ISSUE Project Room : an open and versatile environment in which established and emerging artists conduct, exhibit and perform new and site-specific work

Brooklyn-based artist MV Carbon starts her three-month residency with a free concert at ISSUE on Saturday, featuring a couple of new works using our 15-channel speaker system. The first piece will use pre-recorded cello and synthesizers, with the addition of Carbon's homemade sculptural stringed instrument. The second, in collaboration with Steven Litt of CrudLabs, involves a step sequencer triggering solenoids creating heavy, rhythmic, industrial sounds, along with Carbon's cello, synthesizer, and tapes. These two pieces are part of an ongoing conceptual drive to Carbon's art, dealing in particular with communication, perception, paranoia, identity, and epistemology.

Her last solo performance at ISSUE was a nod to video and communication artist Nam June Paik, using a circuit-bent TV cello as an electromagnetic instrument (video after the jump). These (mis)uses of technology result in unnerving and often volatile musical materials. Yet, for its technological bend and the conceptual impulse, Carbon's work seems intensely personal and visceral. There is the conveyance at these site-specific performances that not just the music but the instrument itself is part of the art.

Check out the four tracks below, all brand new recordings by MV Carbon. I've also added some info and poetry (provided by Carbon) on the main album page. Her performance this Saturday starts at 8 p.m. in Brooklyn.