Wednesday 27 June 2018, 7.30pm
Pleased to welcome US guitarist and composer, Michael Pisaro to OTO for a special two-day residency presenting an intimate portrait of his work and collaborations. Moving from solos (with environmental recordings) through his partnership with Graham Lambkin to chamber works with close collaborators Angharad Davies, Sarah Hughes and Tisha Mukarji (where each of the pieces grows out of considerations of friendship and innocence). Pisaro’s work continues to reflect on the sense of rebirth that accompanied his initial contact with the Wandelweiser group, and often requires a worldly and other-worldly reorientation of the senses.
Michael Pisaro (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer. He is member of the Wandelweiser collective. While, like other members of Wandelweiser, Pisaro is known for pieces of long duration with periods of silence, in the past fifteen years his work has branched out in many directions, including work with field recording, electronics, improvisation and large ensembles of very different kinds of instrumental constitution. Called “patient, unpredictable, exceedingly beautiful” by the New York Times, Pisaro’s music has been featured on many recordings in the last decade. Ben Ratliff of the Times writes: “The American composer Michael Pisaro likes his music to develop as a slow-motion force, with adjustments of tone and pitch and instrumentation so long-brewing that you lose your awareness of the player’s hand and the composer’s will.”
Pisaro has a long-standing collaboration with percussionist Greg Stuart, with over thirty collaborations (pieces and recordings) to date, including their 3-disc set, Continuum Unbound from 2014. The work together on Pisaro’s evening length work for 100 percussion, A wave and waves, was featured at the Melbourne Festival (October, 2015) and Atlanta’s Elevate festival (October, 2016), the Big Ears (Knoxville, March, 2017) and Banff (July 2017). Recent portrait concerts of his music have been given in London, Paris, New York, Santiago, St. Petersburg, Lille, The Hague, Tokyo, Glasgow, Moscow, Chicago, Wrocław, Munich, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Oslo, Madrid, Brussels, Montpelier, Caracas, Boston, Melbourne, Berlin, Houston, Bologna, Trondheim, Amsterdam, Nantes, Mexico City, Seattle and elsewhere. Recordings of his work have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records, erstwhile records, New World Records, Hubro, Potlatch, another timbre, meena/ftarri, slubmusic, Cathnor, Senufo Editions, Intonema, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro's own imprint, Gravity Wave.
Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts (where he taught since 2000), he taught music composition at Northwestern University. In 2005/6 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He was Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor of Music Composition at in the Department of Music at Harvard in the Fall of 2014.
Graham Lambkin (b. 1973) is a London based multidisciplinary artist and publisher whose work embraces audio, visual and text-based concerns. Lambkin was a founding member of the seminal English underground group The Shadow Ring who between 1992-2002 explored the possibilities of fusing amateur folk music, cracked electronics and surreal wordplay into a unique and unsettling hybrid that continues to exert an influence today. Following the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a run of critically acclaimed solo recordings including Salmon Run (2007), Amateur Doubles (2011) and Community (2016) as well as a series of collaborative projects with the likes of Joe McPhee, Keith Rowe, Moniek Darge, Michael Pisaro and Áine O'Dwyer. Lambkin was also the founder of the Kye label who between 2001-2016 published over 60 new audio works by artists as diverse of Philip Corner, Gabi Losoncy, Vanessa Rossetto and Malcolm Goldstein as well as significant archival collections by Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, Joe McPhee and Henning Christiansen.
As a performer Lambkin has appeared internationally, presenting work at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Kitchen, NY, New Museum Brooklyn, NY, CALarts, CA, Sibelius Museum, Turku, I.C.A. London, Cafe OTO, London, Arts Centre, Melbourne and Fylkingen, Stockholm.
Lambkin's visual art explores the metamorphic properties of the drawing medium in which the abstract and the figurative perpetually shape-shift across contrasting visual planes, thereby undermining the expected categories of image content. These works have been exhibited internationally in five solo shows to date, most recently Time Runs Through the Darkest Hour at Blank Forms, NY. Lambkin has seen eight volumes of visual/text based work published to date, chiefly through Penultimate Press, Berlin/London, and has also produced graphic work for a range of artists including The Dead C, Harry Pussy, Splintered and Double Leopards.
Lambkin's much anticipated new release Aphorisms (2023) has just been published via Blank Forms, following their archival 4xLP boxset Solos (2021), and looks ahead to the extensive 12CD box/book anthologising the complete works of The Shadow Ring later this year. In addition Lambkin is readying for the release of Gondolas 2CD (2023), a collaboration with James Rushford via Erstwhile.
