Yarn/Wire Celebrates 10 Years of Yarn/Wire Currents Commissioning Series at Roulette on May 3

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Leah Rankin | Morahan Arts and Media
leah@morahanartsandmedia.com | 646-378-9386

Yarn/Wire Celebrates 10 Years of Yarn/Wire Currents
Commissioning Series at Roulette on May 3

Concert Features Three World Premieres by Composers
Heather Stebbins, Jordan Dykstra, and Jessie Cox

www.yarnwire.org

New York, NY (April 6, 2023) — New York percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire celebrates 10 years of its groundbreaking commissioning series Yarn/Wire Currents on Wednesday, May 3 at 8:00 p.m. at Roulette. Focused on the creation of new works specifically for Yarn/Wire, the series serves as an incubator for experimentation in which a diverse range of musicians, artists and composers explore intersections of composition, technology, installation, improvisation, live performance, music theater and more, in an effort to expand the ensemble’s performance practice and reflect music’s fluidity and reach.

The performance includes the world premiere performances of three new works by composers Heather Stebbins, Jordan Dykstra, and Jessie Cox, commissioned by Yarn/Wire. Stebbins’s work An Index of Fictions combines old and new practices of composition, constructing a relationship between structured notation and real-time reaction. The electronic material was largely generated using software and hardware processing techniques, and part of the material is generated in live performance. “The acoustic material is my reaction to and against the electronic material,” Stebbins says.

Dykstra describes his piece Pitiless as the Sun as being inspired by his experience witnessing three memorable aspects of the solar eclipse in August 2017 - the psychedelic crescent shadows, the temperature dropping, and the total eclipse itself. Cox’s piece Mirror Blown Into Pieces: The Immortal III works with “colored silences”, listening to the many ways sound disappears and decays in acoustic space.

Currents recordings are subsequently self-released by Yarn/Wire. Past commissions and collaborations include works with and by Catherine Lamb, Sam Pluta, Øyvind Torvund, Mark Fell, Klaus Lang, Ann Cleare, Olivia Block, Sarah Hennies, Alvin Lucier, and Thomas Meadowcroft, among others.

Performance Details:
Yarn/Wire Currents
Yarn/Wire
Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Roulette | 509 Atlantic Avenue | Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tickets: $20 advance, $25 doors, $15 Student/Senior (w/ ID, Senior 65 )
Link: https://roulette.org/event/yarn-wire-currents/

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing at https://roulette.org/event/yarn-wire-currents/

Program:
Heather Stebbins - An Index of Fictions (World Premiere)
Jessie Cox - Mirror Blown Into Pieces: The Immortal III (World Premiere)
Jordan Dykstra - Pitiless as the Sun (World Premiere)

Artists:
Yarn/Wire
Laura Barger, piano
Julia Den Boer, piano
Russell Greenberg, percussion
Sae Hashimoto, percussion
Heather Stebbins, electronics

About Heather Stebbins

Heather Stebbins (b. 1987) is a composer, technologist, synthesist, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she is Assistant Professor of Electronic and Computer Music at George Washington University. She works with sounds created by instruments, found objects, nature, and voltage to generate musical experiences ranging from notated works for chamber ensembles to improvised performances on modular synthesizers. In all of her work, Stebbins strives to create sound worlds that are kinetic, resonant, and provoking.

Her music has been performed by ensembles such as the loadbang ensemble, Switch~, Ensemble U:, the JACK Quartet, Dal Niente, Sound Icon, Transient Canvas, Ensemble L’Arsenale, eighth blackbird, and the Riot Ensemble. She has worked with soloists Ning Yu, Andy Kozar, Carlos Cordeiro, Adam Vidiksis, and Sam Kelder to create highly personal pieces for solo instrument and electronics.

Recordings of Stebbins’ acoustic and electroacoustic works have been released on New Focus, SEAMUS, Not Art Records, and Coviello labels. She has released three solo albums of synthesizer-generated electronic music. She released her album At the End of the Sky in 2023 on superpang, a Rome-based record label. New Forms, Old Selves (2022) and Olney (2021) are available through Zeromoon, a DC-based label of Intelligent Noise Music of the non-entertainment genre.

Stebbins is an active performer in the DMV-area experimental electronic music scene and has performed electroacoustic sets at Rhizome, the Pocket, Modular on the Mall, and Sonic Frontiers.

Stebbins studied primarily with Benjamin Broening and Joshua Fineberg and holds degrees from Boston University and the University of Richmond. Stebbins was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Estonia with composer Helena Tulve.

