Material Press would like you to invite you to a very special evening at the Neutra VDL house, to benefit the printing of Material Issue 5 and Neutra VDL. Because Issue 5 will be our last printed issue, our focus is on ideas around de-materialization, employing concepts like reduction and dissipation, diffusion and disappearance to explore the transition and impermanence of material forms.
This ticketed event will feature fragments of language de-materializing in various forms—sound, memory and vibration.
Artist David Horvitz will curate the evening, which will include a live performance by Adrian Tenney of composer James Tenney’s work entitled Having Never Written a Note For Percussion (1971) (for John Bergamo), and an immersive work by Emmett Mathison and Volta collective, entitled Ochko.
Horvitz will create a unique artwork edition of 100, made live on location, that each audience member can take home with them.
Having Never Written A Note... is the last of James Tenney’s “postal pieces,” a set of compositions written on postcards, each a different kind of sonic koan or musical/ metaphysical postulation. The experience of both playing and listening to this piece invites meditative discipline, as one focuses on the constantly changing sound of the tam-tam within the dynamic development of the work (program note by Larry Polansky). Adrian Tenney will perform the piece on an Indonesian gong, timing it to end approximately with the moment of Astronomical Twilight (when the first stars can be seen in the night sky).
Ochko is an immersive work by Mamie Green/Volta and Emmett Mathison for sound, movement, and architecture. The work unfolds across the bedrooms, kitchens, hallways, balconies, stairways and rooftops of Richard Neutra’s Silver Lake home. Recordings and recitations from dreams, piano notes, bodies and breathing enfold onto themselves and each other. In the performance, dream and sound and organism are displaced and layered across the time and space of Neutra House.
This evening of performances will include specialty cocktails crafted by local music venue Zebulon and an installation of hors d’oeuvres by artist Claire Nereim.
Your ticket purchase for this evening will ensure the launch of MATERIAL’s 5th and final issue.