Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We are thrilled to invite you to an evening of live sound performances featuring sound artists Jenn Grossman, Shelley Hirsch, and Hans Tammen.

Jenn Grossman uses a range of materials in her practice including pipes, tubes, amplified fans to create sound sculptures, installations, and object-based performances. Her work explores the psycho-spatial, surreal, affective, and transcendent potentials of sensory media.  Jenn will present a performance: ‘reflective vessels’ that stretches the material dimensions of amplified sound objects/instruments, (industrial tubing, fans, sine tones, synths) embedded in a quadraphonic soundscape of ethereal tones and textures. 

In Eigengrau, Tammen and Hirsch play with spontaneity in form as they respond to each others’ improvisations. Eigengrau is the color you see when you close your eyes. Tammen uses his inquisitive approach to musical instruments as objects, and uses transducers to tease out overtones and noises from guitars. Hirsch uses her signature extended vocal techniques, devised over decades of experimentation, dipping in and out of singing, storytelling, and using the voice as an instrument.

The evening’s performances will be presented on a quadraphonic sound system. We’re embracing the DIY ethos that artists have taken to appropriating the often inaccessible domain of spatial audio.

Presented in conjunction with Tara Aliya Kesavan and Indranil Choudhury’s exhibition FEEBLE TRANSMITTERS, the evening’s performances center experiencing the tactile and material dimensions of sound.

Program

Eigengrau

Sound Performance

In Eigengrau, Tammen and Hirsch play with spontaneity in form as they respond to each others’ improvisations. Eigengrau is the color you see when you close your eyes.

‘reflective vessels’ 

Sound Performance

‘reflective vessels’ stretches the material dimensions of amplified sound objects/instruments, (industrial tubing, fans, sine tones, synths) embedded in a quadraphonic soundscape of ethereal tones and textures.

Program Duration: 60 mins

Bios

Jenn Grossman is an audiovisual artist, composer, and sound sculptor based in Brooklyn, NY. She is concerned with the expansive physical and psycho-spatial potentials of sensory media within a culture of commodification, expanding the “every-day” into affective/emotive/expressive vessels and transportive experiences. She explores themes of disorientation, staged synchronicity, cyclical time, the surreal, and other-worldly. Her work has taken the form of sound sculpture, audiovisual installation/performance, video, light events, public interventions, and spatial audio compositions. She’s held residencies at I-Park Foundation, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, presented audio works & research at venues and festivals such as the Black Mountain College Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Megapolis Audio Festival, Cistern Dreams at the Deep Listening Institute, the Global Composition Conference at Darmstadt amongst many NYC venues and galleries. Recently, her work’s been presented at SARC’s Sonic Lab, Roulette’s MATA festival, the Light Matter Film Festival, and the Re-embodied Sound Symposium at EMPAC in Troy, NY.

Born and raised in East New York Brooklyn, Vocal Artist, Performer, Composer, Storyteller, Interdisciplinary Artist Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art and performance work, drawing on her life experiences, her memory, her vivid imagination for decades. The New York Times called her “A woman of a thousand voices… She offered an enthralling demonstration of the way songs, vocal styles and language might have evolved out of more primal musical impulses”. Hirsch’s multimedia performances, compositions, improvisations, electronic music pieces, sound installations, collaborations and radio plays have been presented at concert halls, museums, theaters, galleries, clubs, radio, worldwide in venues including Alice Tully Hall, Roulette, Experimental Intermedia Foundation and CBGB’s in NYC; Experimenta Festival in Buenos Aires, What is Music? Festival Melbourne Australia; Beyond Innocence Festival in Kobe Japan; City of Women Festival Llubliana Slovenia; Dom Cultural Center Moscow; Akademie Der Künste Berlin; Next Festival Bratislava Slovakia; Time Festival Ghent, Belgium; Angelica Festival Bologna Italy, All Ears Festival Oslo Norway; Red House Sofia Bulgaria; Taktlos Festival Bern Switzerland; New Music America Festival Helena Montana, TBA Festival Portland Oregon, and hundreds more..

Hans Tammen is just another worker in rhythms, frequencies and intensities. He likes to set sounds in motion, and then sit back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. This flows like clockwork, “transforming a sequence of instrumental gestures into a wide territory of semi-hostile discontinuity; percussive, droning, intricately colorful, or simply blowing your socks off” (Touching Extremes).

He performs regularly with prepared and microtonal guitars, Buchla Music Easel, and a Blippoo Box chaos synthesizer. He also performs with various pieces of software of his own design, made for the interactive processing of various objects or instruments. He regularly writes for large ensembles, notably his 18-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Third Eye Orchestra, and the all-electronic Dark Circuits Orchestra, both founded in 2005. In 2021 FLUX String Quartet commissioned him to write a large work for string quartet and live electronics.