JACK Presents Lea Bertucci at Riis Beach and the DUMBO Archway

Brooklyn performance and civic space JACK announces concerts in unusual spaces by acclaimed experimental composer and musician Lea Bertucci. The first, on July 31, involves an afternoon of concerts on the handball courts at Riis Park Beach. The second, on August 14, is a performance in the DUMBO Archway underneath the Manhattan Bridge.

Each of the dates provides an opportunity to witness a musician taking full advantage of spaces with extreme acoustics -- in the case of the handball courts, the bouncing of sound back and forth against the concrete walls, and in the case of the DUMBO Arch, the 40-foot height providing an experience of intense reverb mixed with the sound of the subway crossing the bridge.

Saturday, July 31, 2021 at 2 pm, 4 pm, and 6 pm:

Music for Handball Courts at Riis Beach
Location: Jacob Riis Park, Rockaway Park, NY
Featuring:
Lea Bertucci (Alto Sax)
Chris Pitsiokos (Alto Sax)
Ben Bennett (Percussion)
Shayna Dunkelman (Percussion)
Tickets: $10 (available here)

Each of the three performances will consist of an improvised set with an ensemble of acoustic woodwinds and percussion. Bertucci's aim is to excite the acoustic conditions within the handball courts. Just steps from the beach, the concerts offer the opportunity for a stimulating day-trip incorporating both art and rest.

Saturday, August 14, 2021 at 8 pm:

Voices in the Arch
Featuring Amirtha Kidambi + Lea Bertucci duo and Charmaine Lee solo.
LOCATION: The DUMBO Archway (outdoors, under the Manhattan Bridge; Water Street and Adams Street, Brooklyn)
Tickets: $10

This concert features three ascending musicians -- known for their experiments in voice and electronics -- filling the DUMBO Archway with amplified vocals and digital sound. The evening promises a perfect collision of pioneering artists with the architecture of the city. Presented in partnership with DUMBO Improvement District (www.dumbo.is/home | @dumbobrooklyn).

MORE INFO ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician, composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. Her discography spans over a decade, with eight releases of full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released the critically acclaimed solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes and has since gone on to found her own imprint, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021's A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release.

Her collaborations extend to other chamber-noise projects, including a recently formed duo with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi. This collaboration finds new territory in extending the sonic possibilities of the human voice through electronic manipulation with tape and free improvisation. Their debut album Phase Eclipse was released on Astral Spirits Records in 2019 and followed up with End of Softness EP in 2020.

She has performed and exhibited extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery NYC, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, PS1, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Sound of Stockholm Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. She has attended residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and ISSUE Project Room, among others. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers' Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. She is currently working on a number of commissions from the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin and by ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia for new compositions that are forthcoming in 2021/22.

Chris Pitsiokos is an alto saxophonist and composer based in Brooklyn, NY. Aesthetically, his work combines the lyricism of jazz and the intensity of extreme rock forms and noise with the attention to detail and abstraction of contemporary classical music. Known for expanding the vocabulary of the saxophone through extended range, circular breathing, nuanced articulation, and other extended techniques, his recent work also commands considerable cathartic, emotive, and lyrical power. His compositions often function as a platform for performers to express a unified aesthetic vision without subjugating their individual voices as musicians in their own right. In this way his work contrasts with more traditional modes of composition in which the composer or band leader is the sole, or primary arbiter, of a singular vision. Pitsiokos has worked with Weasel Walter, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Joe Morris, Philip White, Guerilla Toss, C Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, Brandon Seabrook, Lydia Lunch, Paul Lytton, Miya Masaoka, Mick Barr, and many more. He has appeared at major festivals and toured throughout Europe, the United States and Japan as a solo artist, with his own bands, and as a side man. A prolific artist, Pitsiokos is the leader or co-leader of ten commercial recordings on record labels Clean Feed, Astral Spirits, UgExplode, One Hand, Carrier, New Atlantis, and his own imprint, Eleatic. http://www.chrispitsiokos.com/

