Queer Trash: the Symposium
with Justin Allen, Derek Baron, Lorene Bouboushian, Ivoire Foreman, Sarah Hennies, Crystal Penalosa, and Dane Rousay
Saturday, September 22nd, 2018 - 7pm
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum, Brooklyn, NY 11201
$15 / $12 ISSUE Members + Students
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum, Brooklyn, NY 11201
$15 / $12 ISSUE Members + Students
For their third presentation as Suzanne Fiol 2018 Curatorial Fellows, Queer Trash presents
Queer Trash: the Symposium, featuring Justin Allen, Derek Baron, Lorene Bouboushian, Ivoire
Foreman, Sarah Hennies, Crystal Penalosa, and Dane Rousay. An auspicious meeting of some
very bright and very queer minds, the evening showcases the myriad ways that queers make
sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life.
An admixture of conversational discourse and live performance, the Symposium presents a
slice of the endlessly sweeping range of current queer performance practices. The evening
kicks off with a moderated discussion with the participants, touching on topics of their practice
-- how they think, hear, and otherwise receive the world -- and is rounded out with blasts of
performances and presentations by each artist in rapid succession.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active
participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created
Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities.
Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City,
presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across
experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong
joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing
visual and performance art in Washington, D.C.
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has read at the Poetry Project,
Kampnagel, and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, and performed at Artists Space, Knockdown
Center, and Queer Abstract.
Derek Baron (b. Illinois, 1989) is an artist working mostly with sound and music. Their solo
work assembles pre-recorded sound in an attempt at documentary realism. Their recent
written and audio work has tried to engage with questions of whiteness and the audiovisual
complex. In addition to their solo practice, Derek's collaborative projects include Cop Tears (a
once-a-year amateur chamber group), Permanent Six Flags (an epistolary duo and residency
program), and Causings (a “home & garden” bricolage family band). Derek has released
albums on such imprints as Penultimate Press, Recital Program, Power Moves Library,
Pentiments, and Silt Editions. With Emily Martin, Derek co-operates the Reading Group record
label from their apartment in New York. In April 2018, Reading Group released a 3-disc LP
edition of the 1989 tape journals of artist David Wojnarowicz. Derek is currently working
towards a PhD in Historical Musicology at New York University, where they are researching
racial politics of concrete music and the role of sound in experimental documentary film.
Upcoming recorded works include a solo LP documenting a canoe trip with their dad, a
double-CD album of Richard Wagner fan fiction by Permanent Six Flags, a first-time duo
collaboration with field recordist Christian Mirande for Erstwhile’s AEU imprint, and an LP of
Cop Tears playing dodgy arrangements of the complete piano music of Theodor Adorno.
Lorene Bouboushian works within dance, experimental music/noise, and performance art.
They build a rhizomatic practice through visible forays into performances and workshopping,
and less visible forays into writing, dialogue, modes of care and support, and resource sharing.
They utilize "self-exposure and vulnerability in real, risky ways" [CultureBot, 2011], and
produce “thought-provoking commentary on social limits” [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2016].
They have shared their work in galleries and theaters in Seattle, Madison, Athens, and Beirut,
performing in festivals including New Genre Festival (Tulsa), Miami Performance International
Festival, QueerNY and Queer Zagreb, Inverse Performance Art Festival, and Month of
Performance Art-Berlin. They have shared their interdisciplinary teaching practice at
universities in Kentucky, Beirut, and Mexico. They have collaborated with Forced Into
Femininity (as missdick vibrocis), Kaia Gilje, Lindsey Drury, Matthew D. Gantt, Valerie Kuehne,
and Panoply Performance Lab, and performed for Yoshiko Chuma, Yvonne Meier, Melinda
Ring, luciana achugar, Daria Fain, and Kathy Westwater. They are a former member of NYC
based collectives XHOIR (organized by Colin Self), Feminist Art Group (organized by IV
Castellanos), and Social Health Performance Club. They are currently an Artist-In-Residence at
Movement Research, in process as a dancer with Jill Sigman/Thinkdance, working with a
think-tank through 9 PROPOSITIONS (Panoply), and a member of the Civic Reflex cohort (also
Panoply). See youtube, ig @lorene.bouboushian, and www.lorenebouboushian.org.
Ivoire Foreman employs various mediums, experiences, pop culture, childhood, time periods,
audio recordings, Trans magic, and un-comfortableness to re appropriate and reflect the
dysphoria, shame, objectification of the trans, queer, POC and marginalized existence. They
create art contemporary to them and the many communities they move within, developing
validation through visibility. They are heavily influenced by Faith Ringgold, Lisa Frank, Kara
Walker, Ebony Patterson, Sara Sze, Barbra Kruger, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, comics, video
games, science fiction, John Cage, and Space. Ivoire studied at the San Francisco Art institute,
received their BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and hold an MFA in
Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. They live, create, make, and work in Brooklyn, New
York.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY.
Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive
examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her
work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes
(NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan),
and Second Edition (Stockholm) and has received commissions for new work from Cristian
Alvear, Bearthoven, Bent Frequency, R. Andrew Lee, LIMINAR, Qubit Music, and the Thin Edge
New Music Collective. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
New Music USA, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2016 was awarded a fellowship in
music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hennies is currently a member of
improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with
sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. In late 2017 she premiered the groundbreaking work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a film featuring a cast of transgender women with a live score for string quartet and three percussionists. In 2013, Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music including Prune Bécheau, Thomas Bonvalet, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Tim Feeney, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Enrico Malatesta, and Matt Sargent.
Crystal Penalosa (they/them) is an American artist & interdisciplinary designer based in New
York. Their work focuses on queer identity, utilizing modular electronics and voice. Penalosa
has performed collaboratively and solo in New York at Issue Project Room, Roulette
Intermedium, Sediment Gallery, MoMA PS1, Experimental Intermedia, and at Spektrum in
Berlin. They currently work with the veteran underground record label Generations Unlimited.
Artist Statement: Generally, the solo work I present makes public my search for authenticity
and how it intersects with trans visibility. Presently, I am using electronics, voice, and light in a
performance exploring how my voice is a source of power and safety. The structure is
meditative and is centered on voice affirmations I wrote for myself when I began voice
self-therapy.
Dane Rousay is a Canadian-American improvisor, composer, and curator based in San
Antonio, Texas. Drawn to improvisation by a desire to free their percussion practice from the
constraints of conventional timekeeping, Rousay explores the emotional overlap of rhythm,
speed, and texture as both a soloist and participant in creative partnerships that span the United
States. Citing artists like Luis Arturo Aguirre and Cecil Taylor as inspiration, they continually
seek to affirm the liberating power and strong ethical commitments of playing free.
Since entering the improvising community in 2016, Rousay has toured extensively across North
America, booking 220 dates in 2017 alone. Their travels have found them performing with a
range of collaborators, including Jacob Wick, Paul Giallorenzo, Brandon Lopez, Tom Carter,
Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten and many more. This summer will see Rousay hitting the road multiple
times with Brandon Lopez, Jacob Wick and Michael Foster as well as ensemble appearances at
the Sonic Transmissions and NMASS festivals in Austin, Texas. Rousay also curates
Contemporary Whatever, a monthly series for adventurous art in San Antonio; they also
collaborated with Artpace to produce the inaugural Right Now Festival in August 2017, which
brought experimental and improvising performers to town from across Texas.
Rousay has also released a steady stream of solo recordings on labels including Kendra Steiner
Editions and Hard Fun in the US and Colour8 in the UK, as well as their own Rat Tail Tapes
label. Their output ranges from the extended-technique kit explorations of “blip” and “Anatomize”
to “of SIRI”’s MIDI orchestrations and the EAI of “IMP/ENV”. Their most recent release, Divide,
is was released on Already Dead Tapes on April 20th.
Queer Trash: the Symposium, featuring Justin Allen, Derek Baron, Lorene Bouboushian, Ivoire
Foreman, Sarah Hennies, Crystal Penalosa, and Dane Rousay. An auspicious meeting of some
very bright and very queer minds, the evening showcases the myriad ways that queers make
sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life.
An admixture of conversational discourse and live performance, the Symposium presents a
slice of the endlessly sweeping range of current queer performance practices. The evening
kicks off with a moderated discussion with the participants, touching on topics of their practice
-- how they think, hear, and otherwise receive the world -- and is rounded out with blasts of
performances and presentations by each artist in rapid succession.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active
participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created
Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities.
Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City,
presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across
experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong
joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing
visual and performance art in Washington, D.C.
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has read at the Poetry Project,
Kampnagel, and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, and performed at Artists Space, Knockdown
Center, and Queer Abstract.
Derek Baron (b. Illinois, 1989) is an artist working mostly with sound and music. Their solo
work assembles pre-recorded sound in an attempt at documentary realism. Their recent
written and audio work has tried to engage with questions of whiteness and the audiovisual
complex. In addition to their solo practice, Derek's collaborative projects include Cop Tears (a
once-a-year amateur chamber group), Permanent Six Flags (an epistolary duo and residency
program), and Causings (a “home & garden” bricolage family band). Derek has released
albums on such imprints as Penultimate Press, Recital Program, Power Moves Library,
Pentiments, and Silt Editions. With Emily Martin, Derek co-operates the Reading Group record
label from their apartment in New York. In April 2018, Reading Group released a 3-disc LP
edition of the 1989 tape journals of artist David Wojnarowicz. Derek is currently working
towards a PhD in Historical Musicology at New York University, where they are researching
racial politics of concrete music and the role of sound in experimental documentary film.
Upcoming recorded works include a solo LP documenting a canoe trip with their dad, a
double-CD album of Richard Wagner fan fiction by Permanent Six Flags, a first-time duo
collaboration with field recordist Christian Mirande for Erstwhile’s AEU imprint, and an LP of
Cop Tears playing dodgy arrangements of the complete piano music of Theodor Adorno.
Lorene Bouboushian works within dance, experimental music/noise, and performance art.
They build a rhizomatic practice through visible forays into performances and workshopping,
and less visible forays into writing, dialogue, modes of care and support, and resource sharing.
They utilize "self-exposure and vulnerability in real, risky ways" [CultureBot, 2011], and
produce “thought-provoking commentary on social limits” [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2016].
