Interference AV
“Times Square is a felt experience, an area of New York that overloads the senses with buildings, billboards, and lights, leaving travelers to make sense of differing signals. Interference AV brings these facets to a three-day spectacle, with leading forces in fringe art, music, and video collaborating at a historic movie theater right in the middle of “the crossroads of the world.” Believing this crossroads to be the impetus of art, we have devised a place where people will want to stay: an experimental coven and artistic sanctuary. Be prepared to take it all in, popcorn and earplugs in hand.”
- Lani Combier-Kapel, Curator & Event Manager for Clocktower
Experimental video collective UNDERVOLT & CO. teams up with Clocktower to produce live projections on an epic scale for this three-night festival takeover of America’s top-grossing multiplex, AMC Empire 25. The movie theater-turned-concert stage will feature nightly headliners Jlin, Lightning Bolt and The Sun Ra Arkestra. Dynamic live projections by UNDERVOLT & CO. artists Peter Burr and Sabrina Ratté, will include their original work and live remixing of video art by other collective members including Andrew Benson, Jacob Ciocci, Birch Cooper, Brenna Murphy, Yoshi Sodeoka, Jennifer Juniper Stratford, Ryoya Usuha, and more. The party overflows to the popcorn lobby, where Clocktower curates DJs and a zine fair.
Schedule:
Feb 19 | Jlin // Sadaf
Feb 20 | Lightning Bolt // Irreversible Entanglements
Feb 21 | The Sun Ra Arkestra // YATTA
FREE but ESSENTIAL RSVP: https://withfriends.co/clocktower
Admission will be first come, first served at the door.
Follow @TSqArts and @Clocktower_NYC for opening-act announcements.
Headliners:
Jlin is one of the most prominent producers of the current generation. She grew up in Gary, Indiana, just 20 miles from downtown Chicago. Though previously using samples in her work, she now refuses to, and her tracks are composed of all original material. Her album Black Origami was recently selected as the 16th best album of 2017 on NPR Music’s “The 50 Best Albums of 2017.”
Over the course of its two-decade existence, Lightning Bolt has revolutionized underground rock in immeasurable ways. The duo broke the barrier between stage and audience by setting themselves up on the floor in the midst of the crowd. Their momentous live performances and the mania they inspired paved the way for similar tactics used by Dan Deacon and literally hundreds of others. Similarly, the band's recordings have always been chaotic, roaring, blown out documents that sound like they could destroy even the toughest set of speakers.
“Founded in the mid-1950s, the Sun Ra Arkestra became the primary conduit through which polymath jazz composer, bandleader, pianist, poet, and philosopher Sun Ra expressed his visionary perspective… When Sun Ra left planet Earth in 1993 … Marshall Allen assumed its helm [in 1995]. An alto saxophonist, flautist, and electronic valve instrument player who joined the Arkestra in 1958, Allen lived, rehearsed, toured, and recorded with Sun Ra almost exclusively throughout his musical career. At age 93, Allen is the only living member of the Arkestra’s original core group, but maintains that its current incarnation is no ghost band… Allen and the other members of the Arkestra continue to live at the Sun Ra residence in Philadelphia… There, Allen writes fresh arrangements of Sun Ra’s tunes and composes new music for the Arkestra, committed to a life of discipline centered on the further development of Sun Ra’s musical precepts. With such a massive, joyous songbook that encompasses spiritual grooves, sing-along chants and ecstatic fire music, the Arkestra continues to traverse their namesake’s spaceways.” – Blank Forms, www.blankforms.org
Openers:
Sadaf H. Nava is an Iranian born, New York City-based producer, violinist, vocalist and multi-media artist. SADAF's visuals, sonics, and confrontational performative tactics confound and upend the inward-looking affect inherent to contemporary performance art, simultaneously drawing from and subverting the language of advertising, celebrity, and the gaze. SADAF has presented work at the 9th Berlin Biennale, MOMA PS1 Warm up and Sunday Sessions, Issue Project Room, 47 Canal and Performa in NYC, as well as: Museum of Fine Arts Montreal, SALTS gallery Switzerland, Treize Gallery Paris. Her work has been featured in Pitchfork, The Wire, ID magazine, FADER, and the Guardian UK.
