and the power of words in their music-making. Continue Reading More »
Caitlin Masley at her studio in DUMBO. (Image: Carissa Pelleteri)
Looking at Baltimore’s busted-out vacancies last weekend, with their broken, boarded-up windows and exhausted dereliction, I couldn’t help but think of a phrase the artist Caitlin Masley used when we spoke in January: “monuments to failure.” It’s an interesting description, because monuments tend to valorize failure’s opposite: success and the heroic triumphs of civilization. Beyond recognizing fallen soldiers and epic battles, monuments reserve their monumentality for the great and the good. Yet so much of life is neither great nor good, and if reality is to be preserved in statuary, isn’t it equally worth capturing the sad defeats of life? And if we were to pursue that idea, would we need to go much farther than the half-built developments littering so much of America today? Aren’t their shells evidence of stock market failure and an inability to curb our greed for more land, more profit?
Those are the kinds of questions Masley’s artworks prompt. Her sculptures, drawings, installations, and photography speak to the hoped-for futures humans conjure and then leave behind, whether in their imaginations or here in the material world. There is, for instance, “TWOTOWERSVER2,” a manipulated photo of an imaginary landscape in postwar reconstruction, and “Copperland,” a series of abstract drawings overlaid in copper leafing. In the works, dense clusters of human habitation are seen from a bird’s-eye view, with some sections darkened as if erased, the whole of it suggesting a desert landscape—El Paso at night maybe, or, more likely, bombed villages in the Middle East. Continue Reading More »
Having followed the poetry scene on both sides of the Hudson for years, it was inevitable that I would come to know the poets paired for this interview. In 2010, I met George Wallace at the Bowery Poetry Club where he was host for that Sunday afternoon’s reading. I immediately appreciated the excitement he generated and the encouragement he offered to the features and those, like me, who would participate in open mic. I met Romanian-born poet Claudia Serea at the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey in 2010. There, I was surrounded by poets who would eventually offer to publish her work and mine in the same Red Wheelbarrow anthology that year. When I learned that the two poets knew each other too, they became perfect candidates for the artist-to-artist interview series. Claudia would ask George to decode poetryland and George would oblige, revealing a mindfulness about poetry that straddles high and low culture, emphasizing the roles of plurality, craftsmanship and discovery.
George Wallace is the 2011 Writer-in-Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace. He is currently on tour promoting Walt Whitman and Beyond—Fanfares for the Common Man both stateside and overseas. He is the author of 19 chapbooks of poetry, professor at Pace University in New York, a well-known and highly regarded poetry promoter. Here, he is interviewed by Romanian-born poet Claudia Serea whose work and translations have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish and 5 a.m. and is the author of two poetry collections.
Vince Contarino is a New York based painter. His multi-layered canvasses explore the language of abstraction. From first glance there is something illusive in Contarino’s canvases, a tension between the forthright and the concealed. The artist often repurposes forgotten brushstrokes and colors, pasting them into his collages and works on paper. The result is something both beautiful and challenging, a floating soup of the painterly. Contarino’s belief in the ongoing relevance of abstraction is mirrored in his extracurricular activities. His most recent curatorial project, “The Working Title”, organized with painter Kris Chatterson, opens at the Bronx Art Center next Friday. I recently had the chance to speak with the artist over the phone. Continue Reading More »
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