TAK Ensemble Presents SWOONFEST, A Two-Day Festival Celebrating A Decade Of TAK, May 5-6

TAK Ensemble will present SWOONFEST, a two-day, multi-artist festival, on May 5 and 6, 2023 at The Clemente Center in New York's Lower East Side.

Currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, TAK has been hailed as "one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music" (I Care If You Listen). The contemporary classical quintet will perform alongside a dazzling and eclectic SwoonFest lineup, curated by the ensemble, including Phong Tran, Chris Williams, Natacha Diels, Sour Spirit, and the gabby fluke-mogul, Tcheser Holmes and Mara Rosenbloom Trio.

In curating this festival in honor of TAK's first decade, the ensemble shares, "For our tenth anniversary, we decided to celebrate by honoring the lush and stunning ecosystem of artists that surrounds us, which we consider ourselves lucky to be one small part of. We curated the stellar performers featured at SWOONFEST with one guiding principle: their music makes us swoon!"

The lineup for Friday, May 5 opens at 7:00pm with a solo set by Phong Tran (b. 1993), a Brooklyn-based composer and visual artist primarily working in digital and electronic mediums. His work revolves around emotions and experience in nonphysical spaces. His most recent album, The Computer Room, is a "thank you" to the virtual worlds, video games, message boards, and online communities of people he grew up with in the early 2000s.

Phong's work has been released through New Amsterdam Records, people | places | records, and slashsound. He performs live using all analog and modular synthesizers, recently performing with Sō Percussion and Miss Grit. Phong also performs and writes in MEDIAQUEER, a collaborative partnership with fellow composer and visual artist Darian Thomas, creating visuals, art pieces, and live performances.

Chris Ryan Williams, an interdisciplinary artist based between New York City and Los Angeles, follows at 8:00pm. Most at home collaborating with contemporary improvisers and experimentalists, Williams has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. His work explores the dyad of ancestral trauma and power existing in all Black Americans. Investigating this history has led to the creation of the modular piece I Ain't Got No Spare (2019), which interweaves performance, homemade electronics, sound, and projection.

At 8:00pm, TAK will premiere a new work by DM R alongside bassoonist Joy Guidry. The quintet will also be performing elegy for jaimie branch by Tyshawn Sorey and Instruments by Eric Wubbels. A native of Bogota, DM R is an electroacoustic music composer based in New York City. With footholds in post spectral, ambient, pop culture, Colombian folk, and Rock en Español, their music has been presented by such artists as the International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn Wire, Alarm Will Sound, ECCE Ensemble, counter) induction, Boston Musica Viva, Berrow Duo, Eric Drescher, and Josh Modney, at venues including the BANFF Centre for the Arts and Creativity, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, the Goethe Institut in Boston, Americas Society, University of North Colorado, the Coral Gables Museum, Boston Conservatory, and the New England Conservatory. Their recent projects include an electroacoustic installation piece for the National Sawdust Ensemble (NSE), part of the 2022 Hildegard Commission Initiative, an evening-length work for the New York-based trio Sputter Box commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, and a string duo for andPlay. A dissertation fellow at Columbia University and a teaching assistant at New York University, DM R also teaches composition at Kaufman Center's Face the Music.

SWOONFEST continues at The Clemente Center on Saturday, May 6 at 6:00pm with a solo set by Natacha Diels titled Somewhere Beautiful. Diels' work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. With a focus on collage, magic of the virtual, and the ritual of life as art, Diels' compositions have been described as "a fairy tale for a fractured world" (Music We Care About) and "the liveliest music of the evening" (Los Angeles Review of Books). Diels is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003) and also teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

At 7:00pm, SWOONFEST features the gabby fluke-mogul, Tcheser Holmes and Mara Rosenbloom Trio- featuring gabby fluke-mogul, a New York-based violinist, improviser, composer, and educator; Tcheser Holmes, a drummer from New York who grew up submerged in Brooklyn's Afro-centric culture; and bandleader Mara Rosenbloom, a pianist and composer who's been called "a wholehearted poet of the piano" (All About Jazz). fluke-mogul is known for combining threads of improvisation, free jazz, noise, and experimental music in ways that are striking, virtuosic and visceral.

With influences including rock, house, and hip-hop, Holmes played djembe with African drum ensembles from an early age, taking up the drumset and incorporating jazz concepts into his playing. After studying at the New England Conservatory, Holmes moved back to New York and remains a fixture in the jazz community. Most recently, he was recognized for honoring Terri Lynn Carrington's Grammy-winning album and book New Standards at NYC Winter Jazzfest '23.

