Elegy (Streaming Music Show)

Elegy (Streaming Music Show)

7:00pm Intro Fred Moten’s Post-Notes

7:10pm: Elegy

  • Debit “The Fifth Night”
    (audio)
  • Dreamcrusher “Wanderer”
    (audio visual)
    Artist: Dreamcrusher
    Album: Another Country
    Release date: June 2020
    Label: Purple Tape Pedigree (PTP)
    Video: Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”
  • BL Shirelle/ Leila Adu “The 2100”
    (audio)
    Radiophonic collaboration for the Network for New Music, Philadelphia
  • TYGAPAW “Who Cant Hear Must Feel”
    (audio visual)
    (TYGAPAW ICA live)
  • Bon “Flora”
    (audio visual)
    Album: Pantheon (Visual Album)
    Release date: Upcoming 2021

Artist Bios

7:00pm Intro Fred Moten’s Post-Notes

Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, The Feel Trio, The Little Edges, The Service Porch, and All that Beauty among others. Moten has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.  He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/performance-studies/fred-moten

7:10pm: Elegy

Jamar Roberts (Miami, FL) graduated from the New World School of the Arts. He trained at the Dance Empire of Miami, where he continues to teach, and The Ailey School’s Fellowship Program. Mr. Roberts was a member of Ailey II and Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Dance Magazine featured him as one of “25 to Watch” in 2007 and on the cover in 2013. In 2016 he was a guest with London’s Royal Ballet and won Outstanding Performer at the New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. He made his Ailey II choreographic debut with Gêmeos, set to the music of Afrobeat star Fela Kuti. He has premiered three works for the Company to critical acclaim: Members Don’t Get Weary (2017), Ode (2019), and A Jam Session for Troubling Times (2020). Jamar has been commissioned to make virtual works for New York City Ballet, The March on Washington Film Festival and Works and Process at the Guggenheim where he created the short dance on film piece entitled Cooped. In 2019 Mr. Roberts was appointed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s first Resident Choreographer. He first joined the Company in 2002.

Kwami Coleman is a pianist, composer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. His research interests include experimental music history, jazz history, the history and music cultures of the African Diaspora, the political economy of music, music technology, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Coleman’s current book project, in production, is titled Change: The “New Thing” and Modern Jazz. His 2017 album is titled Local Music, and features original music written for trio and field recordings. His upcoming electronic recording project is titled POLY. Coleman was a founding member of the Afro-Latin@ Forum, a non-profit organization devoted to the study and increased visibility of Latinos of African descent in the United States, now housed in NYU’s Steinhardt School.

  • Debit “The Fifth Night”
    (audio)

Debit: Delia Beatriz is an electronic music producer, performer and DJ with a Masters degree in Music technology from NYU. Her thesis research involved MIR and an archeological archive of Mayan wind instruments from the Late Classical Period. She got her B.A. from Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Latin American Studies. Her bachelor’s thesis project The Incunables investigated the role of the book & the printing press as a colonial technology in Mexico. Her debut LP Animus was released in 2018, receiving critical acclaim from a wide range of international media. It was ranked 14th in Fact Mag’s Best 50 Albums of the year and # 1 in Noisey Español’s Best Latin American Electronic Albums of 2018. That year, Vice’s Noisey Español also placed her as the top “20 Hispanic artists to keep in the radar of 2018”. In 2019, her third release System was ranked best music by Fact Mag, Resident Advisor and Pitchfork.

  • Dreamcrusher “Wanderer”
    (audio visual)
    Artist: Dreamcrusher
    Album: Another Country
    Release date: June 2020
    Label: Purple Tape Pedigree (PTP)
    Video: Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”

