AdHoc Presents
Object Collection
‘It’s All True’
With Bonnie Jones + Laurie Tompkins & Suze Whaites
Object Collection
Thursday, August 9th
About the Show
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.
“One of the most confronting and exhilarating things I’ve seen.” – BBC Radio
Grounded upon the Live Archive series of the Washington DC outfit, 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 spanning shows from 1987 to 2002, and encompassing random feedback, aimless drum noodling, pre-show activist speeches, audience hecklers, and the police breaking up gigs. All of this material is the foundation of an ear-body-and-mind-flossing 100 minutes for 4 voices/performers, 4 electric guitars/basses and 2 percussionists.
Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto comments: “All of us were both blown away and disoriented by the work – it was well beyond anything we had anticipated when agreeing to Travis’ early request. While this project was in no way an active collaboration, we feel moved by Object Collection’s engagement with our archive material and salute everyone involved for their hard work and patience and for wrestling with such integrity with our sounds and words.”
It’s All True is overloaded, maddening, mundane, properly funny, and a radical incitement to action. Half of this delectably bruising megalith is collected here for the first time and on the accompanying Prisons For Profit EP [SLP041], which together form Object Collection’s debut outings on Slip. The label itself came to a lot of people’s attention last year with the release of Mica Levi and Oliver Coates stunning Remain Calm collaboration, a track from which was recently picked by the New York Times in it’s article 25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going.
It’s All True was commissioned by and premiered at 2016’s Borealis Festival in Bergen, Norway. The album is available on 12” vinyl and CD with artwork featuring Henrik Beck’s beautiful photography of the original stage production. Vinyl comes with a foldout doublesided A2 newspaper print featuring both performance text and liner notes, replicated in the CD edition as a 20 page booklet. Mastered and cut by by Josh Bonati.
Object Collection was founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. Based in Brooklyn, the group operates within the intersecting practices of performance, experimental 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 our merging of theatricality and pedestrian activity. Their works upset habitual notions of time, pace, progression and virtuosity. They value accumulation above cohesion.
Written and directed by Kara Feely
Composed by Travis Just
Commissioned by Borealis – a festival for experimental music in collaboration with Bergen National Opera. Composition commission with the support by Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
This is a general admission standing show.
About the Artists
Laurie Tompkins & Suze Whaites
Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites’ duo performances blend rudimentary acoustic and electronic sound in wayward, weird games. They’ve performed together at Manchester’s Caustic Coastal, Berlin’s Reflektor Festival, Halmstad’s Harp Art Lab, and London’s Cafe Oto and V&A. For National Sawdust, they’ll be performing new music of their own alongside music by Tim Parkinson, and perhaps more. Laurie and Suze co-direct Slip; a home to rogue hybrids of improvised, composed, and electronic musics. The label has recently presented a 2-day label residency at Cafe Oto, and received accolades in The Wire, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Recent releases include music by Ashley Paul, Chaines, Object Collection, Yeah You, Gwilly Edmondez, Mica Levi & Oliver Coates.
Bonnie Jones
Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, she co-founded TECHNE https://technesound.org/, an organization that introduces young female-identified women to technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. TECHNE’s programs are delivered through partnerships with grassroots organizations that share an aligned commitment to racial and gender equity. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in 1977 in South Korea she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland. https://bonnie-jones.com/