Rosenbloom is known as a builder and a synthesist: "a fiercely lyrical composer and improviser" (All About Jazz). The New York Times has praised her penchant for "full-bore group improvising," while The Chicago Reader has written that her ensemble "achieves an elusive chemistry and degree of spontaneous interaction that transcends mental boundaries." With an interest in building community by encouraging honest expression and interactive dialogue through music, Rosenbloom has focused on the theme of human connection throughout the past decade. As a result, powerful group interaction has become a hallmark of her sound. Rosenbloom is a 2022 OneBeat Fellow: a residency program supported by the U.S. State Department and FoundSound Nation.

At 8:00pm on May 6, TAK will premiere A Forest, a new composition by Michelle Lou. Composing mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music - in both hardware and computer-based forms - Lou creates large-scale sound installations that are often performative and collaborative. She performs and improvises on acoustic and electric bass, as well as on electric guitar and on laptop and various electronics. She received degrees in double bass performance and music composition from UC San Diego with additional studies at The Conservatorio G. Nicolini in Piacenza, Italy (double bass) and The UDK in Graz, Austria (composition) - the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship. Her graduate studies culminated in a doctorate in composition from Stanford University. Lou was also a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has been granted commissions from institutions such as the Fromm Music Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, and the Norwegian Arts Council. She's taught at short-term courses such as the WasteLAnd Summer Composition Course, Line Upon Line Festival Academy, and the Yarn/Wire Institute at Stony Brook. She has also taught as visiting faculty at Dartmouth College, the Akademie für Neue Musik in Boswil, Switzerland, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

SWOONFEST will conclude at 9:00pm with Sour Spirit: the duo of Rodnie King and Riot Dent making waves of harsh noise with free jazz flourishes, playing within and in spite of traditional rock structures.

Program Details
TAK Presents SWOONFEST

May 5-6, 2023
The Clemente Center | NYC
Link: www.takensemble.com/swoonfest
Ticket Information:
Pre-Sale Until April 20:
General Admission $30 each night / $50 both nights
Artist & Student: $15 each night / $30 both nights

After April 20:
General Admission $40 night / $70 both nights
Artist & Student: $20 each night / $35 both nights

*no one turned away for lack of funds* email contact@TAKensemble.com if further discounts are desired

Friday, May 5, 2023:
7:00pm - Phong Tran Solo Set
8:00pm - Chris Williams
9:00pm - TAK Performs works by Tyshawn Sorey, Eric Wubbels, and DM R feat. Joy Guidry

Saturday, May 6, 2023:
6:00pm - Natacha Diels Solo Set, Somewhere Beautiful
7:00pm - gabby fluke-mogul, Tcheser Holmes, and Mara Rosenbloom Trio
8:00pm - TAK premieres A Forest by Michelle Lou
9:00pm - Sour Spirit

Regarded as "one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music" (I Care If You Listen), TAK delivers energetic performances "that combine crystalline clarity with the disorienting turbulence of a sonic vortex" (The WIRE), and "impresses with the organicity of their sound, their dynamism and virtuosity" (New Sounds, WQXR).

The quintet has released seven albums to critical acclaim; recent records have been described as "sublime art... a masterpiece," (AnEarful), and "one of the most distinct and eclectic releases of the year" (I Care If You Listen). Their recorded output fosters a "deep sense of connection and communication" (Bandcamp Daily), and features collaborations with Mario Diaz de Leon, Taylor Brook, Erin Gee, Brandon López, Ann Cleare, Tyshawn Sorey, Natacha Diels, Scott L. Miller, David Bird, and Ashkan Behzadi. Their most recent release - Love, Crystal and Stone - brought together composer Ashkan Behzadi, scholar Saharnaz Samaienejad, painter Mehrdad Jafari, and design-house Sonnenzimmer to fuse poetry, visual art, original essays, and music into an experience-based hybrid publication. The ensemble's 2019 album Oor launched their in-house media label, TAK editions, that aims to support recorded musical endeavors from across the experimental music communities, highlighting direct conversations with artists through the TAK editions Podcast. Recent TAK editions releases have included those of Ensemble Interactivo de La Habana, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Nina Dante + Bethany Younge, and several of TAK's own recordings.

Deeply committed to educational collaborations, TAK has conducted residencies at institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, Oberlin Conservatory, Cornell University, Wesleyan University, New York University, The Delian Academy for New Music, and many others. The ensemble has also collaborated with the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers Program and Juilliard's Music Advancement Program. TAK is currently the Long-term Visiting Ensemble in Residence at University of Pennsylvania.

TAK was formed in 2013 in Brooklyn. Learn more at www.TAKensemble.com.

*Photo Credit: Kaveh Kowsari