They have shared their work in galleries and theaters in Seattle, Madison, Athens, and Beirut,
performing in festivals including New Genre Festival (Tulsa), Miami Performance International
Festival, QueerNY and Queer Zagreb, Inverse Performance Art Festival, and Month of
Performance Art-Berlin. They have shared their interdisciplinary teaching practice at
universities in Kentucky, Beirut, and Mexico. They have collaborated with Forced Into
Femininity (as missdick vibrocis), Kaia Gilje, Lindsey Drury, Matthew D. Gantt, Valerie Kuehne,
and Panoply Performance Lab, and performed for Yoshiko Chuma, Yvonne Meier, Melinda
Ring, luciana achugar, Daria Fain, and Kathy Westwater. They are a former member of NYC
based collectives XHOIR (organized by Colin Self), Feminist Art Group (organized by IV
Castellanos), and Social Health Performance Club. They are currently an Artist-In-Residence at
Movement Research, in process as a dancer with Jill Sigman/Thinkdance, working with a
think-tank through 9 PROPOSITIONS (Panoply), and a member of the Civic Reflex cohort (also
Panoply). See youtube, ig @lorene.bouboushian, and www.lorenebouboushian.org.
Ivoire Foreman employs various mediums, experiences, pop culture, childhood, time periods,
audio recordings, Trans magic, and un-comfortableness to re appropriate and reflect the
dysphoria, shame, objectification of the trans, queer, POC and marginalized existence. They
create art contemporary to them and the many communities they move within, developing
validation through visibility. They are heavily influenced by Faith Ringgold, Lisa Frank, Kara
Walker, Ebony Patterson, Sara Sze, Barbra Kruger, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, comics, video
games, science fiction, John Cage, and Space. Ivoire studied at the San Francisco Art institute,
received their BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and hold an MFA in
Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. They live, create, make, and work in Brooklyn, New
York.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY.
Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive
examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her
work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes
(NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan),
and Second Edition (Stockholm) and has received commissions for new work from Cristian
Alvear, Bearthoven, Bent Frequency, R. Andrew Lee, LIMINAR, Qubit Music, and the Thin Edge
New Music Collective. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
New Music USA, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2016 was awarded a fellowship in
music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hennies is currently a member of
improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with
sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. In late 2017 she premiered the groundbreaking work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a film featuring a cast of transgender women with a live score for string quartet and three percussionists. In 2013, Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music including Prune Bécheau, Thomas Bonvalet, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Tim Feeney, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Enrico Malatesta, and Matt Sargent.
Crystal Penalosa (they/them) is an American artist & interdisciplinary designer based in New
York. Their work focuses on queer identity, utilizing modular electronics and voice. Penalosa
has performed collaboratively and solo in New York at Issue Project Room, Roulette
Intermedium, Sediment Gallery, MoMA PS1, Experimental Intermedia, and at Spektrum in
Berlin. They currently work with the veteran underground record label Generations Unlimited.
Artist Statement: Generally, the solo work I present makes public my search for authenticity
and how it intersects with trans visibility. Presently, I am using electronics, voice, and light in a
performance exploring how my voice is a source of power and safety. The structure is
meditative and is centered on voice affirmations I wrote for myself when I began voice
self-therapy.
Dane Rousay is a Canadian-American improvisor, composer, and curator based in San
Antonio, Texas. Drawn to improvisation by a desire to free their percussion practice from the
constraints of conventional timekeeping, Rousay explores the emotional overlap of rhythm,
speed, and texture as both a soloist and participant in creative partnerships that span the United
States. Citing artists like Luis Arturo Aguirre and Cecil Taylor as inspiration, they continually
seek to affirm the liberating power and strong ethical commitments of playing free.
Since entering the improvising community in 2016, Rousay has toured extensively across North
America, booking 220 dates in 2017 alone. Their travels have found them performing with a
range of collaborators, including Jacob Wick, Paul Giallorenzo, Brandon Lopez, Tom Carter,
Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten and many more. This summer will see Rousay hitting the road multiple
times with Brandon Lopez, Jacob Wick and Michael Foster as well as ensemble appearances at
the Sonic Transmissions and NMASS festivals in Austin, Texas. Rousay also curates
Contemporary Whatever, a monthly series for adventurous art in San Antonio; they also
collaborated with Artpace to produce the inaugural Right Now Festival in August 2017, which
brought experimental and improvising performers to town from across Texas.
Rousay has also released a steady stream of solo recordings on labels including Kendra Steiner
Editions and Hard Fun in the US and Colour8 in the UK, as well as their own Rat Tail Tapes
label. Their output ranges from the extended-technique kit explorations of “blip” and “Anatomize”
to “of SIRI”’s MIDI orchestrations and the EAI of “IMP/ENV”. Their most recent release, Divide,
is was released on Already Dead Tapes on April 20th.
