"Wave goodbye to your former selves."

​Prince Rama
Issue Project Room
Sunday, February 20

The Hare Krishna-bred, Animal Collective-produced crew Prince Rama are the Brooklyn-based band you previously might've seen performing alongside a homemade vacuum-cleaner-powered organ during Body Actualized Control's dusk "Evil Yoga" class on the Market Hotel rooftop last summer, "getting weird" with Deakin at the New Museum, or, more recently, ladling soup at the Clocktower while nude under fur, with a prayer-bell-clad cat in tow. Sunday, they kicked off a three-month artist residency at the Issue Project Room in Gowanus.

For this performance, titled UTOPIA=NO PERSON (the first in their three-part series examining "musical performance as ritual"), sister bandmates Taraka and Nimai Larson present themselves as members of a "pseudo-utopian cult" called "THE NOW AGE." Sporting leotards and headsets, they invited willing "initiates" to follow them in a clever 20-minute routine (repeated hourly), which explores the similarities between exercising and exorcising. In their own words: "UTOPIA=NO PERSON focuses on the body as a vehicle for utopian experimentation, encouraging willing participants to undergo a confrontation with personal demons and shedding of individual identity through the physical exhaustion of the body." And so on.

The immersive setting included a bar offering rainbow-colored "chakra water"; smoky incense; video projections and monitors; altars with skulls, feathers, and a disco ball; metallic sheets covering the walls; bunches of garlic hung over the door; colored flashing lights; and, of course, a transcendental soundtrack of distorted synthesizers, bells, and chirping birds. See photos and quotes from the routine below, along with a short video clip of the "burn" moments preceding the mid-set "transformation" of the participants.

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​It was a year ago last week that Suzanne Fiol, the Brooklyn arts fixture that founded the experimental performance space Issue Project Room and helped it grow from its humble beginnings in the East Village to its incipient residency in an enormous arts center at 110 Livingston Street, passed away. Since then, the space has been without a permanent leader. Finally, that's changed. The venue announced today that they've selected a new Executive Director, Ed Patuto. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it's because Patuto is a West Coast guy. According to the press release:

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​It was this day last year that Suzanne Fiol, the kind, charismatic local presence who founded Issue Project Room in 2003, died, after a protracted battle with cancer. (Our tribute to her is here.) She was a lovely person whom we were lucky enough to know, a little bit, like so many other people who worked with her or ran into her at her space over the years. For today, one stray memory: standing outside Issue's old space along the Gowanus, halfway into the stellar month-long Independents Festival Fiol curated in January, 2007. "I'm a little shocked at how successful this is," she said to me, as geeked out by her own proceedings as I was. "Fend for your own," her partner in that Independents Festival, Regina Greene, told me then, when I asked about the uncertain long term prospects of the space. "The only thing you can do about it is to grab onto your community and family, which is us." And Suzanne did.

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Merzbow, looking deceptively non-threatening. All photos by Georgia Kral

​Merzbow
Issue Project Room
Thursday, September 23

Better Than: Not knowing what noise feels like.

Listening to extremely loud, abrasive noise music is an exhilarating experience because while you're in it, there's nothing you can do but give in, and endure--just ask the more than 50 people crowded into Issue Project Room last night for the first of a two-set night with Merzbow, Japan's preeminent sonic terrorist. When it's over, you're just a little bit stronger. (Though our eardrums may beg to disagree. The music was so loud even the most die-hard fans were sporting earplugs, which the venue was handing out like candy.)

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Apparently it got a little sweaty. Pics by Jesse Hlebo.

​Man Forever
Issue Project Room
Friday, June 25

Say "drummer's solo project" and conflicting sounds come to mind--Foo Fighters, "Sussudio," Peter Criss, Charlie Watts' Charlie Parker project--with few of them ever meditating exclusively on the drum itself. Conversely, when Oneida's indefatigable Kid Millions (a/k/a John Colpitts) dropped his self-titled debut as Man Forever on the Secretly Canadian vinyl-only St. Ives label this month, its two side-long tracks provided drums aplenty.

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​Last month, the Philadelphia guitarist Jack Rose was felled by a heart attack at the appallingly young age of 38. He was in his creative prime. Now comes the welcome word that Thrill Jockey will be releasing Luck in the Valley, the last album he recorded before his death, on February 23rd. It's a lovely record--as alternately carefree, virtuosic, and psychedelic as those that came before it. To celebrate the man and his work, Issue Project will be hosting A Valentine for Jack Rose, a February 14th memorial featuring frequent Rose collaborators the Black Twig Pickers, his old psych-blooze band Pelt, Marcia Bassett of Double Leopards, the legendary guitarists Glenn Jones (of Cul De Sac) and Michael Chapman, Steve Gunn, and Tom Carter. This show, and one a day earlier in Philadelphia, will be both album release shows and memorials--all the artists slated to play are old friends of the departed guitarist. Thrill Jockey has passed along an MP3 from the new (all live!) record: "Woodpiles On The Side Of The Road," a song he recorded in one stunning take. Arg. Rose used to do that a lot.

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These Are Powers played Issue Project Room on Friday, October 9, to help raise money for the non-profit's future space at 110 Livingston Street, which is also the same space where the Brooklyn threesome filmed their newest video. The show was also a way to honor the sadly departed Suzanne Fiol; TAP brought out saxophonist Jon Natchez and percussion beard Ryan Sawyer to help pay tribute. Below are Rebecca Smeyne's photographs from the occasion.

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​It's not a memorial--that will come later, and in high style--but the Issue Project Room is holding a benefit tomorrow night for its future space at 110 Livingston Street. Honor Suzanne Fiol by attending. She helped put "Poetry to the Infinitive Power(s)" together and that's reason enough alone for IPR to see it through. Poets Bob Holman, Jonas Mekas, Anne Waldman, and many more will read; Brooklyn bulldozer trio These Are Powers, who filmed their newest video in the nascent Livingston space, will be on hand to debut the film and perform. Then the DJs take over. Take the opportunity to end what's been an awful week by celebrating the woman and the space. Suzanne will be present in all kinds of ways.

Further info can be found here.

​Suzanne Fiol, who founded the itinerant new-music venue Issue Project Room in an East Village garage in 2003 and who shepherded the venue through three successive spaces, died yesterday, after a long struggle with cancer. In this paper's archives you will find any number of raptures about the sheer creativity of the spaces she turned into venues--an oil silo on the Gowanus; the Old American Can Factory; and a magnificently crumbling theater at 110 Livingston, which when it opens in 2010 or 2011 will be the Carnegie Hall of experimental music in New York--and as many bemused descriptions of Fiol herself. She was charming. The first night I met her, at the Gowanus space in January of 2007, we drank water and red wine out of plastic cups and talked about the Baltimore noise duo Nautical Almanac. She was 46, curly-haired, stylish, and striking.

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Issue Project Room, the exceedingly well-booked and determined non-profit arts space that has bounced from the East Village to the Gowanus Canal to the Old American Can Factory, will live on a little longer. Last year, the space and its energetic, curly-haired doyenne, Suzanne Fiol, beat out more than 99 other cultural organizations for a spot on the first floor of a historic theater in Brooklyn (the city sold the theater to DUMBO developers Two Trees Management in 2003, but mandated that that an arts space be part of the deal). Issue's triumph at finding a permanent home was tempered by what it would cost to rehab the cavernous, crumbling theater: $2 million dollars. A capital campaign raised a striking amount of money-- $350,000--and now comes the news that the city, in the form of Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, will be kicking in an addition $1.1 mil for renovations.

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