R WE WHO R WE on Bandcamp
Ted Hearne official site | Philip White official site | Ted Hearne on Instagram

R WE WHO R WE — a project by composer/performers Philip White and Ted Hearne — releases its sophomore album, “I Love You”, on November 21. The duo will celebrate the release with their first New York show in several years on December 2 at Brooklyn’s Union Pool.



Both acclaimed creators in their own right, White and Hearne combine for R WE WHO R WE to make music that marries beauty and brutality. White’s homemade electronics merge with Hearne’s expressive vocal feats in songs gutted with noise. Brash, hollowed out standards are deconstructed and infused with moments of arresting but temporary warmth.



On their eponymous debut, the duo deconstructed pop songs: Madonna’s “Material Girl”, Eminem’s “Hi My Name Is” and of course Ke$ha’s “WE R WHO WE R” from which they cribbed their name. The album paid uneasy tribute to the way these songs offered a sense of self for the listener, while maintaining a constant push undermining each song’s exploitative potential. With that, R WE WHO R WE became a project about how we sculpt and perform our identities.
 


”I Love You” shifts these ideas about identity onto a fractured set of cultural narratives about relationships, love and masculinity; honing in on the inevitable collisions. Nine original songs fuse a ballad-driven sense of lyricism with a noise-music sonic palette, in a sense both violent and pathetic. The duo works through disturbed desire (“Song and Dance,” “Kristin”), adolescent projections (“I Just Want U II”, “Womb”), disintegrating relationships (“Silence”, “Valentine’s”, “Cutaway”) and violence (“Two Trees”, “Firestarter”).

Hearne and White met in 2005 in Charleston, SC as young composers. After diverging on different paths (Ted to Yale for composition and Philip to Mills College for electronic music) the two reconnected in NYC in 2010 and formed R WE WHO R WE. White plays a self-constructed and ever-evolving instrument made of both repurposed analog electronics and state-of-the-art digital controlling devices, harnessing no-input feedback into a mystifying array of luscious sonic landscapes and hard driving dance beats, which the Wall Street Journal has called a “vibrant textural tapestry” and the Village Voice has called “annihilating and enervating.”  Hearne, a singer with a massive range of styles and registers (“a vocal hellion,” Time Out Chicago; “fresh and muscular music,” The New York Times), brings an expressive intensity to his performances, embodying a landscape of emotions and vocal color, from the stripped-down human voice to the ecstatically digitally processed.

Tigue official site |Tigue on Twitter | Tigue on Facebook | Tigue on Instagram | Tigue on Soundcloud

Tigue is a group of three percussionists with a fluid musical identity. The Brooklyn-based trio (Matt Evans, Amy Garapic and Carson Moody) makes their own kinetic and hypnotic blend of instrumental minimalism while opening up the possibilities of their instrumentation through commissioning and collaboration. Tigue’s debut album Peaks was released in 2015 with New Amsterdam Records with highlighted performances at the Ecstatic Music Festival, Bric Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, and the Zemlika Festival in Durbe, Latvia. Recent commissions and premieres have included works by Molly Herron, Randy Gibson, Jason Treuting, Adrian Knight and Robert Honstein alongside collaborative ventures with Kid Millions and visual artist / sculptor Michael Mercil. These works have been presented in concert halls, galleries, black box theaters and universities throughout the country including EMPAC, Roulette, The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Noguchi Museum, Yale School of Music, and Princeton University.  Praised for their focused and “high octane” performances (New York Times), the Ohio-born band members have worked together since they were practically children.

Along with performing, the members of Tigue are dedicated to outreach and community projects. In collaboration with Make Music New York, the trio has led three 10-week music education programs with adult and adolescent inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island Correctional Facility, featured in both the New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine. Working with inmates in both men’s and women’s facilitates, the trio shared the communicative nature of music through West African musical traditions and hand drumming culminating with inmate performances for the Rikers population.  Tigue has also presented workshops and masterclasses with collegiate universities, elementary classrooms and community groups across the globe.

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This past spring Tigue events included a Carnegie Neighborhood series performance in the Bronx premiering the latest movement of Jason Treuting’s piece 9 numbers, a trip to Boston, MA to perform on the Celebrity Series “Stave Sessions “ with fellow Brooklyn trance inducers Innov Gnawa, the premiere of Randy Gibson’s “The Four Pillars Appearing from The Resonating Discs invoking The 72:81:88 Confluence in a setting of Quadrilateral Starfield Symmetry ATS4 Base 6:81” with the Avant Media Festival, a weekend in Columbus, OH performing the latest version of Michael Mercil’s “Thoreau’s Desk” and a week long workshop and performance of new music for new instruments with composer Molly Herron and instruments designed by Dartmouth College engineering students.

2016 was a busy year for Tigue. The ensemble appeared as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, Avant Media Festival, American Music Festival, and Celebrate Brooklyn! Festivals where they performed new music of their own along with composers Adrian Knight and Jason Treuting. The group made their first trip to the West Coast, with help from the Permutations Series and the Center for New Music, and they flew to Latvia for their first international performance as part of the Zemlika Festival. In between these projects Tigue played intimate shows with their friends in the Brooklyn community, presented workshops and master classes for elementary school classrooms and ivy league institutions, and started recording their second album. Most recently, this past February, Tigue hosted a three week Sunday night residency at local Gowanus music venue Three’s Brewing, presenting concerts with Brooklyn community talents Alice Cohen, J. Hoard, Qasim Naqvi, LADAMA, Wilder Maker and Innov Gnawa.

Photo Credit: Catalina Kulczar

Ka Baird is a musician, performer, composer and sound designer based in New York City. She is known for her live performances which include extended voice and microphone techniques combined with electronics and psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds. She creates a present tense sound with a vigorous, ritualistic delivery that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension. She has worked/collaborated with many other musicians, artists, filmmakers and choreographers, both in structured compositions and in their dedicated practice of improvisation and interdisciplinary work.

Her debut solo album “Sapropelic Pycnic” was released through independent Chicago label Drag City in 2017. Her latest solo recording “Respires” was released through Brooklyn based imprint RVNG Intl in October 2019. Recent national and international engagements have included performances at Unsound Festival (Krakow, PL), Lampo (Chicago, IL), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), The Kitchen (NYC), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), TUSK Festival (Newcastle, UK), Incubate (Tilburg, NL), KRAAK (Brussels, BE), Le Guess Who (Utrecht, NL), and the Festival Of Endless Gratitude (Copenhagen, DK). She has been artist-in-residence at We Jazz Festival (Helsinki, FI), Sonoscopia (Porto, PT), Inkonst (Malmo, SE), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, IL), and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). She was a recipient of the Foundation of Contemporary Art’s Emergency Grant, a Jerome Foundation Artist-In-Residence at Roulette Intermedium, and is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow through 2023-25.