Mikel Rouse
Mikel Rouse's Gravity Radio Special Album Release Performance
October 23, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009 at 8pm
Galapagos Art Space
16 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY
Featuring selections from Gravity Radio
With special guests: ACME, Veanne Cox, and new video by Cliff Baldwin
2010 Tour: New Orleans, New York, Illinois, North Carolina, Toronto, Ireland, and Spain
Tickets: $15 (in advance) $20 (at the door) www.galapagosartspace.com or call 718.222.8500
"Anyone who grew up at a time when Bob Dylan first became popular will remember how, on first hearing, his long ballads, which Rouse's songs sometimes resemble, didn't make much sense. But they inspired repeated hearings, haunting the listener until conventional understanding was beside the point." – Los Angeles Times
"We have Rouse's works as living proof that complexity need not keep listeners at a distance, and that pop music can sustain serious interest with the right person at the helm." – Gramophone
Available Nov. 3 for purchase at iTunes, all major retailers, and www.mikelrouse.com/mikel-rouse-store.html.
For more information and audio visit www.mikelrouse.com.
New York, NY – Composer, filmmaker, director and solo performer Mikel Rouse celebrates the release of his latest album, Gravity Radio (Exit Music 1012) with a special performance at Galapagos Art Space (16 Main Street, Brooklyn) on Friday, October 23 at 8pm. Mr. Rouse will be joined onstage by his band and special guests ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble) and TONY nominated/OBIE Award winner Veanne Cox. New work by acclaimed video artist Cliff Baldwin will be projected throughout the performance. The release date for Gravity Radio is November 3 (on iTunes and at all major retailers) but the disc will be available for purchase at Galapagos.
Mikel Rouse has spent his successful and varied career creating music and multimedia projects that marry simplicity and intricacy. Gramophone reports, "We have Rouse's works as living proof that complexity need not keep listeners at a distance, and that pop music can sustain serious interest with the right person at the helm." Mr. Rouse has finely honed his ability to defy genres with his "avant-rock" music, infusing his work with sincere melody while basing it on strict and complex idioms. The result is music that is infectious from the first hearing, and which grows more engaging and cerebral thereafter.
Of the new album Rouse says, "Perhaps it (Gravity Radio) is an attempt to recapture or update my first memory of radio in the late 1960s – Motown and British rock fading in from a faraway Chicago station as the local news faded out on my transistor radio, which I put between my head and the pillow late at night."
Actual AP Newswire reports are recited by Ms. Cox throughout Gravity Radio. These reports are scattershot, reflecting aspects of current events and society as reported on the news. Included are stories from the Iraq war, the statistics for cell phone usage, plastic surgery, professional football and the economy. The title Gravity Radio is inspired by physicist Raymond Chiao's experiments with superconductors and gravity waves – which exist in theory but have eluded detection.
Mikel Rouse's musical and theatrical repertoire has its roots in the high art-meets-popular culture, mix-and-match aesthetic of the early '80s downtown Manhattan music and art scene from which he emerged. As the Toronto Globe and Mail puts it, Rouse's music has brought "comparisons to Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and occasionally Talking Heads, though Rouse's love of complex rhythmic patterns far exceeds them all. But music is just a part of what he does: His pieces also build a hypnotic effect through their non-narrative approach and the use of surreal film images." After the premiere of Rouse's multimedia opera, The End of Cinematics, The New York Times reported, "Sometimes built on heavy, repetitive beats, and sometimes couched in Beatle-esque psychedelia, the songs are vivid, pleasingly visceral and often engagingly harmonized, with amusingly off-kilter lyrics."
Following the November release of Gravity Radio, Rouse and his 11-piece band will embark on an international tour in January 2010. The live performance of the song cycle will incorporate multichannel video representing a visual kaleidoscope of earthbound images. The AP Newswire reports and the written commentary that highlights the connections between the song lyrics and the reports will be customized for each performance, taken from that day's local and national news. The Gravity Radio tour begins in New Orleans at the Contemporary Arts Center on January 23, and will include performances in New York, Illinois, North Carolina, Toronto, Ireland and Spain. Details for tour performances will be announced throughout this year. For the latest updates, visit www.mikelrouse.com/mikel-rouse-bookings.html.
More about Mikel Rouse: Born in 1957 in St. Louis, Missouri and raised in the "bootheel" southern region of the state, "Michael" became "Mikel" in third grade, when he decided to spell his name the way it sounded – and realized it looked considerably cooler in print like that. He may have acquired some of his theatrical smarts when, at fifteen, he briefly ran away to join a carnival. Rouse attended both the Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, simultaneously fueling his interests in the visual and the musical.
Relocating to New York City in 1979, Rouse explored African and other types of world music and began studying the math-based Joseph Schillinger Method of Composition. Through Carla Bley's New Music Distribution Music Service, which at the time was the avant-garde music community's most effective conduit to forward-thinking consumers, he released albums with his contemporary chamber ensemble, Mikel Rouse Broken Consort. He recorded more overtly rock-oriented material with another combo, Tirez Tirez, through new wave indie label, IRS.
Rouse's largest-scale work to date has been his modern operatic trilogy: Failing Kansas (1994), Dennis Cleveland (1995), and The End Of Cinematics (2005), which was presented for the first time in repertory during the 2008 Luminato Festival in Toronto. Failing Kansas was inspired by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. The piece is performed solo by Rouse and employs multiple, unpitched, prerecorded voices in counterpoint to each other and to Rouse's own vocals – a technique he dubbed counterpoetry that would become central to his work. Dennis Cleveland transformed the landscape of trash-talk TV into opera, with Rouse himself as the rabble-rousing host. This provocative piece of environmental theatre, in which cast members were planted amongst the audience and the audience itself was featured on video monitors, blurs the lines between performance and reality. Dennis Cleveland began its life with a sold-out run at tiny New York City avant-garde venue the Kitchen, where theatre-goers had to turn to scalpers to nab hard-to-come-by tickets, and returned to Manhattan years later in a more full-blown form, for a critically-acclaimed engagement at Lincoln Center. Village Voice critic Kyle Gann called it "the most exciting and innovative opera since Einstein on the Beach." The End of Cinematics was inspired by two essays –"The Decay of Cinema" and "A Century of Cinema" – written by Susan Sontag. It explores the domination of film by corporations and commercial interests, and was premiered at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana and subsequently performed in Chapel Hill, New York, Miami, and Liverpool.
Rouse's recent projects include Music For Minorities, commissioned in 2005 by UCLA Live, which was shaped, sonically and conceptually, by the time he spent in rural Northern Louisiana at a college artist-in-residence program. A quiet departure from his direction and performance of large, multimedia work, Music For Minorities was performed by Rouse as a solo guitarist and singer, with a recorded soundscape of percussion and multiple guitars plus video of abstract images integrated with interviews from numerous personalities in Louisiana and New York. In 2006, Rouse's International Cloud Atlas was commissioned by The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the John Cage Trust and Betty Freeman, and premiered at The Joyce Theater in New York. The piece was scored for multiple iPods set to "shuffle" so that each audience member had a different realization of the score. International Cloud Atlas was released exclusively on iTunes and was available for download prior to the premiere.