About Jordan Dykstra
Jordan Dykstra (b. 1985, Sioux City, Iowa) is a Brooklyn-based violist and composer exploring the performer-composer-listener relationship through the incorporation of conceptual, graphic, and text-based elements. In 2007 he moved to Portland, OR and became involved in the experimental music scene in the Pacific NW. Aside from performing and recording with individuals and bands — including Dirty Projectors, A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Hildur Guðnadóttir, Atlas Sound, and Valet — he worked at Marriage Records and Publishing House. In 2014 he received a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission to apprentice with Daníel Bjarnason, composer and conductor of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, in Reykjavík, Iceland. He received his BFA in 2016 under Michael Pisaro, Ulrich Krieger, and Wolfgang von Schweinitz at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. In 2018 he received his MA in Experimental Composition from Wesleyan University in Connecticut where — under the mentorship of Alvin Lucier and astrophysicist Seth Redfield — his thesis explored connections between microtonality and the cosmic distance ladder. In 2019 he received a Cultural Grant from the Netherlands-America Foundation to compose The Arrow of Time and premiere the work with Reinier van Houdt in Amsterdam. In 2020 The Arrow of Time was listed as one of the best Modern Composition albums by The Wire and included in The Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2020 by Bandcamp. In 2021 he completed an MFA in Media Scoring at the Feirstein School of Cinema and as a media composer he has numerous credits including in the films 20 Days in Mariupol (winner of the 2023 Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival), Blow the Man Down, Hail Satan?, It Comes At Night, and the 2019 Emmy winner for Outstanding Investigative Documentary Documenting Hate. His compositions for film have been heard at Cannes, Sundance, TriBeCa, TIFF, and the IFFR. His performance highlights include MOCA (CA), Harpa (Iceland), Musikfestval Bern (Switzerland), Ftarri (Tokyo), CHAFF (Brussels), KM28 (Berlin), Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), Syros Institute (Greece), Yale Union (OR), Big Ears Festival (TN), and the RISD Museum (RI). Recordings of his music (solo and collaborative) have been issued by New World Records, Domino, Important Records, Elsewhere, Milan, Marriage Records, Mexican Summer, K Records, Gilgongo, and Dykstra’s own cottage industry label Editions Verde.

About Jessie Cox
One of the world’s most brazenly experimental composers, Swiss artist Jessie Cox makes music about the universe - and our future in it. Through avant-garde classical, experimental jazz, and sound art, he has devised his own strand of musical science fiction, one that asks where we go next. For the last decade, his music has been marked by its freeness; his embrace of otherness has led to a body of work described by the LA Times as ‘some of the most experimental music, not just of the day, but the season’.

Cox’s music goes forward. When he describes it, he compares it to time travel and space exploration, likening the role of a composer to that of a rocket ship traversing undiscovered galaxies. He is influenced by a vast array of artists who have used their music to imagine futures, and takes Afrofuturism as a core inspiration, asking questions about existence, and the ways we make spaces habitable. Known for its disquieting tone and unexpected structural changes, his music steps into the unknown, and has been referred to by the New Yorker as an example of ‘dynamic pointillism’, a nebulous and ever-expanding sound world that includes ‘breathy instrumental noises, mournfully wailing glissandi, and climactic stampedes of frantic figuration’.

Cox’s fascination with futures is seen in compositions such as The Sound of Listening, which explores the connection between human and terrestrial bodies. An interactive piece, it is written to feel deliberately unfinished, its tones and timbres open, moving forward through an endless map of possible pathways. Though his music is unwaveringly experimental, eschewing traditional structure, he is constantly looking for connections, attempting to explain how we relate to each other and care for our world. His recent collaborative composition ...As A Song To The World asks these questions directly, its bombastic collaborative ritual emphasizing the way we create fictions and lores to feel things as a community.

Though Cox’s music is expansive, it can often come from relatively little. A rehearsal room with a drum-kit in it, for instance, can serve as the setting for his vast world-building. His work can be light on resource, but teeming with detail, as exemplified in Breathing, an opera for one vocalist and handheld percussion. The piece involves bass-baritone Derrell Acon, who sings, hums and hyperventilates alongside chiming textural percussion. Like many of Cox’s pieces, it features deviation and destruction, and is defined by moments of uncontrollable human intervention. The result is a large, labyrinth composition that can’t be contained as an ordinary ‘piece’ of music.

