GRID, Lea Bertucci, Greg Fox, Multa Nox
In association with AdHoc, Pioneer Works presents NNA Tapes’ record release show on Tuesday, March 28. Multa Nox’s Sally Decker opens the evening of contemporary experimental music in a performance of her intimate and ghostly electronic sound-scapes that delve into submerged territories of solitude, anxiety and wonder. Multi-disciplinary drummer Greg Fox will perform new solo work in a hybridized electro-acoustic drum set-up. Composer Lea Bertucci will bring together instruments/objects to form an ominous sound world. GRID, featuring Matt Nelson, Tim Dahl and Nick Podgurski will perform their debut album Grid, a non-idiomatic work that combines jazz and extreme noise in a festering, combustible entity that evokes unhinged 70’s era free Jazz and droning Doom and Sludge.
GRID, apart from its initial appearance as a jazz trio, is a non-idiomatic yet familiar work featuring tenor saxophonist Matt Nelson (Battle Trance), bassist Tim Dahl (Child Abuse, Lydia Lunch Retrovirus) and drummer Nick Podgurski (Feast Of The Epiphany). GRID carries in its fundament the spirit of each player’s individual work enmeshed in singular vision. Extending technique both instrumentally and spatially, its homogenous nature hinges on close performative quarters. GRID buries the isolation of its independent parts in favor of supporting the resultant world these elements form together. Evoking unhinged 70’s-era Free Jazz and droning Doom and Sludge, GRID was recorded live to two inch tape at the cavernous Seizures Palace in Brooklyn. Feedback and an array of effects employed by Nelson and Dahl congeal into a festering, combustible entity spurred on by the singularity and contrastingly dry sonics of Podgurski’s drumming. The edges are sufficiently roughed up via mastering courtesy of Weasel Walter.
Lea Bertucci is an American composer and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her instrumental practice, (alto saxophone and bass clarinet), her work often incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique and tape collage. She has performed across the US and Europe at venues including The Kitchen, PS1 MoMA, The Drawing Center, Anthology Film Archives, Abrons Arts, ISSUE Project Room, The Queens Museum, Artists Space, Caramoor, The High Zero Festival and Experimental Intermedia. Her debut solo LP, Resonance Shapes, was released in 2013 on the Obsolete Units label and has been praised by A Closer Listen as, “A grand exploration of the possibilities inherent in sound.” Bertucci is a 2016 MacDowell fellow in composition and a 2015 ISSUE Project Room artist-in-residence. Her discography includes a number of solo and collaborative releases on various underground independent labels in the US and Europe, most recently, Axis/Atlas, on Clandestine Compositions. In 2017, Bertucci will release All That is Solid Melts Into Air: Works for Strings, on NNA Tapes.
Greg Fox is a New York City drummer, multidisciplinary artist and teacher. He has played on and released 49 records since 2008 including his work with Liturgy, ZS, Ben Frost, Colin Stetson, Skeletons, Hieroglyphic Being, Man Forever and his own solo work and projects GDFX and Guardian Alien. Fox has toured worldwide with various groups and collaborations, held residencies at The Clocktower NYC, and in 2011 he was awarded “Best Drummer in NYC” by the Village Voice. Currently, Fox is working on new collaborations and compositions, teaching individual and group drum lessons, and exploring new territory as a solo artist using a hybridized electroacoustic drum setup to explore new dimensions through the traditional gestures of the modern drummer and the possibilities inherent in electronic and computer music.
Sally Decker is a musician and poet from Evanston, IL, now based in Brooklyn, NY. Her primary performance project is called multa nox in which she uses electronics in an attempt to move through submerged, intimate territories such as solitude, anxiety and frenzied wonder. Decker is interested in the emotional potential of sounds as healing or portals of connection and works to impart a type of focus towards one’s own internal world. She also plays in the band Market.