QUEER TRASH PRESENTS: BLACK LEATHER JESUS, (A)SEX, MAD RECITAL, RACHIKA S
Sat 16 Jun, 2018, 8pm
ISSUE Project Room
Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship 2018QUEER TRASH PRESENTS: BLACK LEATHER JESUS, (A)SEX, MAD RECITAL, RACHIKA S
Sat 16 Jun, 2018, 8pm
Tickets
($15 - 12) ALL-ACCESS
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY 11201
For their second program as 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, Queer Trash is elated to present Black Leather Jesus, (A)sex, Mad Recital, and Rachika S. Queer Trash turns to refuse in both senses of the word: refuse of discarded detritus, and refuse as in “no fucking way.”
Promising a rousing evening of cuts and stitches, collage of space and sound and body, Queer Trash has assembled an evening that plunges deep into the marginal excesses of dominant values.
Black Leather Jesus (BLJ) have been Queer Trash’s “noise daddies” since before they can remember. Founded in 1989 by Richard Ramirez, for Queer Trash, BLJ will consist of Ramirez and his husband Sean E. Matzus. Harsh and minimal, BLJ performances are anti-music rituals of entropy and sonic decay, informed by both religion and sadomasochistic gay male sexuality. Innovators of Harsh Noise Wall, BLJ envelops the listener and environment in a thick sonic palette that, like in sadomasochism itself, is as deeply vulnerable as it is emotionally overwhelming.
Mad Recital is an experimental fashion line that employs repurposed garments and unconventional structures by Sean E. Matzus and Richard Ramirez (who also produces fashion as Richard Saenz). This is a rare convergence of the artists’ fashion work and sonic output in the same evening, underscoring their cross-disciplinary commitment to complicating the value of what is otherwise considered junk.
Currently based in Denton, Texas, Mitchell Rotunno formed (A)sex in 2014 as a cathartic project in relation to a lasting ordeal of anorexia and resulting sexual ramifications. The abrasive and fluid sound is purgative of the shame, guilt, and warped perspective caused by the disorder. The pain of candor in self exposure is transformed into a therapeutic experience.
Rachika S weaves multi-instrumental samples and synthesized sounds with collaged found and personal video, set in a light and scrim installation. Based in Brooklyn, her work draws on intergenerational memory and meanders purposefully through appropriated visual and audio landscapes from immaterial pasts to the immediate present.
Together, this work presents an array of relationships of queer body and mind. This is creative deconstruction and recontextualization of opposing forces, cut-ups and inversions of hierarchies of worth. To quote a former design slogan of Richard Ramirez, “If I wanted the world to love me, I wouldn’t have worn this.”
Black Leather Jesus is the harsh noise unit formed in 1989 by Richard Ramirez. Originally based in Texas, BLJ is currently in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The group has had over thirty members. BLJ’s imagery primarily has been gay leather erotica and pornography. Images that has caused criticism and hate at times. The group is mainly fronted by married couple Richard Ramirez and Sean E. Matzus. Their sound is mainly “junk” noises with heavy feedback. Very minimal set up (no vocals). BLJ has also worked with such artists Smell & Quim, MSBR, Smegma, Kadaver, Nihilist Assault Group, Merzbow, Le Cose Bianche, and Andrew Liles. Black Leather Jesus was invited by Sonic Youth to open for them in 2007 in Marfa, TX (sponsored by Chinati/Donald Judd Foundation). Black Leather Jesus has toured the U.S. from coast to coast as well as Europe.
Mad Recital is an avant-garde fashion label established in 2010. Current designers of the label are Sean E. Matzus and Richard Ramirez (Richard Saenz). Mad Recital focuses on deconstruction, re-purposed garments, handmade techniques, alternative visions of beauty and unconventional designs. The designers are influenced by designers like Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, Ann Demeulemeester, Susan Cianciolo, Junya Watanabe, and Yohji Yamamoto. Drawing inspiration from nature, folklore, myths and legends, film and the arts. Mad Recital aims to create wearable art. The end goal is pieces that delight, unsettle, inspire and provoke. The label produces clothing, accessories and hand-printed t-shirts along with a diverse selection of media including zines and video. The duo has also created an online site called Either Territory that also features their other fashion labels (Automatism, Richard Saenz, and Dismembered Quietly).
Sean E. Matzus began working in the Houston, TX experimental music scene in 2001, as a member of the improvised electronics group In the Land of Archers. He soon gravitated towards the harsh-noise faction of the scene and began his long-term collaboration with Richard Ramirez--later to become his partner and husband--as a member of numerous projects including [untitled], Nuits Rouges and Black Leather Jesus. Sean creates with a combination of field recordings, synthesizers, electronics and contact mic manipulation. His solo work ranges from harsh noise walls (HNW) in projects Thewhitehorse and The Shudder of Anguish, extreme minimalist wall noise as theNIGHTproduct to the sound-collage based experimental project A Week of Kindness and the traditional harsh noise of Red Hook. He also produces work as founder and curator and frequent artist of ongoing Queer Agitprop project Pink Triangle Series. Major influences include Chop Shop, The Haters, Etant Donnes, John Duncan and M.B. Just as important has been the “non-musical” influence of creative film sound-design, from the nightmare soundscapes of horror films to the more sculptural sound-worlds of Tarkovsky and the chaos of noise and buried dialogue in the work of Godard.
Sean lives in Southwestern Pennsylvania with his husband.
