Crit Night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn

Ace Hotel Brooklyn and Pioneer Works join in creative arms to foster artistic communities.

Crit Night is a seasonal series, where Pioneer Works artists-in-residence share works in progress during an intimate evening focused around experimentation and discourse.

Gelsey Bell

Planetary Anamnesis
Planetary Anamnesis is an aural experience that tells the 4.5-billion-year story of Earth’s history using the phenomenological scale of the listener’s body in a sickbed. Events such as the creation of the moon, the emergence of life, the journey of plants and then animals onto terra firma, and previous mass extinction events are layered onto a meditation for and of the human engagement with chronic pain and disability. The piece will take its final form as an easily accessible sound work for individuals to experience at home but for this developmental showing, Gelsey will share a solo early draft of the beginning of the piece outlining the early days of Earth.

Or Zubalsky

When a Reference to a Name is Lost
Personal history, national narratives, code, and sound facilitate a debugging session of a memory leak: a type of software bug that gradually makes memory unavailable and depletes the system of resources.

Music Resident Alum Matt Evans will DJ in the Lobby Bar following the program.

About the artists

Gelsey Bell is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, and scholar. She has been described by the New York Times as “one of New York’s most adventurous musicians” and “a charismatic and fiercely intelligent performer.” She is a core member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. Her soundwalk Cairns, created with Joseph White, is ongoing at Green-Wood Cemetery. Her work has been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. She has released multiple albums on Gold Bolus Recordings. She is a resident artist at the HERE Arts Center, where she is developing the opera mɔːnɪŋ, and she has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, and the Japan Foundation.

Or Zubalsky is an artist and educator based in a part of Lenapehoking also known as Brooklyn. They explore how coding participates in practices of political resistance. Or’s projects originate in software and are encountered as digital platforms, physical objects, installations, gatherings, and performances. Their work is compelled by curiosity regarding the ways in which the composition and execution of code manifest as political action, capable of both healing and shifting power relations. With a commitment to unlearn and resist settler-colonialism, they engage the complexity that software-based systems afford in order to reflect on, criticize, and intervene in existing systems of power.

Matt Evans is a Brooklyn based drummer and producer creating electro-acoustic music that considers the interconnectedness of landscapes, both real and imagined. His compositions draw inspiration from millennial esoterica, natural phenomena, and science fiction, resulting in hypnotic soundscapes and surreal sonic worlds. Combining a meticulous drum-driven approach with imaginatively processed keyboards and samples, Matt crafts a rhythmic, post-ambient music that’s been described as "hyperreal and phantasmal" (Wire Magazine), and "a form of chill complexity" (New York Times). Matt has presented solo projects at the Guggenheim, The Kitchen, Roulette, and 2220 Art+Archives and has released records with Moon Glyph, Whatever’s Clever, Dinzu Artefacts, NNA Tapes, Deathbomb Arc, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe, Perfect Wave, and Thrill Jockey.

Crit Night is co-presented with Ace Hotel Brooklyn.

This program is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the National Endowment for the Arts.