Lea and Ben will present My Words Came Out Slow and Odd, a text-based composition for voices and electronics, trumpet, and reeds.

The duo's new work pushes the boundaries of language and intelligibility and extends the human voice through the aid of creative electronic processing. What new modes of communication emerge when language is in a constant state of morphology? How quickly can we recalibrate to allow for complex meaning to be projected onto abstraction? My Words Came Out Slow and Odd is a clattering, psychedelic whirl of heteroglossia, smears, and stutters.

Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci began collaborating during the summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, New York. What started as a conversation between friends slowly developed into a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation, one that examines the very nature of creative dialogue.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Note that seating for this performance is very limited. Reservations are required for entry. If you make a reservation and then are no longer able to attend, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or email info@grahamfoundation.org to release the spot to someone on the waiting list. 

Ben Vida (b.1975, Dubuque, Iowa) is a composer, improviser and artist. His work explores aural phenomena, language, durations and systems. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country in Chicago. Later, after a move to Brooklyn, he shifted his focus to electronics and systems-based compositions that used psychoacoustics, aural phenomena and advanced synthesis techniques. Since 2015 he has composed pieces that combine his interest in experimental writing with his love of singing with people.

Slipping Control (2015), Vida’s multimedia composition for voices, video and electronics, premiered at Audio Visual Arts in New York and then traveled to Los Angeles and Athens. His six-hour performance piece for vocal ensemble and electronics, Reducing the Tempo to Zero premiered for Lampo in June 2016 and was staged at The Kitchen, New York; STUK in Leuven, Belgium; and Centro Pecci, Prato. And So Now (2018) was commissioned for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed at the BAM Fisher Space. Always Already, which was created in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire ensemble and vocalist Nina Dante, premiered for Lampo in March 2020 and was also performed in New York.

In addition to these works, he has developed projects with Marina Rosenfeld, Lucio Capece, and Lea Bertucci. He has released his music with many labels including Shelter Press, Kranky, PAN, iDEAL and 901Editions, among others. Vida teaches in the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.

Lea Bertucci (b.1984) is an artist who works with sound. Her projects describe relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation, and creative misuses of audio technology. Recent projects have tapped into a space's unique acoustic properties, as in 2018’s Acoustic Shadows, a suite of compositions for the enclosed hollow body of the Deutz Suspension Bridge in Cologne.

She has released several solo albums and a number of collaborative projects, including Metal Aether and Resonant Field (NNA Tapes), and Phase Eclipse with Amirtha Kidambi (Astral Spirits). In 2021 she founded Cibachrome Editions and released A Visible Length of Light. Earlier this year the label issued Murmurations, her debut recording with Ben Vida.

Bertucci has performed her work throughout the U.S. and Europe, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, and The Kitchen, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tempo Reale, Florence; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and at international festivals, including Brückenmusik, Cologne; Sound of Stockholm, Stockholm; ReWire, The Hague; and Unsound, Kraków, among others.

Additionally, Bertucci has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; MacDowell, Peterborough, N.H.; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, Calif.; and Issue Project Room, New York. Bertucci's work has been commissioned by the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Photo: Peter Ganushkin

Join us for the final monthly extended gallery and bookshop hours (5–8 p.m.) for our current exhibition, Exits Exist by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon on the last Thursday of the month. A walkthrough of the exhibition led by Graham Foundation staff will begin at 6:30 p.m.

All purchases in the bookshop during evening hours will be 15% off.

Exits Exist, an exhibition by San Francisco-based Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, presents site-specific supergraphics for the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House galleries along with works on paper, artist's books, and a new series of sculptures.

To learn more about the Graham Foundation Bookshop, click here

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (b.1975, Kansas City, Mo.) premieres Three-Sided Figure, his new modular synth and voice performance. Lowe is an artist and composer working primarily with voice and modular synthesizers in the realm of spontaneous music. Speaking about his work, he reflects that “the marriage of synthesis and voice has allowed for a heightened physicality in the way of ecstatic music.” The sensitivity of analogue modular systems echoes the organic nature of vocal expression, which in this case is meant to put forth a trancelike state, to usher in a deeper listening through sound and feeling.