Dreamcrusher: “Playing a fringe yet stylized version of noise and industrial that is intelligent, expressive, and powerfully physical, Dreamcrusher is the solo musical endeavour of multidisciplinary artist Luwayne Glass- hailing from Wichita, Kansas. Formed in 2003, reveling in the aughts of myspace, tumblr, soundcloud and other social media sites, Dreamcrusher began as a project of self-discovery and self-release while contained in a queer, gender non-binary (they/them pronouns, not he/him or she/her), black body in America’s bible belt. Creating over thirty releases, splits, extended plays and singles all before 2014, without ever releasing a full-length album, each project shows a very individual growth while sitting in many scenes that often don’t lend
themselves to explicit artistic morphing. The Dreamcrusher project and their releases have become increasingly more personal,
confrontational, concise and challenging. After migrating from Kansas to New York City, their success hit new heights diving headfirst into the American live DIY scene. Dreamcrushercontinues to alter the overwhelmingly rigid aesthetic of ‘noise’ and underground scenes by expanding the meaning of ‘genre’, and in many ways completely distorting ‘genre’ to form to them rather than the reverse. They choose not to underestimate the intelligence of their audience by challenging them at every sea change.”

  • BL Shirelle/ Leila Adu “The 2100”
    (audio)
    Radiophonic collaboration for Network for New Music, Philadelphia

BL Shirelle (Die Jim Crow Records): Philadelphia native BL Shirelle is an accomplished musician, producer and songwriter. In addition, Shirelle serves as Deputy Director of Die Jim Crow Records, the first non-profit record label in United States history for currently and formerly incarcerated artists. After serving ten years in prison herself, Shirelle is dedicated to social change and activism through her music and work with DJC Records. Shirelle has been a guest speaker at colleges across America, educating youth on mass incarceration. She has spoken at Augustana University, Stockton University, Goucher University, and Susquehanna University. She also continues to work with artists still in prison to produce and share their music on high-quality platforms. Her debut solo album ASSATA TROI will be released with DJC Records June 19th, 2020. Shirelle’s new wave, yet classic sound is a sonic exploration of Hip Hop, Rock, Blues, and R&B, with incredible lyricism coupled with complex instrumentation. Shirelle and her work have been featured in Rolling Stone, PBS/Whyy, The Indypendent, Flowertown, Ms. Magazine, Bushwick Daily, Aesthetics For Birds, and We Want The Airwaves among others.

Leila Adu: Leila Adu is an astonishing force in the space where electropop, avant-classical and singer-songwriter meet. Exploring her roots in New Zealand, Britain and Ghana, Adu is an international artist who has performed at festivals and venues across the world. Compared to Nina Simone and Joanna Newsome by WNYC, Adu has released five acclaimed albums, and has given visionary solo BBC and WQXR performances. Adu’s credits include Ojai Music Festival, Bang on a Can, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Late Night with David Letterman, and composing for a Billboard charted album. Adu holds a Princeton University music composition PhD.

  • TYGAPAW “Who Cant Hear Must Feel”
    (audio visual)
    (TYGAPAW ICA live)

TYGAPAW: Dion Mckenzie known as TYGAPAW, is a one-person army on a mission to highlight inclusivity and displacement through sound. Originally from Mandeville, Jamaica, and based in Brooklyn, New York, TYGAPAW is a polymathic artist injecting their Jamaican heritage into techno. Operating at the intersections of their musical and cultural roots, TYGAPAW infuses the raw energy of dancehall with their signature emotional club sound. The self-taught producer founded monthly club nights Shottas, No Badmind and Fake Accent, creating platforms and spaces for QTIPOC. Fake Accent also functions as TYGAPAW’s own imprint, which aims to platform and center black electronic music artists.

  • Bon “Flora”
    (audio visual)
    Album: Pantheon (Visual Album)
    Release date: Upcoming 2021

Bon: Alex Morris and Yerosha Windrich are composer producers based in East London. They’ve had music featured with The R.S.A, British Arts Council, The BBC, Channel 4, Audi and Nowness as well as co-writing and producing avant-garde electronic albums and E.Ps for Hyperdub Records, Warp records, Mixpak. Alex is published by Bucks Music and Yerosha Warp Publishing. 

During the first lockdown they were inspired to create a modern classical ambient visual album Pantheon – ‘A Ritual to the Goddesses – Pantheon comes as a visual album created as an ode to nature. The images glitch between altered perceptions and the internal worlds all around us. Half remembered clips from a fragmented timeline – colliding with the brains desire to ‘make sense’ of things.’