Bang on a Can Presents Lee Ranaldo and Dither - Hurricane Transcriptions - at The Noguchi Museum
Friday, October 22, 2021
Doors 6:15pm / Performance 6:30pm–7:30pm
The Noguchi Museum | 9-01 33rd Road | Long Island City, NY
Extremely limited tickets ($10) on sale beginning Friday, October 8 at 12pm at www.noguchi.org/bangonacan
On Friday, October 22, 2021 at 6:30pm, Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum present the final concert in the 2021 Artists at Noguchi season, a monthly series of performances in the Museum’s garden and galleries. Celebrating their eleventh season of collaboration, the Bang on a Can | Artists at Noguchi series features musicians performing an inclusive blend of music from across genres and across the world.
On October 22, Lee Ranaldo gives a special performance of his Hurricane Transcriptions with electric guitar quartet Dither and drummer Brian Chase. Ranaldo says, “This piece has its origin on the day in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City. I noticed the strong winds were creating strange acoustic effects, which sounded like demented choirs, dense tonal clusters and harmonies, both consonant and dissonant. The gale was playing the city buildings like a giant Aeolian harp! I grabbed my portable digital recorder, suited up and went out into the storm to collect these sounds. As I walked the streets in my neighborhood the sounds shifted on every corner. I recorded what I could. Over the following week, with New York’s power grid a casualty of the storm, I transcribed what I heard and from these sonic impressions I built the piece, initially for a European orchestra, now realized for the current ensemble.”
The performance will take place in The Noguchi Museum’s first floor gallery, with only 30 public tickets available. Tickets are $10 (the same price as museum admission) and allow patrons access to the galleries and garden after hours. Doors open at 6:15pm and the performance runs from 6:30pm–7:30pm. Masks and proof of vaccination are required. More information is available at 718.204.7088 or www.noguchi.org/bangonacan. The Noguchi Museum is located at 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City, NY.
Musician, visual artist, and writer, Lee Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active both in New York and Internationally for 40 years as composer, performer and producer; also exhibiting visual art worldwide and publishing several books of journals, poetry and writings on music. New solo acoustic composition “In Virus Times” was released in Spring 2021 on Mute. Lives and works in New York City. For more information, visit www.leeranaldo.com.
DITHER, a New York based electric guitar quartet, is dedicated to an eclectic mix of experimental repertoire which spans composed, improvised and electronic music. Formed in 2007, the quartet has performed across the United States and abroad, presenting new commissions, original compositions, multimedia works, and large guitar ensemble pieces. Dither’s members are Taylor Levine, Joshua Lopes, James Moore and Gyan Riley.
Dither has performed and collaborated with a wide range of artists including Eve Beglarian, Nels Cline, Fred Frith, Mary Halvorson, David Lang, Ikue Mori, Phill Niblock, Lee Ranaldo, Lois V. Vierk, Yo La Tengo, and John Zorn. They have brought their live 13-guitar rendition of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint to The Barbican Center, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The Ellnora Guitar Festival and WNYC's New Sounds Live. The quartet has also performed at the Guggenheim Museum, the Bang on a Can Marathon, The Performa Biennial, The Amsterdam Electric Guitar Heaven Festival, Hong Kong's Fringe Theater, The Winter Jazz Festival and the Borealis Festival.
Dither produces an annual Extravaganza, a raucous festival of creative music and art, which has been called an "official concert on the edge" by The New Yorker and "the here and now of New York's postclassical music scene" by Time Out New York. They have released four full-length albums, including Dither plays Zorn on Tzadik, featuring the premiere recordings of several of John Zorn's improvisational game pieces, which was named one of the year's “best avant albums,” by Rolling Stone. For more information, visit www.ditherquartet.com.
Brian Chase (Brooklyn, New York) drums for Grammy-nominated rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs and NYC’s experimental music scene. Performing has taken him across the world to such notable venues as the Sydney Opera House, the Reading and Leeds Festivals, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as countless independent art spaces of music’s ‘underground’ communities. In 2007, Brian began Drums and Drones, a solo project which applies principles of harmonic resonance to percussion; initial inspiration for the project comes from La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s legendary Dream House installation. Drums and Drones: Decade, a triple album with 144 page book (Chaikin Records), was released in 2018; the collection was described in The Wire as “luscious laboratory experiments in listening to stretched skins, wooden vessels and metallic surfaces.” As an educator, Brian was a visiting professor at Bennington College and guest lecturer at So Percussion’s Summer Institute at Princeton University. Essays and writings have appeared in John Zorn’s Arcana series, Modern Drummer magazine, and culture blog Talkhouse. Performer and artist residencies have been held at Headlands Center for the Arts and The Stone. In 2018, Brian started his record label, Chaikin Records, which focuses primarily on the NYC avant-garde arts community. For more information, visit www.chaikinrecords.com and www.chasebrian.com.
About Bang on a Can: Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” (The New York Times)
Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother’s Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. “When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it,” write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. “But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us – we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act – that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet.”
In March 2020, when the pandemic began, Bang on a Can responded with the Live Online concert series including its signature Marathon concerts. With this online series, Bang on a Can has been able to support composers and performers and engage audiences throughout the pandemic shutdown. Other in-person programs include two festivals LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA and LONG PLAY, current projects include The People's Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year; recording projects; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a professional development program for young composers and performers led by today’s pioneers of experimental music; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can’s extreme street band that offers mobile performances re-contextualizing unusual music; Found Sound Nation, a new technology-based musical outreach program now partnering with the State Department of the United States of America to create OneBeat, a revolutionary, post-political residency program that uses music to bridge the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries; cross-disciplinary collaborations and projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more. Each new program has evolved to answer specific challenges faced by today’s musicians, composers and audiences, in order to make innovative music widely accessible and wildly received. Bang on a Can’s inventive and aggressive approach to programming and presentation has created a large and vibrant international audience made up of people of all ages who are rediscovering the value of contemporary music. Bang on a Can has also recently launched its new digital archive, CANLAND, an extensive archive of its recordings, videos, posters, program books, and more. Thirty-three years of collected music and associated ephemera have been digitized and archived online and is publicly accessible in its entirety at www.canland.org. For more information about Bang on a Can, please visit www.bangonacan.org.
About The Noguchi Museum: Founded in 1985 by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), one of the leading sculptors and designers of the twentieth century, The Noguchi Museum was the first museum in America to be established, designed, and installed by a living artist to show their own work. Widely viewed in itself as among the artist’s greatest achievements, the Museum comprises ten indoor galleries in a converted factory building, as well as an acclaimed outdoor sculpture garden. Since its founding, it has served as an international hub for Noguchi research and appreciation. In addition to housing the artist’s archives and catalogue raisonné, the Museum exhibits a comprehensive selection of sculpture, models for public projects and gardens, dance sets, and his Akari light sculptures. Provocative installations drawn from the permanent collection, along with diverse special exhibitions related to Noguchi and the milieu in which he worked, offer a rich, contextualized view of Noguchi’s art and illuminate his enduring influence as a category-defying, multicultural, cross-disciplinary innovator. For more information, please visit www.noguchi.org or follow @noguchimuseum.