Collaborators include Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, Rose Lazar, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Ben Vida, Lucky Dragons, Alan Licht, Patrick Smith, Monica Baptista, Lee Ranaldo, Kevin Martin, Chris Johanson, Tyondai Braxton, David Scott Stone, Genesis P-Orridge and Rose Kallal, as well as many others. Select appearances include Doug Aitken’s Migration happening at 303 Gallery (2008) and Princeton University (2010), La Suite for Serpentine Gallery (2012), In the Wan Light of Napalm and Moon with Evan Calder Williams (2012), Peradam with Sabrina Ratté at EMPAC (2014), Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2014), performances with Ariel Kalma at Lincoln Center (2015), Unsound Festival and San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2018), and Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within at Kurimanzutto and the Guggenheim Museum (2019). In November 2014, Lowe premiered Early Hypnagog in the Lampo series. Recent projects include composing the Candyman score (2021), which was on the shortlist to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, and sound for Rashaad Newsome’s Assembly at the Park Avenue Armory (2022). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Returning to the Graham Foundation with a limited in-person concert, Lampo presents Intraday by Andrew Lampert and Chris Corsano. This reactivation of the Lampo performance series at the Graham also launches the Lampo Folio, a collection of ten text-based scores created during the pandemic.

Intraday is a musical study of Spotify’s stock fluctuation between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. on May 13, 2021. The work is a structured improvisation performed in accordance with the ups and downs of the stock price, as represented by 92 line charts in the score. Performers are presented with a wide range of tactics to guide them through a small amount of musical space.

The Lampo Folio, co-edited by Andrew Fenchel and Andrew Lampert, is a collection of text-based scores from ten interdisciplinary artists engaged with sound and language, including Nikita Gale, Sarah Hennies, Bonnie Jones, Andrew Lampert, Jessie Marino, Nour Mobarak, Gala Porras-Kim, Elliot Reed, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Jennifer Walshe. Each commissioned work is published in the form of instructions that can be used to enact an intimate performance in a personal space such as one’s home. The premiere of Intraday coincides with the hour the score was composed and is intentionally presented in the domestic context of the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House, which was a home from 1902–1963. 

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Note that seating for this performance is very limited. Reservations are required for entry. If you make a reservation and then are no longer able to attend, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or email info@grahamfoundation.org to release the spot to someone on the waiting list. Masks are required for all, regardless of vaccination status.

Andrew Lampert (b. 1976, St. Louis) is an artist, archivist, and writer. His eclectic and extensive body of films, videos, performances, and photographs have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Toronto Film Festival, and New York Film Festival, among other venues. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, he has preserved hundreds of important films and videos. Recent projects include co-editing and contributing to the text score collection Lampo Folio (2021, Lampo); releasing the album Lush Valley (2021); co-editing the book Tony Conrad: Writings (2019, Primary Information); and co-writing (with Howie Chen) the monthly column “Hard Truths” for Art In America. His new book, William Wegman: Writing by Artist, will be released by Primary Information this spring.

Chris Corsano (b.1975, Englewood, New Jersey) is a drummer who has worked at the intersections of free jazz, avant-rock, and experimental music since the late 1990s. He is a rim-batterer of choice for some of the greatest contemporary purveyors of jazz (Joe McPhee, Paul Flaherty, Evan Parker, Mette Rasmussen) and rock (Sir Richard Bishop, Bill Orcutt, Jim O’Rourke), as well as artists beyond categorization (Björk for her Volta album and world tour, Ghédalia Tazartès, Michael Flower, Okkyung Lee). Appearing on over 150 albums and touring in a wide array of collaborations, Corsano is also a celebrated solo performer, weaving free improvisation, extended percussion techniques, reed instruments, and drum heads resonated by bowed strings into an “ensemble of one.” In 2017, he received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Join us for an introduction to Exits Exist, an exhibition by San Francisco-based Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, including site-specific supergraphics for the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House galleries along with works on paper, artist's books, and a new series of sculptures. Tours are led by Graham Foundation staff and invited guests.

Friday, 12-1 p.m.
July 1 and July 8
REGISTER HERE

Saturday, 2–2:30 p.m.
July 9
REGISTER HERE

Last Thursday of the month, 6:30–7 p.m.
June 30
REGISTER HERE

Group tours are available by request, contact us at info@grahamfoundation.org

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