Good Grief: Dreamers
'vienna', a new release on Small Forms Records w FIM Basel Concert March 2023 Hypersurface is a NYC-based trio consisting of Drew Wesely (guitar/objects), Lester St. Louis (cello), and Carlo Costa (percussion). Hypersurface explores timbral, durational, and formal aspects of improvisation with lenses focused on their instruments' acoustic particularities alongside employing tiles, railroad spikes, ceramic plates and other objects to expand them further. In coming together Carlo, Drew and Lester wanted to create a music that puts emphasis on the erasure of sonic boundaries, embracing the liminal spaces between their instruments, their sounds and the greater sonic environment. Timbre, gesture, duration, particles, layers… a real time tapestry of its own. The trio has given performances throughout the United States and Europe in a diversity of concert settings from clubs to large halls and galleries; with each utilizing the acoustics to follow potent musical pathways. Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. http://kamaupatton.com
Good Grief is a deep listening live event series curated by Drew Litowitz (A Place to Go, Marble Rye) and friends. For this edition, titled “Dreamers,” guest curators and DJs Eugenia and Rafa will each provide their own soothing reset of otherworldly tenderness and warmth. A special and rare live performance by Ronan will drift dynamically through mystic realms and healing tones. Resident and organizer Marble Rye will present a mix of tension and euphoria through a haze of experimental, balmy excursions, both icy and warm. You will leave rejuvenated and recalibrated.
*feel something*
Marble Rye
Marble Rye is the ambient project of Drew Litowitz (A Place to Go). In both his DJ sets and his original music Litowitz explores the tension between the aspirational tranquility of New Age music with the looming darkness of the experimental and avant garde. Hope and foreboding bend and morph across time for a transcendent experience through sound.
Eugenia
The Bay Area DIY scene nourished Eugenia’s roots as a DJ: Through performing at deep techno and ambient-centered gatherings in SF and Oakland from 2017, she began to develop a dynamic sound marked with her signature shimmering, whimsical touch. Her sets are reflective, playful and textural, soaring across genres and energy levels with a queer twist – while remaining tender, minimalistic, and irresistibly groovy. Upon moving to New York City in 2023, she began co-heading RECESS, a queer, psy-forward DIY day-rave alongside her dear friend como se DJ, through which she has continued honing her musical voice and her skills as an event curator. Eugenia is also a practicing poet and is host of a genre-nonconforming, ambient-inspired mix series, The Shape of Memory which aims to re-imagine memory as a living, breathing being which influences our feelings and our sense of self.
Rafa
Rafa weaves immersive sonic landscapes, blending a background in classical piano with the raw energy of Brooklyn’s underground electronic scene. Guided by emotional connections between sonic worlds over genre constraints, he crafts evocative journeys that invite emotional connection, shifting fluidly through ambient depths and instrumental interludes. With a sensibility for lush textures, their sound drifts between organic and electronic elements, creating a space for healing, introspection, and renewal.
Ronan
Robin Arthur Lohrey is a sonic ritualist, writer and dancer born and raised in the San Juan Islands of the Salish Sea, now living in a mountain valley of the Western Catskills of New York. His work is primarily concerned with personal mythmaking and collaborates with a cast of inner characters to channel his work.
One of these characters is named Ronan, meaning ‘a little seal’ in Gaelic. He is a shapeshifting selkie spirit connected to elven and druidic lineages whose sonic fingerprint is rooted in the mycorrhizal history of sound system music and watered by the deep wellsprings of Jazz improvisation, traditional Celtic folk music and post-modern electro acoustics. Through the arcane power of music and communal dance he seeks to remind himself and others of the great freedom, power and responsibility that is bestowed upon all humankind, so we may remember our place in a living universe and create more harmonic relations with ourselves, each other and our more than human kin.