Percussionist Ben Bennett has developed a commanding and highly personal synthesis of both traditional and extended techniques which takes the lineage of jazz, free-improvisation, and experimental music as its foundation. In searching for an expanded sonic palette, and fluid movement between disparate timbres, he has distilled the drumset into a compact assortment of drumheads, stretched membranes, and other objects which become multi-functional when placed in different physical relationships to each other, and activated by striking, friction, circular-breathing, and other techniques. Bennett's music often sounds electronically-generated, although it is produced entirely through bodily interaction with acoustic materials. The versatility of his approach combined with the simplicity of his setup allows for a high degree of responsiveness in improvisational situations, as well as unencumbered portability. Bennett has been performing and touring actively for the past 12 years, playing across the US and abroad as a soloist, in long-running groups with Zach Darrup, Michael Foster, Evan Lipson, and Jack Wright; and with many other collaborators including Pascal Battus, Leila Bordeuil, Tashi Dorji, Sandy Ewen, Travis Laplante, Ingrid Laubrock, Charmaine Lee, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Brandon Lopez, Weston Olencki, Jacob Wick, and Nate Wooley.

Shayna Dunkelman is a musician and percussionist based in Brooklyn, NY. Dunkelman is known for her versatile and unique techniques, and use of electronics to access a sonic pallet not found in acoustic percussion. In addition to solo performances, Dunkelman tours with the Puerto Rican band Balún, multi-instrumentalist Emily Wells, electro-acoustic duo Peptalk, Pakistani singer and author Ali Sethi, and her percussion duo Nomon with her sister Nava Dunkelman. Dunkelman was recently a soloist in the latest orchestral piece by Pulitzer Award-Winning and Grammy nominated composer Du Yun, titled Where We Lost Our Shadows (2019) along with Ali Sethi and vocalist Helga Davis. The piece premiered at Ultima Festival (Oslo), Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Southbank Centre (London). It is also scheduled to tour worldwide and to be recorded with the Peabody Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop in 2020. Dunkelman became increasingly active in the alternative music scene as a member of the band Xiu Xiu, touring the world for 6 years. As part of Xiu Xiu, Dunkelman premiered a multimedia performance art piece at the International Summer Festival in Hamburg, Germany (2013) and Donaufestival in Krems, Austria (2014). As a composer, Dunkelman collaborated with choreographer Amanda Piña to present work at the Presidential Palace of Austria as part of the opening ceremony of ImpulsTanz with the presence of President Heinz Fischer. For this performance, she was awarded a grant from Foundation of Contemporary Arts in NYC. Since then, Dunkelman and Ms. Pina collaborated on several pieces and toured them internationally.

Amirtha Kidambi is the composer and bandleader of her quartet Elder Ones, with Matt Nelson, Max Jaffe and Nick Dunston and the leader of her vocal quartet Lines of Light, featuring Anaïs Maviel, Emilie Lesbros and Jean-Carla Rodea. Kidambi is also a regular collaborator of Lea Bertucci, in a voice and analog electronics duo, is a member of guitarist Mary Halvorson's Code Girl, featured in various projects with composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones, a longtime contributor of Charlie Looker's early music inspired dark folk band Seaven Teares and a soloist in Pat Spadine's analog percussion and light ensemble Ashcan Orchestra. She has collaborated and performed with New York luminaries in the experimental and creative music community including Tyshawn Sorey, Matana Roberts, Ingrid Laubrock, Maria Grand, Brandon Lopez, Daniel Carter, Sam Newsome, Trevor Dunn, Ava Mendoza, Matteo Liberatore and veteran improviser William Parker.

Charmaine Lee is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers id m theft able, Ikue Mori, Sam Pluta, Tyshawn Sorey, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. Charmaine has performed at ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, The Poetry Project, and MoMA PS1, and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies, Huddersfield Contemporary, and Ende Tymes. She has been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). In 2019, she was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, and is an upcoming 2021 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette. Charmaine is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Sound American.

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