Richard Ramirez began his work in 1989 in Houston, TX with the harsh noise project Black Leather Jesus and Flesh Puppets. He began recording under his own name in 1992. The same year he began his label, Deadline Recordings (which continues today). Ramirez work was influenced by artists like The Haters, Kapotte Muziek, The New Blockaders, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, and Nurse with Wound. Openly gay, Ramirez took a lot of “heat” from the noise scene especially in his early years. He used gay erotica and extreme leather scene images in his work. At times still gets criticism and hate mail over his sexuality and art. Ramirez has toured/performed in the U.S., Canada, Japan, UK, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. He has collaborated with many experimental artists including Merzbow, G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, Thurston Moore, CON-DOM, Skullflower, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, PBK, The Rita, Prurient, MSBR, Smell & Quim, Vomir. Ramirez has many side/collaborative projects including Werewolf Jerusalem, Nuits Rouges, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Fouke, & Martyr of Sores. Currently his project Nuits Rouges is working on a collaboration release with Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) to be released on Matzus-Ramirez’s label, Next Halloween Records. Ramirez resides in Southwestern Pennsylvania with his husband/collaborator.
Mitchell Rotunno’s relationship with noise and experimental music began in 2006 with a hasty release of raw sound cultivated from as little instrumentation as possible on his own imprint Untitled Productions. In 2013 a series of personal life events changed the trajectory of his process towards a more pointed, emotionally charged sound-as-catharsis. Currently, he has four main projects: (A)sex, Michelle, The Ebony Tower, and Urban Decay; each explore a specific theme or state of mind through sound. With The Ebony Tower, a literary obsession was channeled into Harsh Noise Wall, or HNW. With (A)sex, there is a strong cut-up influence meant to deal with trauma and explore the relationship of pain and pleasure. Michelle is an attempt at purity in sound utilising the mixer as the primary instrument, with an emphasis on free improvisation; it is the project with which he has collaborated most with other experimental artists. Urban Decay is a combination of techniques used in NIMB (no-input mixing board) with HNW. The proliferation of projects serves to combat stagnancy and complacency in the artist’s personal life.
Rachika S is a Brooklyn-based ambient-electronic producer and multi- instrumentalist whose work touches upon electro-acoustic methods, installation, and video. She magnifies latent sonic and harmonic qualities of her instrumental work using electronic processing techniques like granular synthesis, while pushing and resampling those digital apparatuses to the point of revealing their artifacts—situating her work within the transitional space between physical acoustics and digital audio, the real and the virtual. She also drums for several local bands, including queercore quartet MALLRAT, and writes for national music magazines including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Time Out NY. She has spoken on panels and presented music at universities such as Hampshire College, Cornell University, and Wesleyan University, and her work in her various projects has been featured in publications including Tiny Mixtapes, Mask Magazine, Afropunk, New Noise Magazine and more.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Mad Recital, photo by Carol Sandin-Cooley
Sat 16 Jun, 2018, 8pm
Tickets
($15 - 12) ALL-ACCESS
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY 11201
For their second program as 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, Queer Trash is elated to present Black Leather Jesus, (A)sex, Mad Recital, and Rachika S. Queer Trash turns to refuse in both senses of the word: refuse of discarded detritus, and refuse as in “no fucking way.”
Promising a rousing evening of cuts and stitches, collage of space and sound and body, Queer Trash has assembled an evening that plunges deep into the marginal excesses of dominant values.
Black Leather Jesus (BLJ) have been Queer Trash’s “noise daddies” since before they can remember. Founded in 1989 by Richard Ramirez, for Queer Trash, BLJ will consist of Ramirez and his husband Sean E. Matzus. Harsh and minimal, BLJ performances are anti-music rituals of entropy and sonic decay, informed by both religion and sadomasochistic gay male sexuality. Innovators of Harsh Noise Wall, BLJ envelops the listener and environment in a thick sonic palette that, like in sadomasochism itself, is as deeply vulnerable as it is emotionally overwhelming.
Mad Recital is an experimental fashion line that employs repurposed garments and unconventional structures by Sean E. Matzus and Richard Ramirez (who also produces fashion as Richard Saenz). This is a rare convergence of the artists’ fashion work and sonic output in the same evening, underscoring their cross-disciplinary commitment to complicating the value of what is otherwise considered junk.
Currently based in Denton, Texas, Mitchell Rotunno formed (A)sex in 2014 as a cathartic project in relation to a lasting ordeal of anorexia and resulting sexual ramifications. The abrasive and fluid sound is purgative of the shame, guilt, and warped perspective caused by the disorder. The pain of candor in self exposure is transformed into a therapeutic experience.
Rachika S weaves multi-instrumental samples and synthesized sounds with collaged found and personal video, set in a light and scrim installation. Based in Brooklyn, her work draws on intergenerational memory and meanders purposefully through appropriated visual and audio landscapes from immaterial pasts to the immediate present.
Together, this work presents an array of relationships of queer body and mind. This is creative deconstruction and recontextualization of opposing forces, cut-ups and inversions of hierarchies of worth. To quote a former design slogan of Richard Ramirez, “If I wanted the world to love me, I wouldn’t have worn this.”
