“Unsound Festival” (Used 3 times)

As one of the grand finales for this year’s fantastic Unsound Festival (making it’s first appearance in NYC), the excellent Canadian experimental-drone-ambient-shoegazer-doom-metal duo Nadja -- Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff – conjured an absolutely massive soundworld of near-impenetrable density at ISSUE. Nadja design jagged, skyscraping architectures out of scalding and charred streams of noise and distortion, abstracting gestures of drone and doom into complex, infinitely detailed structures of intense beauty. Amidst sprawling ambient landscapes that are at turns placid, quivering, frightening, and impassable, Baker and Buckareff erect looming, spiraling towers that jut, writhe, and twist into the boundless vertical dimension before culminating into screaming spires of searing energy.  Be braced to emerge/escape in a collapsed crawl – drained, soaked, cleansed, and exorcised.

Anticipate Recordings is putting on a showcase tonight at Littlefield in Brooklyn. There will be live music from Ezekiel Honig, Sawako, Alexander Kaline, a DJ set by Borne, and visuals by Joshue Ott (details).

The Anticipate night is part of the NY incarnation of Poland's esteemed Unsound Festival, which is hitting venues throughout the city with an exciting set of music, art, and workshops until Feb 14 (check out ISSUE Project Room's write-up for more).

Anticipate was founded in 2007 by Ezekiel Honig, a NY-based electronic musician and sound designer. A few months ago, Pushbinlou featured Ezekiel Honig's It's Getting Cold Outside EP, released on Philadelphia's Unfound Sound netlabel in 2005 (not to be confused with Unsound Festival!). Here's a track form that EP

Anticipate is primarily a label dealing in physical objects -- some limited to as few as 50 copies, others distributed far and wide through Kompakt. In 2007, they released a free Creative Commons set of field recordings Japanese-born sound sculptor Sawako, recorded while on tour around the world. It was released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, encouraging the world to remix. The first volume of remixes featured members of the extended Anticipate family, including tracks from Sawako herself, Ezekiel Honig, and this one from Portland-based artist Strategy (Community Pool tapes, Kranky), while the second volume (cover art pictured above-left) featured a set of highlights from the CC-powered open call for submissions.

Last year, Sawako stopped by WFMU for a live performance on Bethany's Stochastic Hit Parade, which was featured by PushbinLou here.

Unsound Festival New York kicked off last Thursday evening (2/4) – marking the first incarnation of the innovative performance and lecture series outside its homeland of Poland. Founded in Kraków in 2003 by curator Mat Schulz, Unsound Festival explores the intersections between “electronic, experimental, independent, post-classical, and club music scenes.” After only four days time, the festival is already crowded with stunning highlights. I caught the opening night show at Lincoln Center featuring a terrific set from Finnish DJ/composer/drummer Vladislav Delay (whose Tummaa album was probably my fav release of 09) in collaboration with German video artist Lillevan. Still recovering (in a variety of ways) from a startlingly fresh sequence of programming at Le Poisson Rouge last night: performances of classical music touchstones Pictures at an Exhibition (Moussorgsky) and Bolero (Ravel) were followed by an absolutely resplendent, mind-blowing set of abstract electronic improvisations from the North American debut of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, featuring surprise guests Francois K (!) and Carl Craig (!!).  Levon Vincent closed the event with a blistering DJ set that carried on until the very early morning hours (I’m lame and only made it until about 3:30am…)

ISSUE Project Room will host two events in the festival this week. The “Electronic Bridge” program on Tuesday night (2/9) serves as the first in a thread of thematic shows under the Eastern Promise banner, seeking to highlight a number of important Eastern European artists generally underexposed in the U.S. The “Electronic Bridge” will feature a diverse array of experimental electronic music from Zavoloka (Ukraine) and Zenial (Poland), as well as a set from NY local Bora Yoon in collaboration with composer R. Luke DuBois on the live video tip. To whet appetites for what should be a fantastic show, I’ve compiled a dope little mix featuring works from the artists on the program.

Check here and here for more info on the two shows at ISSUE, and here for a full schedule of the rest of the festival.