Run Time: 60 minutes
Location
20 Putnam Avenue in Brooklyn, C or G train to Clinton-Washington. Accessible station at Franklin Avenue C/Shuttle train.
Special Pop-up Engagement:
MOLTO OHM
October 24TH AT 7:30pm
Molto Ohm viscerally explores the interplay between digital life and social decay. In today's alluring digital world, we are constantly being sold health, beauty, and connection. But at what cost? In the end we find ourselves alone, mindlessly scrolling, pulling furtively on a pane of glass unable to break through. Featuring a large scale iphone screen with rapid fire projections and live performances by sound artists Ka Baird and Matteo Liberatore, Molto Ohm confronts audiences with their own digital compulsions.
Pakistani-American drummer and composer, Quasim Naqvi will open with a slow and contemplative solo electronic bringing a stark contrast to what will follow in Molto Ohm.
About the Artists
Matteo Liberatore is an artist and composer working in experimental music and intermedia art. Now based in Brooklyn, Liberatore spent much of his life in the medieval region of Abruzzo, Italy, amidst dramatic landscapes that are reflected through a performance and composition style of “unsettling beauty” and “striking physicality” (The New York City Jazz Record).Liberatore is known for his nuanced and precise treatment of timbre, texture, rhythm, and gesture—whether through the elegant immediacy of unadorned instrumentation or the affecting dislocation of electronics and preparations. Since 2018, he has released several records that dance between free improvisation, contemporary classical music, and noise music, including Solos (2018, Innova Recordings), Neutral Love (Duo with Amirtha Kidambi, 2021, Astral Editions), Death In The Gilded Age (Quartet with Ava Mendoza, gabby fluke-mogul, and Joanna Mattrey, 2021, Tripticks Tapes), and Lacquer (2022, Tripticks Tapes). Since 2014, he has collaborated with a wide variety of artists and musicians such as Mark Kelley, Brian Chase, Elliott Sharp, Taja Cheek, Gold Dime, and many more. Over the years, he has played hundreds of shows, from DIY venues and museums to festivals and landmark stages such as The Stone and King’s Theatre. His work has been reviewed and featured in Entertainment Weekly, All About Jazz, Paste Magazine, WNYC, Free Jazz Blog, and more. His first solo guitar album Solos was included in Ted Gioia’s 100 best albums of 2018. During his formative years, Liberatore studied classical guitar under Maestro Marco Salcito at Conservatorio di Foggia, philosophy at the University of L’Aquila, and obtained his M.M. in Jazz Performance at NYU. In 2023, Liberatore merged his lifelong interests in moving images and cultural studies with his musical experiments to create the project Molto Ohm, a sonic and visual exploration of the interplay between digital life and social decay. The first Molto Ohm album is slated for release in March 2025 on New Focus Recordings. Since moving to New York, Liberatore has been an active member of the music community, organizing events in both venues and DIY spaces. In 2018-2019, along with Taja Cheek, Max Alper, and Dann Lawrence, he ran the DIY space 49 Shade in Crown Heights, with weekly shows featuring artists such as Raven Chacon, Otomo Yoshihide, Susan Alcorn, Lea Bertucci, Nate Wooley, and many others. In 2023, along with Julia Anrather, Liberatore started a series called Please YS, which curates monthly shows in Crown Heights that have hosted Wendy Eisenberg, David Grubbs, Mizu, Lou Tides, Noia, and Qasim Naqvi, among others. In both cases, 100% of door money goes to the artists.
Ka Baird is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer based in New York City. They are known for their live performances which include extended voice and microphone techniques combined with electronics and psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds. They create a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. They have worked/collaborated with many other musicians, artists, filmmakers and choreographers, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation and interdisciplinary work. Their solo releases include "Sapropelic Pycnic" (Drag City 2017), "Respires" (RVNG Intl 2019), "Brooding Exercises" (Longform Editions 2021), and "Vivification Exercises" (RVNG Intl 2021). In March 2024, they released their most recent solo record entitled "Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos" through Brooklyn imprint RVNG Intl. Recent national and international engagements have included performances at Unsound Festival (Krakow, PL), Lampo (Chicago, IL), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), TUSK Festival (Newcastle, UK), Incubate (Tilburg, NL), KRAAK (Brussels, BE), Le Guess Who (Utrecht, NL), and the Festival Of Endless Gratitude (Copenhagen, DK). They have been artist-in-residence at We Jazz Festival (Helsinki, FI), Sonoscopia (Porto, PT), Inkonst (Malmo, SE), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, IL), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). They have been a recipient of the Foundation of Contemporary Art's Emergency Grant, a Jerome Foundation Artist-In-Residence at Roulette Intermedium, and is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow through 2023-25.
They are one of the core members of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, founded in Chicago in 2001.
Pakistani-American drummer and composer Qasim Naqvi is perhaps best known as a founding member of acoustic trio Dawn of Midi. Outside of his work in D.O.M., Naqvi is an accomplished solo artist with a passion for analogue and modular synthesizer systems. His concert music has been performed/commissioned by The BBC Concert Orchestra, Jennifer Koh, The London Contemporary Orchestra, Stargaze, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Crash Ensemble, The Now Ensemble, The Erebus Ensemble, yMusic, The Helsinki Chamber Choir, Cello Octet of Amsterdam, Alexander Whitley, Cikada, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra(MusicNOW Season) and others. He has been a featured composer at the Musica Nova Festival in Helsinki, the Spitalfields Festival in London, Ultima Festival, Southbank Centre and the Rest is Noise Festival in Holland.Qasim's soundtracks for film have appeared on HBO, NBC, PBS, Showtime, New York Times Op-Docs, VICE Media, at The Tribeca, Sundance, Toronto, Rotterdam and London Film Festivals, at dOCUMENTA 13 and 14, The Guggenheim Museum, The Tate Britain (Turner Prize 2018), MOMA P.S. 1, IDFA, Berlinale and others. He has worked with Laura Poitras, Mariam Ghani, Tremelo Productions, Masterclass, Marc Levin, Naeem Mohaiemen, Smriti Keshari, Prashant Bhargava, Erin Heidenreich and others. Acoustic trio Dawn of Midi have released two albums. Their most recent Dysnomia, was acclaimed by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin, The Guardian and the New Yorker. Radiohead personally picked Dawn of Midi as their support band for two sold out concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden for their Moon Shaped Pool tour. Qasim earned his B.F.A in performance from the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music program and his M.F.A in composition and performance from California Institute of the Arts. He studied drums and performance with Andrew Cyrille, Joe Chambers, Reggie Workman, Buster Williams, Ralph Peterson Jr., Charlie Haden and Rashied Ali and composition with Wolfgang von Schweinitz, James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Marc Sabat, Wadada Leo Smith, Michael Jon Fink and Anne LeBaron. He is a 2016 N.Y.F.A Fellow in Music and Sound and has received other fellowships and awards from Deutsche Jazzpreis, Chamber Music America, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Mid-Atlantic Arts Council, Harvest Works, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, S.T.E.I.M. and Art OMI. Presently, Qasim lives in Brooklyn New York and works on a variety of projects as a freelance composer and drummer.