Yearly Archives: 2024

Dear Friends,

Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons and upcoming 2025 New Year!

As 2024 comes to its end we once more turn to you for any change you might be able to spare to help us continue our activities, this year specifically to continue Saving the DATs! that risk deterioration if not dealt with quickly. Thanks to your generous support in response to our Giving Tuesday SAVE THE DATs! appeal at the beginning of this month, the first 50 DATs of the Experimental Intermedia archive of its concert recordings (the oldest DATs from the 80s and early 90s) are being transferred to digital files by a trusted sound engineer as you read this… thus preserving their invaluable cultural and historic content for posterity. There are however some 350 more DATs to go and we still need to raise around $ 6,500.00 to be able to get them all transferred.

So again, we ask, if you were inspired, challenged or moved by Experimental Intermedia Foundation’s programming over the past 50 odd years, or if you performed yourself, or have come to see friends perform, or to see any of your experimental music heroes… we hope you will consider supporting this fundraising effort. Your fully tax-deductible donation of any amount can be crucial for SAVING THE DAT(S) or at least some of the DATs !
You can do this now if you still want to for the 2024 year, or just get an early start for your 2025 donations if you prefer…

Donations can be made through the “Donate” button on the landing page of our website:
https://experimentalintermedia.org (PayPal) or by sending a check by mail.

An overview of our 2024 year:

In the very beginning of 2024 our beloved director and curator since the 1980s Phill Niblock passed away leaving a tremendous void for all of us. Nevertheless, Experimental Intermedia’s programs have continued into their fifty-first year, under the new artistic directorship of long time curatorial collaborator Katherine Liberovskaya.

This past year Experimental Intermedia Foundation was again able to present artists in several different contexts, bringing new and exciting works into the world.

Our March 2024 Series presented eight in-person evenings of concerts or screenings held at five different New York City locations: Zürcher Gallery, Harvestworks, WhiteBox, Emily Harvey Foundation and ISSUE Project Room. Concerts were by Dave Seidel, Kaffe Matthews, Sarah Bernstein, Lary 7 and William Hooker, and screenings by Joan Jonas, a series of experimental portraits of Phill Niblock by Rina Sherman, Loré Lixenberg, Maurits Wouters and Gilles Paté, as well as the 20th annual Screen Compositions event curated by Katherine Liberovskaya.

The recently completed December 2024 Series had eight concerts or screenings over seven evenings at four New York City venues: Emily Harvey Foundation, Harvestworks, WhiteBox and Zürcher Gallery. Artists presented included Reg Bloor, C. Spencer Yeh, Kevin Ramsay + Yuma Uesaka, Nina Sobell, Zoe Beloff, Jenn Grossman, Ian Douglas-Moore + Dominic Coles, Hans Tammen + Marcus Cummins + Shelley Hirsch.

All events were in-person and simultaneously live-streamed from our website and audio-streamed via Wave Farm’s web radio. Video recordings of all the events remain on our website and can be viewed by anyone near or far at any time.

Experimental Intermedia Foundation also assisted in producing the first edition of Phill Niblock’s annual winter Solstice concert without Phill at Roulette NYC on December 21st.

In addition, Experimental Intermedia’s label XI Records remains active. In 2024 it released a 2-CD set by Matt Rogalsky “Visitations and Revisitations”. And we are currently working on a new release by Julian Knowles scheduled to be out in 2025.

In gratitude,

Experimental Intermedia Foundation
224 Centre Street, #3W
New York, NY, 10013

Experimental-Intermedia mailing list
Experimental-Intermedia@mailman.thing.net
https://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/experimental-intermedia

Dear Experimental Intermedia community,

On this Giving Tuesday we reach out to you with a fundraising appeal specifically for help with the preservation of the portion of the Experimental Intermedia archive consisting of some 400 DATs, recorded between1986 and 2009, which could completely deteriorate if nothing is done soon.

EIF is around the corner from getting through its first full year of activities post-Phill Niblock, not without many difficulties, under the curation of new Artistic Director Katherine Liberovskaya and the help of a number of invaluable assistants. While we are looking ahead and contemplating various approaches to continue, and perhaps modify, EIF’s programs into the future, we also face the important challenge of finding a worthy home for the extensive EIF archive.

