Fire Museum Presents: thingNY & Erik Ruin’s Ominous Cloud Ensemble
Sunday, May 5, 2019 | 8-11pm
$8 – $10 sliding scale | Tickets & Additional Info
About the Line Up
thingNY
thingNY is a collective of New York composer-performers who fuse electronic and acoustic chamber music with new opera, improvisation, theater, text, song and installation. Founded in 2006 for an ad hoc festival in the historic Loew’s Jersey City Theater, thingNY performs experimental sound works created collaboratively by the core ensemble – Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Jeffrey Young, Gelsey Bell, Dave Ruder, and Andrew Livingston – and by adventurous composers such as Robert Ashley, Frederic Rzewski, John King, Pauline Oliveros, Miguel Frasconi, Vinko Globokar, John Cage, Julius Eastman, James Tenney, David Snow, and Andrea La Rose.
The musicians of thingNY are a prolific bunch. They’ve collaboratively created three concert-length operas: their latest, This Takes Place Close By, “Blackly Amusing, Sonically Rich” (NY Music Daily) explores the reactions of isolated individuals in the wake of a devastating storm. Premiering September 2015 at The Knockdown Down Center, a 50,000 square-foot space in Maspeth, Queens, the opera toured to Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, and Edmonton and Calgary (Canada) during its production. ADDDDDDDDD, premiered in 2009 and released on CD in 2010 with a comic-book libretto, and Time: A Complete Explanation in Three Parts, a 2011 performance collaboration with Panoply Performance Laboratory accompanied by a 250-page hardcover book.
This performance will feature Dave Ruder’s sextet work You Must Read a Lot of Jung – a spacious, melodic chamber piece scored for voice, clarinet, violin, saxophone, cello, and percussion that grew out of materials created for thingNY’s 2015 opera This Takes Place Close By.
Erik Ruin’s Ominous Cloud Ensemble
Erik Ruin’s Ominous Cloud Ensemble is an ever-evolving, collectively-improvising large ensemble for projections and music, led by visual artist Erik Ruin, recently lauded by the New York Times for his “spell-binding cut-paper animations.” Erik manipulates intricate paper-cuts and painted films on overhead projectors to create abstract landscapes and fragmentary scenes that are nonetheless charged with meaning, merging with music that ranges from dark atmospherics to ecstatic peaks of dissonance. Members of the ensemble include a rotating cast of Philly’s finest musicians, who have collaborated with everyone from Anthony Braxton to the Sun Ra Arkestra to Bardo Pond.
About Fire Museum Presents
“Since arriving in Philadelphia, Fire Museum Presents has provided an essential resource for open-eared local audiences. Guided by founder Steven Tobin’s impeccable taste and adventurous spirit, the series has brought cutting-edge artists spanning diverse genres to the city, from legendary avant-gardists to up-and-coming envelope-pushers. Fire Museum’s offerings have ranged from free jazz to electronic noise, American Primitive folk to world music fusions, experimental rock to progressive psychedelia, often bleeding over from one hybrid genre to the next. With bills that regularly offer unexpected pairings and often result in spontaneous collaborations, the mere fact that a concert is being presented by Fire Museum is usually sufficient to guarantee that it merits notice.” – Shaun Brady
ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT
Please note that Vox Populi is located on the third floor of a historic warehouse building at 319 N. 11th Street and that there are five steps leading from the street-level to the first-floor landing where the passenger elevator picks-up/drops-off. The entry into/out of the elevator is 29-inches wide, so may not accommodate all wheelchairs or motorized chairs. Any individual requiring a ramp to navigate this entryway is encouraged to get in touch with Vox Populi ahead of time to coordinate ramp-access and discuss accessibility details. Our ramps may not be suitable for all wheelchairs or motorized chairs, so we strongly encourage anyone requiring a ramp to be in touch at: events@voxpopuligallery.org or 215.238.1236
