Roulette Listing Title: Seth Cluett and TAK Ensemble
Short description: Two new works by Seth Cluett and TAK Ensemble engaging resiliency in the face of ecological collapse
Long description: TAK Ensemble presents an evening highlighting the impossibly small sounds and glacially slow music of composer and visual artist Seth Cluett. The performance will feature the world premiere of irreversible histories of disturbance, a long-form composition employing handmade instruments and novel scoring techniques that emphasize communal interdependence, performer agency, and playful curiosity about sound. The result of an extended collaboration, this work takes an ecosystemic approach to audible form and language that considers time-cycles, symbiosis, causation, erosion, disturbance, crisis, decay, and growth as catalysts for musical interaction.
The concert will also present the premiere of a short video work the reformation of assemblages, part of Cluett’s no small matter series of works utilizing found flora. For this installment TAK Ensemble, choreographer Abigail Levine, and filmmaker Itziar Barrio were given separate text scores resulting in an experimental document of an outdoor performance collecting and exploring the sound of seed pods, pine cones, leaves, and downed branches.
A B O U T...S E T H...C L U E T T
Seth Cluett is a composer and visual artist who creates work that explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutiae by amplifying impossible tasks, and investigates memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Ranging from photography and drawing to installation, concert music, and critical writing, his “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). Exploring the territory between the senses, Cluett’s works are marked by a detailed attention to perception and to the role of sound in the creation of a sense of place, the workings of memory, and the experience of time. The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM. His concert work has been commissioned by ensembles ranging from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the International Contemporary Ensemble to So Percussion, Catch Guitar Quartet, and Clogs and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice, and Winds Measure recordings. Since 2017, Cluett has served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs and is Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art MFA Program at Columbia University.
A B O U T...L A U R A...C O C K S
Laura Cocks (they/she) is a flutist with “febrile instrumental prowess” (The New York Times), who works in a wide array of environments as a performer of experimental music and “creates intricate, spellbinding works that have a visceral physicality to them” (Foxy Digitalis). Laura is the executive director and flutist of TAK ensemble, and a member of Talea Ensemble, noted for their “astonishing fluidity,” “compelling lucidity, ” and “precise control” (the New York Times). As a soloist, improviser, and chamber musician, they have performed with musicians such as DoYeon Kim, Shara Lunon, yuniya eddy kwon, Timothy Angulo, Luke Stewart, Wendy Eisenberg, Lester St. Louis, Brandon Lopez, Madison
Greenstone, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Sun Ra Arkestra, Wet Ink Ensemble, and many others in NYC and abroad.
Their recent solo album, field anatomies (Carrier Records), noted as one of Stereogum’s top-ten experimental releases of the year, charted in the Billboard top ten “Classical Crossover” releases and was praised for its “superhuman physicality” and “disciplined patience” (Bandcamp Best Contemporary Release and Experimental Release). Laura can be heard on labels such as ECM, Denovali Records, Catalytic Sound, TAK editions, Tripticks Tapes, Carrier Records, Chambray Records, Double Whammy Whammy, New Focus Records, Sound American, Orange Mountain Music, Supertrain, Gold Bolus, Hideous Replica, Sideband Records, and many others.
A B O U T...M A D I S O N...G R E E N S T O N E
Madison Greenstone is a clarinetist, writer, and composer based in Brooklyn known for their ‘revelatory’ (Pitchfork) performances. Their solo practice exstatic resonances explores ‘shatteringly intense’ (Nowhere Street) instrumental expressivities that give rise to a ‘thrilling rawness’ (The Wire) when the clarinet is treated as a site of generative instability. Exstatic resonances embraces and instigates chaotic timbral actions, difficult-to-reign sonorities, and harmonically rich and noisy resonances that have a vivid inner life and movement. Their debut solo album, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch Records), was included in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of 2023 compilation, and has been described as “one hell of a calling card” (The Wire) and “mindblowing” (Nowhere Street). Madison can be heard on labels such as Wandelweiser Editions, Another Timbre, TAK Editions, Pleasure of the Text Records, eë editions, Unknown Tapes, New Focus Recordings, Impakt Collective, Greyfade, and upcoming on Important Records, Mengi, and Longform Editions.
Madison’s writing on experimental music has been published through LAMPO publications, Greyfade FOLIO, and the Museum of Natural History Neuchâtel (CH), and Contemporary Music Review.
A B O U T...M A R I N A...K I F F E R S T E I N
Marina Kifferstein (she/they) is a violinist and generative artist based in NYC. Equally comfortable in major international halls and intimate DIY venues, she enjoys a diverse career with a focus on contemporary chamber music. Marina is a founding member of TAK ensemble and The Rhythm Method string quartet, a principal member of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, and is a regular guest with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wet Ink, and Talea. A strong supporter of new music, Marina has performed and commissioned an extensive repertoire of music by living composers; as a soloist and chamber musician, they have premiered hundreds of new works. Her own compositions have been performed across the U.S. and Europe. Marina has been a featured performer at international music festivals including the Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Festival Musiques Démesurées, Musiikin Aika, and the Lucerne Festival. She has held residencies with TAK and the Rhythm Method at dozens of universities across the U.S. and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, New York University, McGill, and Zürich Hochschule der Künst.
A B O U T...C H A R L O T T E...M U N D Y
Canadian soprano Charlotte Mundy has been dubbed a "daredevil with an unbreakable spine" (SF Classical Voice), “mesmerizing” (New York Times), and is the only awardee of the Jan Degaetani prize for Contemporary Song from the Joy in Singing Competition. She is the vocal soloist on the recording of Bekah Simms’ 2022 Juno award winning composition Bestiary I & II. In addition to her work with TAK, Mundy is a core member of the microtonally focused vocal ensemble, Ekmeles, described as “almost
frightening in their precision” by Fanfare magazine. Mundy has made plays, dances and installations with theater makers Paul Lazar, Cynthia Hopkins, Katherine Brook and Rachel Chavkin, visual artist Martin Creed and choreographer Miro Magloire, at venues including the Park Avenue Armory, BAM Next Wave Festival, and The Kitchen. Her 23/24 season includes the world premiere of site-specific opera Newtown Odyssey by Kurt Rohde and Marie Lorenz; world premieres by Francisco del Pino, Alyssa Regent, Lainie Fefferman and Aida Shirazi, a solo recital at The Americas Society; and the debut of a new collaborative multimedia ensemble, Pixeltongue, with Christian Quiñones.
A B O U T...E L L E R Y...T R A F F O R D
Ellery Trafford is a New York-based percussionist specializing in contemporary chamber music who thrives on the search for new means of expression, musical and otherwise. Originally from Georgia, he holds degrees from Georgia State University, Bowling Green State University and The Manhattan School of Music and has studied with Stuart Gerber, Roger Schupp, Jeffrey Milarsky and John Ferrari. Trafford has attended festivals such as the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, the Bang On A Can Summer Festival, the Third Practice Electroacoustic Festival, the Spark Electronic Arts Festival and the Beijing Modern Music Festival. He has performed at venues in New York and abroad from the eminent to the underground: from Beijing’s National Performing Arts Center to Carnegie Hall, The Stone, Roulette and many more in New York. Special projects include co-founding ensembles like TAK, a quintet + electronics, and OUTLAW, a percussion/piano performance art duo.