Fascinated with contingency, Cox comes at his compositions from a space of genuine curiosity. He doesn’t know what will happen to his music in a live setting - whether it will break down, or continue to pulse - and seeks to pass the sensation along to his listener. ‘My teacher, Richard Carrick, once said about my music that he was always worried about whether it would survive for the whole performance’, Cox says, attempting to describe it. That is ultimately his aim: not to create something, but to search for it.

For his striking music and uncompromising vision, Cox has been widely celebrated. His pieces have received plaudits from the New Yorker, the LA Times, amongst other publications. It is the subject of thoughtful analysis, with music writer Steve Smith hailing his music as ‘sound science poetry’, celebrating its ‘gene-splicing futurties’ His work has appeared at MaerzMusik and has received performances from renowned groups such as Ensemble Modern, LA Phil, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and JACK Quartet.

About Yarn/Wire
Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg, percussion; Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer, pianos) dedicated to the promotion of creative, experimental new music. According to New York Classical Review, “Yarn/Wire may well be the most important new music ensemble on the classical scene today.” Founded in 2005, and admired for the energy and care it brings to today’s most adventurous compositions, the ensemble seeks to expand the representation of composers including but not limited to those who identify as women, LGBTQIA , Black, African, Indigenous, Latina(o)(x), Asian, or Arab so that it might begin to better reflect our communities and experience new creative potential.

Yarn/Wire’s expansive and international 2022-23 season includes festival performances at Tzlil Meudcan (Israel), Wien Modern (Austria), and Northwestern University New Music Conference (Illinois); returns to the TIME:SPANS (NYC), Festival 20/21 (Belgium), and Rainy Days (Luxembourg) Festivals; a Composer Portrait of Øyvind Torvund presented by Miller Theatre (NYC), which continues the ensemble’s long-running relationship with Torvund; plus appearances at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and The Stone. Recent performance highlights include a residency at Pioneer Works featuring Katherine Young’s Biomes; premieres by Taylor Brook and Diana Rodriguez at the America’s Society in NYC; a video event and Composer Portrait of Thomas Meadowcroft at Miller Theatre; a concert of solo works at Indexical in Santa Cruz; and the continuation of the Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival, a summer festival for composers and performers interested in exploring the collaborative side of contemporary music. Their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music in partnership with Brooklyn-based arts organization Blank Forms.

The ensemble additionally will be in residence at Northwestern University and Adelphi University, and will return for residency activities at Duke University in the 22-23 season. In the previous season, Yarn/Wire was in residence at Cornell, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Brandeis University, and University of Pennsylvania.

In Fall 2022, Yarn/Wire continues their multi-year residency at Girard College in Philadelphia developing a new multidisciplinary performance work, Be Holding, using poet Ross Gay’s book-length poem inspired by Philadelphia basketball champion Julius Erving (a.k.a. “Dr. J”) as its libretto. The commission will explore themes of Black genius and beauty in the face of racial violence and inequities, and the school will host Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, director Brooke O’Harra, and Yarn/Wire, with the world premiere scheduled for Spring 2023.

Yarn/Wire’s numerous commissions include works from composers such as Annea Lockwood, Enno Poppe, Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Ann Cleare, Catherine Lamb, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Alex Mincek, Thomas Meadowcroft, Misato Mochizuki, Sam Pluta, Tyondai Braxton, Kate Soper, and Øyvind Torvund. The ensemble enjoys collaborations with genre-bending artists such as Tristan Perich, Ben Vida, Mark Fell, Sufjan Stevens, and Pete Swanson.

The quartet has performed at festivals all over the world including the Lincoln Center, Edinburgh International, Rainy Days (Luxembourg), Ultima (Norway), Transit (Belgium), Contemplus (Prague), and Wien Modern (Austria) Festivals, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall, Dublin SoundLab, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Brooklyn Academy of Music, and New York’s Miller Theatre.

Yarn/Wire has recorded for the WERGO, Kairos, Northern Spy, Distributed Objects, Black Truffle, Shelter Press, Populist, and Carrier record labels in addition to maintaining their own imprint. Recent and upcoming releases include Tonband, featuring works by Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger, on the WERGO label; Annea Lockwood’s Becoming Air and Into the Vanishing with trumpeter Nate Wooley on Black Truffle Records; Yarn/Wire Currents 7 featuring works by Victoria Cheah, Zeno Baldi, and Diana Rodriguez; Marcel Zaes’ Parallel Prints; the piano and percussion works of Andrew McIntosh; and many more. For more information, please visit www.yarnwire.org.

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