PEOPSSONGS & CHEWY FOOT

Every now and then, we like to just give you a break. We know you spend every waking minute listening to genre-redefining remixes via streaming services, while writing your Medium post, interrupted only by presistent pinging of notifications from social media. That's how it is, and that's how you like it. But let's face it – your ears need some soothing.

Here at ASM, we also understand your need to keep up with the hottest trends in a cappella music. (After all, it's been in somewhat constant evolution since, you know, the 15th century.) It's hard to know what's hip these days, and we don't want you to be that square at the party who fills a sudden and unexpected silence with "Palestrina is dope" or "Pentatonix is my favorite rock band."

And so it is with great pleasure that ASM presents an evening of cutting-edge a capella, by people you can actually drink with (that same evening, even):

ED ROSENBERG - Chewy Foot for 8 singers

FRANZ NICOLAY - Peopssongs for 12 singers

Performed by the fearless Ray Bailey, Judith Berkson, Danica Borisavljevic, Ty Citerman, Melissa Collom, Karen Correa, Thomas Cruz, Peter Hess, Erin Kemp, Nathan Koci, Brian McCorkle, and Karen Waltuch. Conducted by the fear-inducing John Altieri.

Thursday, June 8, 2017
8:45 - 9:30 PM
ShapeShifter Lab
18 Whitwell Pl, Brooklyn NY 11215
D/N/R to Union St
$10 admission

About Peopssongs:

PEOPSSONGS is an a capella, choral song cycle with texts drawn from a series of portraits by the artist Fly, one of the most prominent graphic artists to come out of the Lower East Side squatter scene, documenting LES characters, musicians and artists, and the drifters, visionaries, and charlatans passing through that world. Her longest-running project is a series called “PEOPS": single-page, head-and-shoulders portraits of the characters and scenesters she's met, surrounded by transcriptions of her conversations with them during the sitting. A few are well known—John Perry Barlow, Richard Hell, John Zorn (who says "Her visions should be read every morning instead of your daily newspaper")—but most are simply members of the transient underground. Composer Franz Nicolay went through Fly's PEOPS archive, selected fifteen of the portraits (including Barlow, Hell, Zorn, Penny Rimbaud of Crass, Penny Arcade, Aaron Cometbus, and more), and edited their words down to provide the texts he has set. This work was made possible by a residency at the Rensing Arts Center.

About Chewy Foot:

Chewy Foot explores the idea of deconstructing and reassembling words. The consonants and vowels of the words "Chewy" and "Foot" are separated, shuffled around and reassembled in various ways. The piece also explores the rhythms created by exaggerating the consonants of a phrase. This culminates a beat-box-like passage created by stringing together various consonants without any vowel (pitched) elements. This piece is very much inspired by Luciano Berio and Autechre.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Which is basically to say – your tax dollars at work. Yeah, frightening isn't it?

poster by Fly

Past Performances: