Feb. 4: Bang on a Can presents Laraaji and L'Rain in partnership with BOMB Magazine and the Jewish Museum

PRESS CONTACTS

For Bang on a Can:
Jensen Artists – Maggie Stapleton | maggie@jensenartists.com

For the Jewish Museum:
Daniela Stigh | dstigh@thejm.org 

For BOMB Magazine:
Libby Flores | libby@bombsite.com

Bang on a Can, BOMB Magazine, and the Jewish Museum Present a

Live Performance by Laraaji

Plus Laraaji and L'Rain in Conversation

Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 7:30pm EST
Streaming at live.bangonacan.org

New York, NY –  Bang on a Can and BOMB Magazine announce two online engagements to be presented collaboratively with the Jewish Museum, marking the seventh year of the Jewish Museum and Bang on a Can’s partnership. Originally conceived and programmed for Bang on a Can’s Long Play festival, scheduled for May 1-3, 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic, these events will comprise a diverse roster of artists performing live-streamed concerts, as well as artist conversations in the spirit of BOMB interviews.

The first program on Thursday, February 4, 2021 at 7:30pm EST features musicians Laraaji and L’Rain. This bill showcases a pair of artists, both long champions of NYC’s DIY music scene, who represent two distinct voices in the evolution of ambient music. Bang on a Can and BOMB Magazine will present a live concert performance by Laraaji from his home studio in New York City, and L’Rain and Laraaji in conversation. 

The next event's date and performers will be announced soon. Both programs will be fully live and streamed on Bang on a Can’s new online venue-website, live.bangonacan.org. These events will be free to stream and the featured artists are being compensated by Bang on a Can, but please consider purchasing a ticket. Doing so will help Bang on a Can to do more performances, pay more players, commission more composers, and share more music worldwide. 

About L’Rain: Brooklyn native Taja Cheek is a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and vocalist who often performs under the mononym, L’Rain. She is interested in exploring the complex interwovenness of grief and joy, using voice memos and other manipulated samples recorded in her hometown as inspiration and source material. Since the release of her self-titled debut in 2017, her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Hyperallergic, and she has performed at institutions and venues including The Whitney, The Getty, and The Kitchen, along with festivals including Basilica Soundscape and FORM Arcosanti.

About Laraaji: A 77 year-young American multi-instrumentalist Laraaji, is one of the pioneers of the new-age and ambient philosophies. In the early 70s, Laraaji lived in New York, admired Eastern mysticism, and performed in parks playing a vintage stringed instrument called “zither.” In 1978 Brian Eno saw one of Laraaji’s street performances and helped him record and release an album called “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance.” The release introduced this American musician to a wide audience, and his next 40 albums made him a true legend of meditative music. His most recent record release is a three album project of solo piano improvisation entitled “SUN PIANO”, “MOON PIANO” and “THROUGH LUMINOUS EYES” on ALL SAINTS RECORDS available online at laraajimusic.bandcamp.com. Laraaji also has traveled the world guiding therapeutic laughter release playshops and deep listening celestial music sessions.

About Bang on a Can: Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” (The New York Times)

Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother’s Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. “When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it,” write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. “But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us – we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act – that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet.” 

In addition to its festivals LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA and LONG PLAY, current projects include The People's Commissioning Fund, a membership program to commission emerging composers; the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who tour to major festivals and concert venues around the world every year; recording projects; the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, a professional development program for young composers and performers led by today’s pioneers of experimental music; Asphalt Orchestra, Bang on a Can’s extreme street band that offers mobile performances re-contextualizing unusual music; Found Sound Nation, a new technology-based musical outreach program now partnering with the State Department of the United States of America to create OneBeat, a revolutionary, post-political residency program that uses music to bridge the gulf between young American musicians and young musicians from developing countries; cross-disciplinary collaborations and projects with DJs, visual artists, choreographers, filmmakers and more. Each new program has evolved to answer specific challenges faced by today’s musicians, composers and audiences, in order to make innovative music widely accessible and wildly received. Bang on a Can’s inventive and aggressive approach to programming and presentation has created a large and vibrant international audience made up of people of all ages who are rediscovering the value of contemporary music. Bang on a Can has also recently launched its new digital archive, CANLAND, an extensive archive of its recordings, videos, posters, program books, and more. Thirty-three years of collected music and associated ephemera have been digitized and archived online and is publicly accessible in its entirety at www.canland.org. For more information about Bang on a Can, please visit www.bangonacan.org. 

About the Jewish Museum: Located on New York City's famed Museum Mile, the Jewish Museum is a distinctive hub for art and Jewish culture for people of all backgrounds. Founded in 1904, the Museum was the first institution of its kind in the United States and is one of the oldest Jewish museums in the world. Devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, the Museum offers intellectually engaging exhibitions and programs, and maintains a unique collection of nearly 30,000 works of art, ceremonial objects, and media reflecting the global Jewish experience over more than 4,000 years. Whether visitors come to our Fifth Avenue building or engage online, there is something for everyone to enjoy and learn. The public may visit www.TheJewishMuseum.org or call 212.423.3200 for more information. 

About BOMB Magazine: BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. Since 2014, BOMB’s Oral History Project has staged one-on-one interviews with New York City-based visual artists of African descent, conducted by curators, scholars, and visual artists. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a free digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.

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