Experimental Intermedia Foundation, founded in 1968 by Elaine Summers, has been presenting performances as of 1973. Since that time, Phill Niblock has produced and curated over 1500 concerts at his NYC loft, opening his doors to hundreds of composers, providing them with a place to explore the use of new ideas and technologies in their music. His original plan had been to choose 20 composers whose work interested him and then present them every year, giving an audience a chance to observe how their careers evolved over time. But each year the numbers grew and soon Experimental Intermedia was producing 35 to 50 concerts a year.

What has made the Experimental Intermedia series different from other concert series is that each evening was typically focused on only one artist’s music, as opposed to a musician or ensemble playing the works of many different composers.

Archiving these concerts has been a primary concern for Experimental Intermedia, and each concert since 1978 has been recorded on audio and, as of the 1980s, video. The goal was, on the one hand, to provide the performing artists with high quality recordings of their work, on the other to constitute a physical historical record of work presented at EIF that could eventually find a home in an institution that would make the material available to the general public and for archival research. From 1973 through the late 80s the recordings were analog, and after that, in digital formats. From the late 80s to the mid 2000s the audio format EIF used was DATs.

Since 2017-18 there has been quite a bit of interest in EIF’s archive from different institutions, even one informal agreement for it to be taken leading us to believe that it would be off our hands by 2020. But then the pandemic halted everything… to not ever come back to how anything was pre-Covid. And thus, here we are 8 years later with no concrete developments with any previous interested parties, no confirmation for the archive going anywhere… A stand-still.

And the problem is that the entire audio archive from the late 80’s to 2008-09 is all on DAT. Some 400 DATs. (See below the impressive list of all artists presented by EIF between 1986 and 2009, most recorded on DAT, except for screenings or other non-music). And DAT tapes are notoriously unstable. They degrade over time. That means you can’t rely on them as a long-term preservation tool. In fact, DAT tapes can degrade completely in just 20 years. When you bear in mind that the earliest DAT tapes date back to 1986. And recordings made at that time are now nearly 40 years old. So, they may already have begun to deteriorate. Digitizing them as quickly as possible is vital and urgent to prevent their contents from being lost forever.

Now EIF has been given a very generous estimate for their transfer to digital from a local sound engineer (who was one of Phill’s favorites), and we would like to move forward on this process as soon as possible.

To this end we are hoping to raise $8,000.00 to cover the cost of this process.
But whatever we can raise we will use to start the process of transferring little by little, and seek more funds to continue later.

So, if you were inspired, challenged or moved by Experimental Intermedia Foundation’s programming over the past 50 odd years, or if you performed yourself, or have come to see friends perform, or to see any of your experimental music heroes… we hope you will consider supporting this fundraising effort. Your fully tax-deductible donation of any amount can be crucial for SAVING THE DAT(S) or at least some of the DATs!

Donations can be made through the “Donate” button on the landing page of our website:
experimentalintermedia.org (PayPal) or by sending a check by mail.

Today Thursday 11 April :

at Appleton @ A11 Galleries – Rua Do Centro Cultural 11, Lisbon

– 15:00

Threshold of Predictability (video: Katherine Liberovskaya / music: Phill Niblock)

– 18:00

The Movement of People Working (film and music: Phill Niblock)

+ Margarida Garcia & David Maranha

+ 2 more evenings April 16th and 18th featuring The Movement of People Working (film and music: Phill Niblock) with Manuel Mota, Rafael Toral, Pedro Alves Sousa, Andre Goncalves, Adriana Sa, Vasco Alves

See more detailed information attached…

Cyland MediaArtLab is pleased to invite you to the opening of CYFEST 15: Vulnerability

on Friday, April 19, 2024 at 5:30 pm at CREA—One Contemporary Art Space, Venice. The exhibition is on view until August 30, 2024. Please find the detailed information below.

CREA
Cantieri del Contemporaneo
Giudecca 211-b
Venice, Italy

cyfest.art

Download e-invitation

We are excited to announce the upcoming CYFEST 15: Vulnerability opening in April at CREA—One Contemporary Art Space, Venice, Italy.

The (anti)fragility of biological, social and cyberspaces, personal memories, and scientific imagination, the facsimile of rain, artistic exploration of non-human co-authorship, and a connection between knitting patterns and Mandelbrot sets all converge in our new major group exhibition.

