THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15, 2018, 8:00 PM, $10
DAVID WATSON: Listen Faster!
The Old Stone House
in Washington Park, 3rd Street & 5th Avenue
Park Slope, Brooklyn – Map
718-768-3195 – TICKETS
The 2018-19 season of Musical Ecologies continues Thursday, November 15 with experimental musician David Watson. Originally from New Zealand, Watson has lived and worked in New York City since 1987 where he is active in a wide variety of contexts as an improvisor, composer, and presenter. For the last 25 years Watson has used the highland bagpipe as a tool to explore space and sound, and on this evening he will engage with the pristine acoustics of the Old Stone House using both the Great Highland Bagpipe and Scottish small-pipes in a suite of compositions and improvisations with the superbly creative and idiosyncratic bass trombonist Sam Kulik titled Listen Faster! This will be a first meeting for these two musicians, and the title comes from a retort by the late composer and poet Chris Mann. The evening will begin with a conversation hosted by series curator Dan Joseph.
Now it its sixth season, Musical Ecologies is a monthly symposium on music and sound held at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Curated and hosted by composer Dan Joseph, each event typically focuses on a single artist who presents a work or project either in the form of a talk or lecture, a multimedia presentation, a performance, or combination thereof. Each presentation is preceded by an extended conversation with the curator and audience.
About the artist:
David Watson is an experimental musician – a guitarist, bagpiper and advocate for intelligent listening. Having co-founded the experimental label Braille Records in New Zealand and organized several music festivals there in 1980’s, he settled in New York and into the scene around the Knitting Factory and A-mica Bunker music series. His guitar playing has been featured in many combinations, notably for John Zorn’s Cobra, and in groups with Ikue Mori, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Tipple. In the early 90’s he began playing Highland bagpipes and has worked to create a new vocabulary for the instrument, pushing the limits of space, sound and timbre, the results of which can be heard on his double-CD release Fingering an Idea on Phill Niblock’s XI Records label. Watson also has an ongoing project creating processions – new music in the context of walking and the outdoors. This has led him to making pieces for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, for the Tasmanian Police Band in Australia, and for a large ad hoc ensemble in a parking lot in Los Angeles. In 2015 Watson founded and the Brooklyn/Queens based music performance series WOrK predicated on exploring what “experimental” means today.
Photo by Andrea Callard
Facebook event page: facebook.com/events/318736112243693/