On Friday, August 9th at 7:30 PM at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Fonograf Editions presents a live performance and album recording of FODDER by Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty. A recording of the evening will be released as a full-length LP by Fonograf in early 2020 and a digital EP will also be released by POETRY Magazine & The Poetry Foundation.
Come be part of a moment in history! Dao Strom and Nastashia Minto will also perform at the event. Donations welcome, or become a Fonograf member. www.fonografeditions.com
About the project: FODDER splinters the sounds you were looking at on paper into the document you can hear through speakers. &/or vice versa. Drawing in part from the award winning poetry collection Buck Studies' "Loud-Assed Colored Silence" series, Val Jeanty and Douglas Kearney interweave new and old texts of original composition, samples, and improvisation to create live sound chemistry, raw energy, and better listening through playing. Pull Up AF.
About the artists: Poet/Performer/Librettist Douglas Kearney has published six books, including the award-winning poetry collection Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016)). He has opened for Amiri Baraka and has shared stages with Saul Williams and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, Kearney teaches at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
Val Jeanty is a Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based Afro-Electronic music composer, drummer and turntablist. Her installations have been showcased at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, as well as at international venues including Jazz a la Villette in France and The Biennale di Venezia in Italy. Other highlights include “Fascinating Her Resilience,” a Wesleyan University commissioned multimedia performance collaboration with professor Gina Ulysse and with Afro-Cuban bassist Yosvany Terry on his Grammy-nominated album “New Throned King”.
Dao Strom is an artist whose work explores hybridity through melding disparate “voices”—written, sung, visual—to contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Her primary material is language—which may articulate as text, music, image, sound, space, silence, and the intersections and juxtapositions of these elements in relation to one another. She is a 2016 recipient of a Creative Capital Artist Award in Literature. Her work has also received support from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, James Michener Fellowship, and the Nelson Algren Award; with creative place-making grants from APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon) and the Precipice Fund. She has performed at the Time-Based Arts Festival and presented collaborative work at the SF Asian Art Museum and the American Library in Paris, among other venues.
Nastashia Minto is an African American woman who was born in South Georgia. Her life experiences led her to obtain an associate’s degree in occupational therapy and a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She has been writing since she was nine years old and has found that her writing offers her another way to not only help her self but others as well. Currently residing in Portland, Oregon her debut book of poetry “NAKED” was published February 28th 2019 by Eldredge Books. Nastashia has been a featured at many popular local reading series, including Unchaste Readers, Grief Rites, ROAR and Incite. Her writing has been published in SUSAN the journal, Unchaste Anthology volume III Portland Metrozine, and Nailed.
About Fonograf: Fonograf Ed. publishes albums influenced by language and literature. Each release is available in both an analog and digital format, with a particular focus on the vinyl artifact. Through the hosting of events and performances, Fonograf additionally hopes to cultivate the performative aspect of all language, whether at a concert, poetry reading or community forum.
Fonograf Ed. albums are currently out by Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout, Alice Notley, Harmony Holiday, and Nathaniel Mackey/Susan Howe, with forthcoming LPs by two members of the Canadian group Broken Social Scene, the musicians Annelyse Gelman and Jason Grier, the rapper milo, and an archival work by the poet John Ashbery. More information available at fonografeditions.com.
Cover art photo by Jeffery "Hitch" Hitchens FODDER is funded in part by a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC).
