Satellite music series: Peter Zummo and Eve Essex

07/11/19 • 35 min

Sanna Almajedi talks to composer and trombonist Peter Zummo, and Eve Essex, a musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics.

The music heard in this episode was recorded live during the fifth edition of Satellite at Bar Laika on March 12, 2019, featuring Zummo and Essex.

Peter Zummo is a composer and trombonist whose music encompasses both the contemporary-classical and vernacular genres. His work is informed by five decades of realizing the work of other composers, poets, bandleaders, choreographers, directors, and filmmakers. The way in which he maneuvers the contemporary trombone is genre non-conforming, and still finds a place in any genre.

Zummo worked closely with Arthur Russell, appearing on many of his recordings. He has also collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Phil Niblock, and Yasunao Tone. His music has been released by Foom, Optimo Music, and Experimental Intermedia Foundation.

Eve Essex is a Brooklyn-based musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics, harnessing elements of classical, drone, free jazz, and distorted pop. She has performed as Das Audit (with guitarist Craig Kalpakjian), as well as in trios Hesper (with James K and Via App), and HEVM (with MV Carbon and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix). She has also collaborated extensively with Juan Antonio Olivares as installation/performance-art duo Essex Olivares.

Her first solo album, Here Appear, was released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. She also appears on Pan’s compilation Mono No Aware. Select solo performances include Artists Space, Outpost Artists Resources, Safe Gallery, and Meakusma Festival.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi.

Sanna Almajedi talks to composer and trombonist Peter Zummo, and Eve Essex, a musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics.

The music heard in this episode was recorded live during the fifth edition of Satellite at Bar Laika on March 12, 2019, featuring Zummo and Essex.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi.

Previous Episode

Closed for installation: Fiona Connor

Andreas Petrossiants, Editorial Assistant for e-flux journal, speaks to artist Fiona Connor starting from her exhibition at SculptureCenter, Closed for installation, Fiona Connor, SculptureCenter, #4.

As the show's press release describes:

"Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor remakes overlooked everyday objects, including bulletin boards, park benches, community noticeboards, doors of closed down clubs, real estate signs, municipal water fountains, and so on. She is interested in where these objects come from, what they are made out of, who makes them and for whom, as well as the relationships that the artist initiates and maintains in order to reproduce and re-present the objects as works of art.

For her new commission at SculptureCenter, Connor is producing a set of intersecting works that bring together the artist’s investment in the various operations of sculpture in an expansive field of production, maintenance, and display. In the gallery, she shows a number of bronze pieces that replicate tools required to install an exhibition, such as a measuring tape, a paint tray, a dolly, and scraps of cardboard. Nearby in an apartment in Long Island City, the artist arranges for an annual window cleaning, in perpetuity.

Later in the course of the exhibition, Connor convenes a series of workshops, using pulped institutional printed material to make a set of catalog-sized blocks that will function as the exhibition’s publication."

Read the full text here.

Closed for installation, Fiona Connor, SculptureCenter, #4 is on view through July 29, 2019.

Next Episode

Franco “Bifo” Berardi on the future possibility of living well

e-flux journal editorial assistant Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Franco “Bifo” Berardi following his recent texts “(Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia” in issue 98, and “Game Over” in issue 100.

Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist. His most recent books are Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Semiotexte, 2018) and The Second Coming (Polity, 2019).