[image: Destory All Monsters (Ron Ashton, center, Mike Kelley, right), c. 1970] A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music — a mini-festival :: November 20-21, 2009; 6:00 p.m. to midnight :: Gramercy Theater, 127 East 23rd Street, New York, NY.

2009—Performa is delighted to present A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music, a mini-festival of noise and avant-garde music curated by internationally acclaimed visual artist Mike Kelley. Featuring an amazing line-up of some of the most important musicians and artists in the history of experimental noise music, A Fantastic World traces the development of this unique genre, from the Futurists to Fluxus, and from the New York No Wave scene to the industrial sounds of Europe, the groundbreaking Los Angeles Free Music Society,and beyond.

Artists headlining the two-day event include Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, text-based sound artist Z’EV, No Wave pioneer Arto Lindsay, Half-Japanese co-founder Jad Fair, avant-garde composer and musician John Zorn, experimental musician and filmmaker Tony Conrad, vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara, singer and composer Shelley Hirsch and turntablist and visual artist Christian Marclay, electroacoustic trailblazer John Duncan, Joe Potts (Le Forte Four)-headed musical ensemble Airway, Throbbing Gristle leader Genesis Breyer P.Orridge, and Mike Kelley’s own seminal “anti-rock” group Destroy All Monsters.

A Fantastic World will also feature reconstructions of historic works by John Cage, Fred Frith, Fluxus, Bruce Nauman, and Max Neuhaus, connecting the contemporary proponents of experimental music performing in the festival to their legendary antecedents.

Curator Mike Kelley was born in a suburb of Detroit in 1954 and brought up amidst the city’s well known music scene, which spawned bands such as Iggy and the Stooges and MC5. In 1973, Kelley formed his own band, Destroy All Monsters. A Fantastic World expands Kelley’s longtime interest in musical subcultures, focusing specifically on avant-garde music and sound art that employs elements
such as cacophony, dissonance, and atonality.

“I’m looking to present music that doesn’t employ traditional structuring methodologies, that embraces cacophony and loud volume, and that is not traditionally scored – presenting works from both the music and art realms,” says Kelley. “I also want to present works that existed before what is now called ‘noise music’ existed – before ‘noise’ became completely subsumed into popular music, and there was still some tie to the original notion of avant-garde or experimental music. I also wanted to connect to one of the themes of the Performa 09 biennial: the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism, and in particular, Russolo’s ‘Art of Noise’ manifesto.”

A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music is curated by Mike Kelley with Performa Curator Mark Beasley, and presented and produced by Performa.