Black Leather Jesus is the harsh noise unit formed in 1989 by Richard Ramirez. Originally based in Texas, BLJ is currently in Southwestern Pennsylvania. The group has had over thirty members. BLJ’s imagery primarily has been gay leather erotica and pornography. Images that has caused criticism and hate at times. The group is mainly fronted by married couple Richard Ramirez and Sean E. Matzus. Their sound is mainly “junk” noises with heavy feedback. Very minimal set up (no vocals). BLJ has also worked with such artists Smell & Quim, MSBR, Smegma, Kadaver, Nihilist Assault Group, Merzbow, Le Cose Bianche, and Andrew Liles. Black Leather Jesus was invited by Sonic Youth to open for them in 2007 in Marfa, TX (sponsored by Chinati/Donald Judd Foundation). Black Leather Jesus has toured the U.S. from coast to coast as well as Europe.
Mad Recital is an avant-garde fashion label established in 2010. Current designers of the label are Sean E. Matzus and Richard Ramirez (Richard Saenz). Mad Recital focuses on deconstruction, re-purposed garments, handmade techniques, alternative visions of beauty and unconventional designs. The designers are influenced by designers like Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, Ann Demeulemeester, Susan Cianciolo, Junya Watanabe, and Yohji Yamamoto. Drawing inspiration from nature, folklore, myths and legends, film and the arts. Mad Recital aims to create wearable art. The end goal is pieces that delight, unsettle, inspire and provoke. The label produces clothing, accessories and hand-printed t-shirts along with a diverse selection of media including zines and video. The duo has also created an online site called Either Territory that also features their other fashion labels (Automatism, Richard Saenz, and Dismembered Quietly).
Sean E. Matzus began working in the Houston, TX experimental music scene in 2001, as a member of the improvised electronics group In the Land of Archers. He soon gravitated towards the harsh-noise faction of the scene and began his long-term collaboration with Richard Ramirez--later to become his partner and husband--as a member of numerous projects including [untitled], Nuits Rouges and Black Leather Jesus. Sean creates with a combination of field recordings, synthesizers, electronics and contact mic manipulation. His solo work ranges from harsh noise walls (HNW) in projects Thewhitehorse and The Shudder of Anguish, extreme minimalist wall noise as theNIGHTproduct to the sound-collage based experimental project A Week of Kindness and the traditional harsh noise of Red Hook. He also produces work as founder and curator and frequent artist of ongoing Queer Agitprop project Pink Triangle Series. Major influences include Chop Shop, The Haters, Etant Donnes, John Duncan and M.B. Just as important has been the “non-musical” influence of creative film sound-design, from the nightmare soundscapes of horror films to the more sculptural sound-worlds of Tarkovsky and the chaos of noise and buried dialogue in the work of Godard.
Sean lives in Southwestern Pennsylvania with his husband.
Richard Ramirez began his work in 1989 in Houston, TX with the harsh noise project Black Leather Jesus and Flesh Puppets. He began recording under his own name in 1992. The same year he began his label, Deadline Recordings (which continues today). Ramirez work was influenced by artists like The Haters, Kapotte Muziek, The New Blockaders, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, and Nurse with Wound. Openly gay, Ramirez took a lot of “heat” from the noise scene especially in his early years. He used gay erotica and extreme leather scene images in his work. At times still gets criticism and hate mail over his sexuality and art. Ramirez has toured/performed in the U.S., Canada, Japan, UK, France, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. He has collaborated with many experimental artists including Merzbow, G.X. Jupitter-Larsen, Thurston Moore, CON-DOM, Skullflower, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, PBK, The Rita, Prurient, MSBR, Smell & Quim, Vomir. Ramirez has many side/collaborative projects including Werewolf Jerusalem, Nuits Rouges, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Fouke, & Martyr of Sores. Currently his project Nuits Rouges is working on a collaboration release with Edward Ka-Spel (The Legendary Pink Dots) to be released on Matzus-Ramirez’s label, Next Halloween Records. Ramirez resides in Southwestern Pennsylvania with his husband/collaborator.
Mitchell Rotunno’s relationship with noise and experimental music began in 2006 with a hasty release of raw sound cultivated from as little instrumentation as possible on his own imprint Untitled Productions. In 2013 a series of personal life events changed the trajectory of his process towards a more pointed, emotionally charged sound-as-catharsis. Currently, he has four main projects: (A)sex, Michelle, The Ebony Tower, and Urban Decay; each explore a specific theme or state of mind through sound. With The Ebony Tower, a literary obsession was channeled into Harsh Noise Wall, or HNW. With (A)sex, there is a strong cut-up influence meant to deal with trauma and explore the relationship of pain and pleasure. Michelle is an attempt at purity in sound utilising the mixer as the primary instrument, with an emphasis on free improvisation; it is the project with which he has collaborated most with other experimental artists. Urban Decay is a combination of techniques used in NIMB (no-input mixing board) with HNW. The proliferation of projects serves to combat stagnancy and complacency in the artist’s personal life.