The program features installation, performance, and discursive formats. Key commissions include the multi-disciplinary project Drop Tracer, studying nonhuman agencies and the relationship between images and the natural world by Tuula Närhinen. Ann Marie Maes’ bacterial-grown skins investigate the sculptural potential of organic materials and interfaces between the human and the non-human, the macroscopic and the microscopic. Pioneers of science art, Where Dogs Run collective, look at the terms of the Mandelbrot sets as expressed through knitting patterns in a live performative installation. Mariateresa Sartori, through the frottage technique, gives value to the unseen geology and casts light upon the little-known story of the quarry in Rosà, Vicenza. Elena Gubanova and Ivan Govorkov’s media installation recreates the concept of Time Density developed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kozyrev. This exhibition also features rarely exhibited monotypes «Re-Pressions» by the acclaimed Armenian artist Samvel Baghdasaryan (1956-2017), experimental video art works by Fabrizio Plessi, inflatable fabric sculptures by Irina Korina, architectural and urbanistic objects made of recycled LEDs by Alexandra Dementieva, newly commitioned installation by Anna Frants and much more.

The full list of artists include: Samvel Baghdasaryan, Ludmila Belova, Max Blotas, Alexandra Dementieva, Alexey Dymdymarchenko, Yvetta Fedorova, Anna Frants, Elena Gubanova & Ivan Govorkov, Irina Korina, Natalia Lyakh, AnneMarie Maes, Phill Niblock & Katherine Liberovskaya, Tuula Närhinen, Nao Nishihara, Fabrizio Plessi, Mariateresa Sartori, Monica Naranjo Uribe, Where Dogs Run.

Learn more at cyfest.art

Dear Friends,

It’s time for the EI March Series again, the first one without our beloved Phill Niblock (!)
This March again at a few different venues. Please note all the different locations.
In addition to in-person all our evenings are live-streamed from our website:
www.experimentalintermedia.org

As well we audio stream the concerts live on the Web Radio section of the Wave Farm Website:
https://wavefarm.org/radio/partner-streams/schedule/e7hkxy

EXPERIMENTAL INTERMEDIA

The Fifty-First Anniversary of EI performances, the Fifty-Sixth Anniversary of the Founding of Experimental Intermedia, the Fifty-Sixth Anniversary of the 224 Centre Street loft, and, not least, The Thirty-Fourth Annual Festival with no fancy name, Part Two (or B). Katherine Liberovskaya and Phill Niblock curators

MARCH 2024 – All events at 7PM in all places
Please note all the different venues for this series
Suggested donation $10 except Monday 18th at Zürcher Gallery 2 sets / $20

Dave Seidel (New Hampshire) – at Harvestworks Sunday 17
A performance of the entirety of my three-part electronic drone work “Involution”, from the eponymous XI Records release: A study in complex microtonal sonorities derived from various just intonation tunings and scales; This is the premiere of a new revision of the piece – https://mysterybear.net/ – https://mysterybear.bandcamp.com/

Kaffe Matthews (Berlin) – at Zürcher Gallery Monday 18
Live processing 15th century alchemical systems through the Riple; An instrument occupied with the generation and processing of all colours of noise, designed through discoveries made by the British alchemist George Ripley; Noise, colours, lightning, square waves and clocks, mashed with salt and fed by mercury to feed the Toad, the gold, the final output? Today with the WORM on vocals – www.kaffematthews.net

Sarah Bernstein (NYC) – at Zürcher Gallery Monday 18
Solo violin/voice performance utilizing heavily-processed sound and raw expression, melding noise, electronic improvisation, art rock and existential poetry into an ecstatic unity – https://sarahbernstein.com

Lary 7 (NYC) – at WhiteBox Tuesday 19
Occupying a realm somewhere between science and music, is a leftover byproduct of the 20th Century tactile physical world . . . Lary 7 is 6 times detritus, plus 5 versions of mistakes, 4 excuses for failure, 3 of the most analog bumps on a log, 2 unexpected goofs, and 1 of the last living _____________s.” (fill in the blank generation . . .with a word that doesn’t make sense.)

