This past August, Null Point presented ‘Art Music Uncomposed‘ on the front lawn of Kleinhans Music Hall. As an encore to that show, the group – a platform for experimental music – plans on continuing the series next summer.
By design, Null Point presents events and projects in a range of institutional settings: arts institutions, community organizations, universities, and architectural repurposing projects.
In the meantime, they have a new series that they are launching at a vacant lot on the city’s West Side – 450 Rhode Island Street (on corner with 18th Street) aka Sublot 37 (lead image).
“Art and activism,” answered Founding artistic director Colin Tucker, when I asked him what was driving the project. “To get people thinking about the politics of space, when music is presented in unconventional spaces. It’s the intersection of music and location, based on contemporary art – site-specific art. We’re focusing on the 60’s and 70’s – reconstructing a variety of pieces that were written during that era. We’re performing a piece by David Dunn (an acoustic ecologist) that has never been performed. And works from a number of artists known as Fluxes (Yoko Ono, for example), with open-ended scores.
Colin Tucker’s work – banal aggression/aggressive banality for lawn, audio, and linguistic annotations
“We’re also focusing on the relationship between colonial-based politics and carbon-based infrastructure. It’s a vacant lot, but it’s also colonial European private property. It brings up the politics of urban space.
Megan Kyle’s piece – Soggy Music, for participants (water, and interactive audio)
“It’s been interesting to work with that space – our last work was a piece on the musical representations of water. We had a pool of water that participants could manipulate with musical samples. Art, music, and water. It’s the longstanding investigative relationship between the aesthetic and the everyday. What makes something everyday, and why?”
Colin Tucker’s work – banal aggression/aggressive banality for lawn, audio, and linguistic annotations
The new Null Point series, which is already underway, is titled Un-mappings.
‘Un-mappings’ features public presentations of Null Point’s newest work in development. This work focuses on excavating and dismantling racial-colonial-bourgeois spatial politics through experimental music techniques such as open scores, interactive and embedded audio, and archival investigations. Set in an open lot on Buffalo’s near-West Side, the events take this outdoor, public space (occupied Seneca land) not as an incidental backdrop but as an integral component of their fabric.
Null Point is a musical research group founded in 2014 and based on Seneca/Haudenosaunee territories.
Details:
October 6, 3-7pm: Music by Megan Kyle and Colin Tucker
October 20, 4-7pm: Music by Colin Tucker and Yoko Ono
October 27, 4-7pm: details TBA
Free to attend