Rachika S is a Brooklyn-based ambient-electronic producer and multi- instrumentalist whose work touches upon electro-acoustic methods, installation, and video. She magnifies latent sonic and harmonic qualities of her instrumental work using electronic processing techniques like granular synthesis, while pushing and resampling those digital apparatuses to the point of revealing their artifacts—situating her work within the transitional space between physical acoustics and digital audio, the real and the virtual. She also drums for several local bands, including queercore quartet MALLRAT, and writes for national music magazines including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Time Out NY. She has spoken on panels and presented music at universities such as Hampshire College, Cornell University, and Wesleyan University, and her work in her various projects has been featured in publications including Tiny Mixtapes, Mask Magazine, Afropunk, New Noise Magazine and more.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Mad Recital, photo by Carol Sandin-Cooley
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Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship 2018
QUEER TRASH PRESENTS: BRUTAL MEASURES (LYDIA LUNCH + WEASEL WALTER), KEIJAUN THOMAS, STRAIGHT PANIC
LINK
Sat 10 Mar, 2018, 8pm
Tickets
($15 - 12) ALL-ACCESS
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY 11201
QUEER TRASH PRESENTS: BRUTAL MEASURES (LYDIA LUNCH + WEASEL WALTER), KEIJAUN THOMAS, STRAIGHT PANIC
LINK
Sat 10 Mar, 2018, 8pm
Tickets
($15 - 12) ALL-ACCESS
ISSUE Project Room
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn, NY 11201
For their first program as 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, Queer Trash is delighted to present Brutal Measures (Lydia Lunch + Weasel Walter), Keijaun Thomas, and Straight Panic. Queer Trash cruises in relentless pursuit of bodily disruptions and sonic deviance against avant-normativity; the collective promises an evening of unhinged sound, linguistic onslaught, and remorseless rupture of the structures of power and subjugation in which everyone is implicated.
Straight Panic is the queer nihilist power electronics project of Thomas Boettner, formerly from Minneapolis, MN and now based in New Orleans, LA. Against assimilation, against ease, Straight Panic matches the intensity of queer rage and desire to richly layered sound, drawing on sources such as the writing of Dennis Cooper to the atrocities of the current “gay purge” in Chechneya.
In her performances, Brooklyn-based Keijaun Thomas embodies a multitude of persona in careful manipulations of objects and sound. Like a priestess of the marginalized, she inverts the social order to center and uphold the denigrated lives and labor on which our society depends. With powerful transformations of seemingly ordinary materials, Keijaun’s performances are saturated with meaning. In her words, she is “reimagining, reworking, and reconstructing notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of blackness in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials.”
Brutal Measures is a collaboration between Lydia Lunch and Weasel Walter, two innovators of the most challenging, aggressive, and uncompromising nether regions of no wave, free jazz, electroacoustic composition, and spoken word. Lydia’s body of work has always been confrontational, from the band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks formed in 1976 to the current group Retrovirus, her Cinema of Transgression collaborations with Richard Kern in the 1980’s, to her longstanding history of infamous spoken word performances. Lydia serves an acerbic and viciously uncompromising assault on patriarchy, sexuality, perversity, and the status quo.
Weasel Walter’s body of work is no less uncompromising, with over twenty years of dedication to the most extreme forms of sonic expression. Walter’s projects include the legendary skronk/punk/no-wave band The Flying Luttenbachers, Cellular Chaos, To Live and Shave in LA, and intense free jazz collaborations with Roscoe Mitchell, John Butcher, Peter Evans, and countless others.
Together, these three performances cut across time, space, and dimensions of interrelated social realities. As the world continues to collapse, economically, politically, environmentally, and in ways yet to be seen, it remains crucial to make space for creative amplification of critical dissent. Queer Trash takes pleasure in the reorientation of discomfort, in the celebration of desire, in the collapse of hetero-patriarchy. In the words of Lydia Lunch, “Pleasure is the ultimate rebellion. The first thing they steal from us as women is pleasure at the brink of the apocalypse, pleasure at the mouth of the volcano. Pleasure. And that’s why we create.”
Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature. Queen of No Wave, muse of The Cinema of Transgression, writer, musician, poet, spoken word artist and photographer, she has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. Brooklyn’s own Akashic Books have published her anthology, Will Work For Drugs, as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary, which has been translated into seven languages. She performs in a variety of mediums, is a rabid collaborator and continues to release new music as well as reissuing classic material such as her spoken word indictment against patriarchal idiocy, The Conspiracy of Women through Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People.
Weasel Walter is a Brooklyn, New York based multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser best known for leading the seminal punk-jazz/no- wave/brutal-prog band The Flying Luttenbachers between 1991 and 2007 on 16 full-length releases. Seamlessly uniting the intensity and abstraction of improvised music with the nihilist aesthetics of extreme rock forms, Walter is committed to violent momentum, idiomatic unpredictability and rapid articulation.Expert in the underground music scene of the late 1970’s, Walter has lectured at various Universities including Bard, San Francisco Art Institute, University of Chicago in Paris, and penned the introduction for Marc Masters book NO WAVE, seen as the definitive history of the New York movement from which Lydia Lunch emerged in 1977 with her first group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In 2012, Weasel Walter began working with Lydia Lunch as musical coordinator and lead guitarist for RETROVIRUS, a retrospective, which spanned the spectrum of her musical legacy from No Wave Skronk to bludgeoning Hard Rock and sleazy Jazz Noir to propulsive Psychedlia. RETROVIRUS has just released their second full length LP URGE TO KILL in the USA, Europe and South America.
