Nyc RESIDENCY WITH FIGURE 8 RECORDING STUDIO

OCTOBER 30 - NOVEMBER 3, 2024

October 30: TOUCH DOWN TOURS AM/PM
AM: SELF-LED EXCURSIONS Curated by Jean Marie Casbarian LINK TBA
PM: CURATED AND LED BY ZEERAK AHMED 3-7PM Start here. exhibition opening / talk / sound exhibition Link TBA October.

October 31 - November 1:
Workshop Led by Shahzad Ismaily AND Zeerak Ahmed HERE.
November 2:
OPEN OR INdividual project STUDIo TIME at figure 8
NOvember 3:
Brooklyn Brunch 10AM HERE.

( FULL PROGRAM TBA )

WORKSHOP
FACILITATED BY ZEERAK AHMED & LED BY SHAHZAD ISMAILY

WORKSHOP NEW MOVEMENTS IN SOUND AND SILENCE WITH FIGURE 8 RECORDING STUDIO

For the two-day workshop at the Figure 8 Recording studio in NYC, we seek new ways of moving and interacting with and through sound. Artists from various backgrounds are invited to explore the sensations, processes, affects and shared gestural languages that come through our sonic experiences. Our goal is to facilitate a deeper understanding and relationship to individual as well as collaborative sound practice.

Facilitator Zeerak Ahmed, and workshop leader Shahzad Ismaily will guide discussions on the embodiment of sound and silence, deep listening, tuning, as well as conducted improvisation methods for interdisciplinary practices. As these talks will take place at the studio, students will have access to studio equipment and resources, which will enable them to experiment and record sessions with professional engineers available on-site.*

Recording prompts, exercises and discussions will be based on shared readings, artworks and excerpts from audioworks, film, dance and new-media. This will include ideas by Godfried Toussaint, methods of Butch Morris, exercises pioneered by Pauline Oliveros and the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, amongst others. Guest lecturers Anya Yermakova and Ganavya will join to discuss sound and somatic healing, and the quiet work of tonal and rhythmic movements occurring in body, memory and shared environment.

*Note: This studio workshop is designed for TT PhD students to engage more deeply with sound as a sensorial experience as well as a medium to aid their own individual practice. At the end of both days, the attending students will have the opportunity to work with an engineer and record their own audio material. These spots are limited and must be reserved in advance. To schedule a session attendees must email Zeerak when registering for the workshop (by July 26).

Additionally, if anyone is interested in developing a larger sound project at Figure 8 Recording studio in Brooklyn, NY (www.figure8recording.com) please email Zeerak to book an independent recording session and/or be mentored by Shahzad Ismaily. For bookings, rates and/or session inquiries email Zeerak here.

BIOS

Zeerak Ahmed / SLOWSPIN is a US-based Pakistani artist. She produces voice-based sculptures, meditative installations and uniquely fragile sound collages that explore notions of identity, memory and longing. Slowspin has a distinct sound practice grounded in Hindustaani classical vocal traditions, dream-folk, ambient and experimental electronic music. Poetry and melodies in her mother tongue(s)—Urdu, Farsi, Purbi and English—build new textural soundscapes. She is presently archiving the sonic and intellectual histories of female folk music traditions from South Asia, drawing new visual forms from the poetic and melodic content of her ancestral body of sound. Exploring new ways of listening, composing, and performing the sounding body, her work addresses critical immaterial art. https://zeerakahmed.squarespace.com/

Shahzad Ismaily is a Brooklyn-based musician, composer, engineer and interdisciplinary collaborator. Born to Pakistani immigrant parents, he grew up in a wholly bicultural household. Exploring improvisation, tonal shifts and rhythmic movement, Ismaily has trained and worked with a number of avante-garde musicians and composers including Laurie Anderson, Anthony Coleman, Milford Graves, Eyvind Kang, Butch Morris and Marc Ribot. Over the last thirty years he has played electric bass, drums, percussion, guitar, synthesizers and all manner of sound-makers procured in life’s travels. Ismaily has done work for dance and theater pieces, such as the film Frozen River (Oscar-nominated and Sundance award-winning) and Inkboat (a butoh crew from California/Switzerland). He has recorded and performed with a diverse crew of artmakers: Yoko Ono “Plastic Ono Band”, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Laura Veirs, Beth Orton, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Marianne Faithfull, Faun Fables, Feist, Bryce Dessner, Dustin O’Halloran, Elysian Fields, Shelley Hirsch, Nels Cline, Bill Frisell, Guillermo E. Brown, Graham Haynes, Keiji Haino, Colin Stetson, Ben Frost, Damien Rice, Ceramic Dog, Laleh Khorramian, Jolie Holland, JFDR, Secret Chiefs 3, Sam Amidon, Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and more.

Anya Yermakova is a composer, sound artist, and a historian/philosopher of logic. In her body-centric methods, she employs acousmatic material, archival traces, and performance research, with the aim of enlivening the non-binary constructs beneath//above the forceful binarism in the world today. She holds a PhD from the departments of History of Science and of Critical Media Practice at Harvard, was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sound at Oberlin College, an Artist-in-residence with the Ocean Memory Project, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Humanities at Washington University in St Louis.

Tamil Nadu-raised and New York-born critically acclaimed vocalist Ganavya lives, learns, and loves fluidly from the nexus of many frameworks and understandings. Hers is a deeply profound and rooted voice. A multidisciplinary creator, she is a soundsmith and wordsmith. Trained as an improviser, scholar, dancer, and multi-instrumentalist, she maintains an inner library of “spi/ritual” blueprints offered to her by an intergenerational constellation of collaborators, continuously anchoring her practice in pasts, presents and, futures. Much of her childhood was on the pilgrimage trail, learning the storytelling art form of harikathā and singing poetry that critiques hierarchal social structures. She is a co-founder of the non-hierarchical We Have Voice Collective.

Hers is a life of nonlinearity, and singularity. Despite not not being schooled traditionally as a child, she carries degrees in theatre (Broward Community College) and psychology (F.I.U.), with graduate degrees in Contemporary Performance (Berklee College of Music), ethnomusicology (UCLA), and Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry (Harvard). Both as an educator and student, she “wishes to study and bring liberative techniques into this world… study certain dyads: what empowers, who is disempowered; what heals, who is ailing— and wishes to wed the two.”

Figure 8 Recording Studio
188 Underhill Ave
Brooklyn, NY, 11238

manager@figure8recording.com
ah.zeerak@gmail.com

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