Thursday 21 September 2017, 7.30pm
New York ensemble Object Collection take on Fugazi’s Live Archives, alongside ragged tangle Historically Fucked.
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.
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.
