21–22 September 2017
New York ensemble Object Collection take on Fugazi’s Live Archives, alongside ragged tangle Historically Fucked and poisonous pop team Yeah You.
IT'S ALL TRUE
'It's All True' is an opera-in-suspension from New York ensemble Object Collection based on the complete live archives of iconic underground band Fugazi.
Grounded upon the DC post-hardcore outfit's 1987-2002 Live Archive series, composer Travis Just and writer/director Kara Feely's work uses only the incidental music, text and sounds, none of Fugazi's actual songs. An obsessive leap into 1500 hours of gig detritus - random feedback, aimless drum noodling, pre-show activist speeches, audience hecklers, police breaking up gigs - is the foundation of an ear-body-and-mind-flossing 100 minutes for 4 voices/performers, 4 electric guitars/basses and 2 drummers. It's All True is overloaded, maddening, mundane, properly funny, and a radical incitement to action.
Performers:
Catrin Lloyd-Bollard, Avi Glickstein, Daniel Allen Nelson, Deborah Wallace - voice/performance
James Moore, Josh Lopes - electric guitar, bass
Owen Weaver - drums
Half of this delectably bruising megalith is collected on a pair of Slip releases, 7” and 12”, arriving September and October 2017.
Object Collection will be performing an unstaged set for 70 minutes on both nights. This will be the first UK airing of material from the opera.
'It’s All True' was commissioned by and premiered at 2016’s Borealis Festival, Bergen and will be performed in full from Feb 2nd - 25th 2018, at LaMaMa, New York City.
"The past and present telescoped and collapsed in some freaky dialectic" - Guy Picciotto, Fugazi
“Compelling, disturbing, and shockingly beautiful” - Huffington Post
“It's shows like this that shut down the NEA” - Backstage
“Object Collection, my favourite discovery of this year” - Emily Bick, The Wire
"I hope this is the future" - Robert Ashley
Object Collection was founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. The Brooklyn-based group operates within the intersecting practices of performance, music, and theater. They are concerned with simultaneity, complexity, and radicality, combining dense layers of text, notation, objects, and processes. They work to give audiences unconventional viewing experiences through a merging of theatricality and pedestrian activity. The company’s works upset habitual notions of time, pace, progression, and virtuosity, and value accumulation above cohesion.
Object Collection performances can take the shape of large-scale performance projects, experimental operas, and duo performances. Object Collection has premiered six original operas. Their work has toured to Norway, Denmark, the UK, Japan, Canada, Italy, and the US. Object Collection’s pieces have appeared in New York at La MaMa, Performance Space 122, Ontological Theater at St. Mark’s Church, National Sawdust, Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Arts Center, Invisible Dog Art Center, Roulette, and Issue Project Room, among others. Albums have been released on Slip Imprint, Infrequent Seams, and khalija. Object Collection has received extended profiles in Frieze magazine, Pitchfork, The Guardian, The Wire, BOMB, and on BBC Radio. www.objectcollection.us
Historically Fucked is a four way entanglement made to create short, eruptive songs and then set about obliterating them from the inside, like improvising a barrel to encase themselves in and then proceeding to lick their way out of it.It is about playing and laughing at playing, and it is about not doing either of those things sometimes. Sometimes it is to do with talking, howling or grunting, and sometimes it is to do with hitting and rubbing. It has to do with some of the four people who do it, who each share the same duties, and whose names in sequence are Otto Willberg, David Birchall, Greta Buitkuté and Alecs Pierce and who would like to be remembered by them, so that when they have finished doing this thing, their names carry on doing other things.
To you YEAH YOU are to you a father daughter duo who let music invade the family context. Who let music dismantle the family car, using construct absurdity to redeem resented weekly Tesco shops and traffic jams. YEAH YOU are not who you said we are, but we are that inverted, and battery op. The content shifts depending on how many supermarket discounts we found. Known for their sneak-up picnic public invasions, perform mostly when uninvited but will always jump on chance to berate a strobe-cut stage, brawling electronic dirt pop, words and feet exert integral (instagram) distrust: you won’t hear what you see.
Why who? They only ever wanted to take back their solidarity with inertia. Creeping up behind a ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ cultural climate, striving to unbuckle the gift economy. You let the lesson be yearn inappropriately. Warped into identity politics this could be an anti-formulaic deconstruction of the nuclear family and of psychic uniform, which normative roles serve to sustain. But in itself is just an improv life stream of the bottom 40: from 0 to -40. Diving in with an admittedly involuntary entropic approach, they provide something for all the family to enjoy/not enjoy.