Irreversible Entanglements are a liberation-oriented free jazz collective formed in early 2015 by saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) and bassist Luke Stewart, who came together to perform at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event organized after the slaying of Akai Gurley by the NYPD. Months later the group added trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes (a duo who also performed at the MAPB event) for a single day of recording at Seizure’s Palace in Brooklyn, and the full quintet’s first time playing together was captured for this debut. In four relentless bouts of inspired fire music the instrumentalists explore and elaborate compositional ideas drawn from their deep individual studies of free jazz improvisation, but the tone of each piece is driven decisively by Ayewa’s searing poetic narrations of Black trauma, survival and power. The message is the undeniable essence of the music. Though free jazz with voice is an uncommon approach in the modern day landscape of the genre, the spirit and subject the band channels and explores represent a return to a central tenant of the sound as it was founded – to be a vehicle for Black liberation. As creative and adventurous as any recording of contemporary avant-garde jazz but offering listeners no abstractions to hide behind, this is music that both honors and defies tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future.
YATTA is a Houston-born interdisciplinary artist, digipoet, and musician currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Using incantations born of loop pedal drones, folk acoustics, and electronic beats, they alchemize and creolize jazz vocals w/ Krio cries to create music to lie down in. Their most recent project, ‘hey! don’t let your subconscious run the show!’ is a poetic exploration of psychosis in relation to generational trauma, healing, and magic. The zine and accompanying audio is soon to be released with the support of Clocktower Radio. Past performances, readings, and workshops have taken place in friends' backyards, community farms, Afrofuturism conferences (Cornell University, Vassar University, Wesleyan University, The New School), The Brooklyn Museum, Powrplnt, The Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival at Knockdown Center, MOMA PS1, Issue Project Room, Roulette, and about 73 other places. Their music and poetry has been featured in ArtNews, Dazed Digital, Mask Magazine, Thump, Tiny Mixtapes, and more.
Zines
La Liga is an online platform and print zine that showcases the many ways latinxs/chicanxs/latin americans are dissecting their cultural identities through different means of self expression. We aim to show their experiences and highlight the way they de-westernize different areas of life. We feature photoseries, essays, poetry, and visual artwork.
The Media is a recurring ad-free webpaper covering underground music, art, and culture. We've published 80 issues since the project launched in 2013, with special issues focusing on themes like drag (#22), trash (#48), and immaterial digital labor (#61).
Anhelo Escalante
Et Cetera publishes perzines and mini-comics as a tool to process daily life.
Suffragette City is a volunteer-run printed zine, and community of artists, writers, and musicians, aiming to break
up cis male dominated creative scenes. We are committed to promoting the creative and intellectual ideas of strong and outspoken self-identified women and non-binary individuals. We believe in working together to accomplish our goals rather than stepping on each other to get ahead. Suffragette City is advertisement free, and 100% funded by donations. We're proud to be a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas.
Moody Rose Christopher, best known for her electric painting rich with vibrant color, twisting organic shapes, and gold glitter. Self taught, Rose began creating as a way to deal with emotional turbulence. Her current body uses nude figures as a metaphor for vulnerability, domestic scenes to represent the artist inner workings, and a nest of tight knit abstract shapes to weave absurd compositions. The work is as complex as it is simple, everything is arbitrary but intentional. Rose focuses on absurdity as a tool to shock the viewer and make them rethink preconceived notions of the everyday. You can summarize Rose's work with a quote from Billy Madison, "I drew the duck blue because I'd never seen a blue duck before and to be honest with you I wanted to see a blue duck."
Sarvnaz