William Hooker (NYC) – at WhiteBox Wednesday 20
“The Mind World”…Part 1 – is a solo auditory visual experience of sounds directed through spontaneous musical improvisations augmented by dance movements / as viewed by the audience; Thereby, exploring energy levels – directions and the communion (of the being /spirit) with the viewing audience; With dance by Yaching Cheung: In addition there will be a live improvisation with Phill Niblock’s video-audio piece “Hooker-Niblock” (2015-19)
https://www.williamhooker.com/

Joan Jonas (NYC) – at EHF Friday 22
Joan Jonas will screen a selection of older and newer video works – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Jonas

Rina Sherman (Paris) / Phill Niblock – at EHF Saturday 23
On one of my first trips to New York after coming to Paris in exile in 1984, Phill Niblock filmed a portrait of me in a series of portraits, Anecdotes From Childhood, that featured in his 2007 exhibition at the Gahlberg Gallery and was taken up in Working Title (2013) published by Presses du réel in a bilingual edition; Phill Niblock traveled constantly, and we saw each other often when he came to perform in Paris; In 2013, I made a cineportrait of him, “Phill Niblock, Minimalist Composer and Intermedia Artist” (Rina Sherman, VOICES, rencontres avec des personnes remarquables); Both portraits will be screened – www.rinasherman.com

3 moving image impressions of Phill Nibloc – at EHF Sunday 24
“Singterview with Phill Niblock” (2015) by Loré Lixenberg (London); “The Movement of Phill Niblock” (2015) by Maurits Wouters (Turnhout, Belgium); “PHILL NIBLOCK: The Movement of People Working, Centre Pompidou Paris 29 November 2014” (2015) by Gilles Paté (Paris)

SCREEN COMPOSITIONS 20 curated by Katherine Liberovskaya – at ISSUE Monday 25
This year Screen Compositions celebrates its 20th anniversary! Our jubilee edition brings you, as ever, a collection of always captivating and inspired intersections of moving image with sonic art; a program of screen works representing dynamic two-way collaborations between video/film artists and sound/music artists specifically intended for single-channel projection with no live or performance component; featuring collaborations by: Deborah Bernagozzi / Jason Bernagozzi; Patrick Bokanowski / Michele Bokanowski; Navel Cassidy / Michael Evans; Holly Fisher / Lois V Vierk; Gisela Gamper / Pauline Oliveros+Zach Layton+Jonas Braasch; Richard Garet / Barbara Held; Katherine Liberovskaya / Phill Niblock+Francisco Janes; Ursula Scherrer / Marcia Bassett; Claudia Schmitz / Ute Wassermann; Sara C. Sun / Michael Vincent Waller

Venues:
Harvestworks: 596 Broadway #602, New York, NY 10012 – www.harvestworks.org
Zürcher Gallery: 33 Bleecker St, New York, NY 10012 – www.galeriezurcher.com
WhiteBox: 9 Ave B, New York, NY 10009, at Houston Street – https://whiteboxnyc.org
Emily Harvey Foundation (EHF): 537 Broadway #2, New York, NY 10012, at Spring – www.emilyharveyfoundation.org
ISSUE Project Room: 22 Boerum Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11201 – https://issueprojectroom.org/

Experimental Intermedia, 224 Centre Street at Grand, Third Floor, N Y 10013 212 431 5127
www.experimentalintermedia.org and www.XIrecords.org

Our programs are supported by the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Phaedrus Foundation, the Ulla Dydo Charitable Fund, a Donor Advised Fund of Renaissance Charitable Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Office of the Governor and the New York State
_______________________________________________
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Experimental-Intermedia@mailman.thing.net
https://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/experimental-intermedia

Phill Niblock RIP
“Master of Minimalism”

Phill was one of those it is hard to imagine the world without. Always working, moving, chatting, asking, (“Hey! – What’s happening!”… a declaration not a question), his extraordinary energy belied his slowly evolving work. He lived a long life doing what he loved, releasing records for over 7 decades (who else can claim that? Not many…), Phill holds a unique place in the history of recorded music, and it was an honour to work with him for a good chunk of that time. He was a superb film-maker and photographer. Ask for a photo for his new album, he would submit a full folio (here are some unused ones below). Ask for 20 minutes of sound and he’d send 3 hours. Deeply rooted in an analogue sensibility and its acoustic, digital formats were a godsend to Phill. Our last collaboration “Working Touch” came on a USB stick with 22GB of material – Phill considered this to be his valediction. Of his generation, perhaps only Morton Subotnik (90), LaMonte Young (88), & Alvin Curran (at a sprightly 85) are around to hold the candle and show that the way things used to be done are increasingly, not less valid. Rest in peace, Phill – and thank you. We’ll be listening for the sounds as they come through the clouds. [Mike & Jon, 9th January 2024]

You can read an obituary by Lawrence English in The Quietus here

Phill Niblock was interviewed by Mike Harding for his very first edition of Long Wave, 8th October 2013. You can listen to the full broadcast here.

If you’re not familiar with his work, you can listen on his Bandcamp page here