Sunday,
November 5, 2023
7pm
Doors open
7:30pm
Concert begins
November 5, 2023
7pm
Doors open
7:30pm
Concert begins
“Although their practices may seem antithetical,” Adrian Rew (of Ergot Records) tells us, “the performers behind the Blue Lake and Music for Broken Violins projects share a sense of deference to the acoustic materials with which they work. Whether using a custom-built zither or broken violins, they approach their instruments with elemental simplicity and restraint, dispensing with self-expression so as to allow for sound to speak for itself.”
For his first-ever performance in the US, Blue Lake plays guitar, clarinet, recorder, and a new 36-string zither designed for portability on the road. He invites Music for Broken Violins for a solo performance and to join him in duo formation.
Introductory remarks by Adrian Rew.
Introductory remarks by Adrian Rew.
The musician and DJ Adrian Rew founded the label Ergot Records in 2011 and opened a record shop, using the same name, in 2021. You can find him there most days, at 32 East 2nd Street. Last year, Adrian organized an exhibition and reading around John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem at the shop.
Blue Lake is the moniker of musician and instrument-builder Jason Dungan, a Dallas native currently splitting time between Copenhagen and rural Sweden, whose practice revolves around the use of self-made zithers. The latest Blue Lake LP, Sun Arcs (2023), foregrounds the influence of frolicking American primitive folk, with acoustic guitar, keyboards, cello, clarinet, alto recorder, and percussion providing scaffolding for the shimmering overtones of Dungan’s zither latticework.
Blue Lake is the moniker of musician and instrument-builder Jason Dungan, a Dallas native currently splitting time between Copenhagen and rural Sweden, whose practice revolves around the use of self-made zithers. The latest Blue Lake LP, Sun Arcs (2023), foregrounds the influence of frolicking American primitive folk, with acoustic guitar, keyboards, cello, clarinet, alto recorder, and percussion providing scaffolding for the shimmering overtones of Dungan’s zither latticework.
Music for Broken Violins is the project of Marija Kovačević, a Serbian-born, New York-based violinist. Kovačević has developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary of dragging strings, playing cracks, bowing broken bodies, wrapping loose hair, and creaking pegs. In performance, there is a minimalist, ritualistic structure to her unembellished studies, as each instrument is approached in procession, with silence in between each visceral deviance from the accepted technical norms. In addition to two volumes of Music for Broken Violins, Kovačević’s broken violins also appear on a duo cassette with Thierry Müller.