Straight Panic is the primary solo project of artist Thomas Boettner. Straight Panic queers all that it touches; from release artwork, to subject matter, to blatantly homosexual subject matter, proving that—as always—Industrial music is protest music. Where earlier albums were self-released on the artist's (now defunct) Fuck Mtn. Ltd. Release imprint, more recent titles have been handled by Breathing Problem Productions, Petite Soles, Invocation Films, and Phage Tapes. Though originally based out of Minneapolis, MN, he currently resides in New Orleans, LA, with his husband and three dogs.
Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas is reimagining, reworking, and reconstructing notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of blackness in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, DC.
Straight Panic is the queer nihilist power electronics project of Thomas Boettner, formerly from Minneapolis, MN and now based in New Orleans, LA. Against assimilation, against ease, Straight Panic matches the intensity of queer rage and desire to richly layered sound, drawing on sources such as the writing of Dennis Cooper to the atrocities of the current “gay purge” in Chechneya.
In her performances, Brooklyn-based Keijaun Thomas embodies a multitude of persona in careful manipulations of objects and sound. Like a priestess of the marginalized, she inverts the social order to center and uphold the denigrated lives and labor on which our society depends. With powerful transformations of seemingly ordinary materials, Keijaun’s performances are saturated with meaning. In her words, she is “reimagining, reworking, and reconstructing notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of blackness in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials.”
Brutal Measures is a collaboration between Lydia Lunch and Weasel Walter, two innovators of the most challenging, aggressive, and uncompromising nether regions of no wave, free jazz, electroacoustic composition, and spoken word. Lydia’s body of work has always been confrontational, from the band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks formed in 1976 to the current group Retrovirus, her Cinema of Transgression collaborations with Richard Kern in the 1980’s, to her longstanding history of infamous spoken word performances. Lydia serves an acerbic and viciously uncompromising assault on patriarchy, sexuality, perversity, and the status quo.
Weasel Walter’s body of work is no less uncompromising, with over twenty years of dedication to the most extreme forms of sonic expression. Walter’s projects include the legendary skronk/punk/no-wave band The Flying Luttenbachers, Cellular Chaos, To Live and Shave in LA, and intense free jazz collaborations with Roscoe Mitchell, John Butcher, Peter Evans, and countless others.
Together, these three performances cut across time, space, and dimensions of interrelated social realities. As the world continues to collapse, economically, politically, environmentally, and in ways yet to be seen, it remains crucial to make space for creative amplification of critical dissent. Queer Trash takes pleasure in the reorientation of discomfort, in the celebration of desire, in the collapse of hetero-patriarchy. In the words of Lydia Lunch, “Pleasure is the ultimate rebellion. The first thing they steal from us as women is pleasure at the brink of the apocalypse, pleasure at the mouth of the volcano. Pleasure. And that’s why we create.”
Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature. Queen of No Wave, muse of The Cinema of Transgression, writer, musician, poet, spoken word artist and photographer, she has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. Brooklyn’s own Akashic Books have published her anthology, Will Work For Drugs, as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary, which has been translated into seven languages. She performs in a variety of mediums, is a rabid collaborator and continues to release new music as well as reissuing classic material such as her spoken word indictment against patriarchal idiocy, The Conspiracy of Women through Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People.
Weasel Walter is a Brooklyn, New York based multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser best known for leading the seminal punk-jazz/no- wave/brutal-prog band The Flying Luttenbachers between 1991 and 2007 on 16 full-length releases. Seamlessly uniting the intensity and abstraction of improvised music with the nihilist aesthetics of extreme rock forms, Walter is committed to violent momentum, idiomatic unpredictability and rapid articulation.Expert in the underground music scene of the late 1970’s, Walter has lectured at various Universities including Bard, San Francisco Art Institute, University of Chicago in Paris, and penned the introduction for Marc Masters book NO WAVE, seen as the definitive history of the New York movement from which Lydia Lunch emerged in 1977 with her first group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. In 2012, Weasel Walter began working with Lydia Lunch as musical coordinator and lead guitarist for RETROVIRUS, a retrospective, which spanned the spectrum of her musical legacy from No Wave Skronk to bludgeoning Hard Rock and sleazy Jazz Noir to propulsive Psychedlia. RETROVIRUS has just released their second full length LP URGE TO KILL in the USA, Europe and South America.
Straight Panic is the primary solo project of artist Thomas Boettner. Straight Panic queers all that it touches; from release artwork, to subject matter, to blatantly homosexual subject matter, proving that—as always—Industrial music is protest music. Where earlier albums were self-released on the artist's (now defunct) Fuck Mtn. Ltd. Release imprint, more recent titles have been handled by Breathing Problem Productions, Petite Soles, Invocation Films, and Phage Tapes. Though originally based out of Minneapolis, MN, he currently resides in New Orleans, LA, with his husband and three dogs.
Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas is reimagining, reworking, and reconstructing notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of blackness in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, DC.
