I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

This week: concerts in New York (January 7 – January 13, 2013)

Unraveling | Corey Dargel, Jacob Cooper

Corey Dargel – Photo by Robert Mciver

Unraveling presents art song cycles by composers Corey Dargel and Jacob Cooper. Backed by a classically trained rock ensemble, Dargel premieres the full version of Hold Yourself Together, his set of songs about composure and technology. In Cooper’s cycle Silver Threads, the soprano Mellissa Hughes sings with microtonal precision over a flickering, quasi-transcendental electronic track, with lighting design by Eric Southern, supertitles/projections by Laura Grey, and poetry by Kristin Kelly, Dora Malech and Zach Savich. The meditative quality of Silver Threads provides the perfect complement to Dargel’s up-tempo trickster-cynicism.
Monday, January 7 at 7:30 PM
Tickets $15
Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
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SONiC Afterhours – Innovocal @ 92Y Tribeca

It wasn’t until well after the show began that I realized how right it felt: an after-hours new-music show.  With a bar.  Why hasn’t this format taken off?  Why does the new music community (and the classical community, more broadly) stick to 8pm start times, with the occasional matinee thrown in?  And, of course, the dreaded 7:30 start time, which exists solely for the purpose of making all your friends a half-hour late because every reasonable human being knows that Concerts Start at Eight.

The official start time for Innovocal Thursday night at the 92Y Tribeca, part of the SONiC Afterhours festival-within-a-festival, was 11pm, but the show took its time as the audience got their drinks from the bar and chatted each other up on their leisurely walk to the tables.  Most of the audience appeared to be people associated with SONiC, or their friends, but rather than feeling like an insiders’ club, there was a genuinely warm social buzz in the room.  It really did have the feel of a genuine after-hours show, the kind where band members shed all the main-stage formalities and just play a stripped down, relaxed set for their friends.

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