Invisible Anatomy
Composer-performer ensemble Invisible Anatomy (cellist Ian Gottlieb, guitarist Brendon Randall-Myers, percussionist Ben Wallace, pianist Paul Kerekes, and vocalist Fay Wang) combines diverse musical backgrounds and individual voices to create works of virtuosic physicality and dramatic visual presentation. Practicing composition and performance as interrelated, communal acts, IA has built a repertoire of evening-length, conceptually unified pieces that harness elements from classical, pop, jazz, experimental rock, performance art, and theater.
IA’s inaugural show BODY PARTS dismembered, manipulated, and reanimated bodies in performance – creating a chattering chorus of woodblock teeth, wearing pop songs as a mask, and floating screaming eyes on TV screens. After the group’s 2015 debut concerts in New York City, they were invited to China for three shows, including a featured solo concert at the Beijing Modern Music Festival. IA’s second season opened with an intimate house concert of BODY PARTS hosted by David Lang, followed by the world premiere of DISSECTIONS at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, later featured in a full-length profile in the Village Voice. The group performed DISSECTIONS at Pomona College and The Blue Whale in Los Angeles in February 2016, followed by appearances on Heartbeat Opera’s Collaboret Series; at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn; at the Yale School of Music in New Haven, CT; and at Ars Nova’s ANT Fest in Manhattan. The group was the first runner-up in the 2016 SAVVY Chamber Competition at the University of South Carolina School of Music.
On Halloween 2016, IA produced FUNHOUSE, an immersive experience of art installations and performances in a prewar Victorian Harlem brownstone. In February 2017, IA debuted TRANSFIGURE at Roulette Intermedium, completing a triptych of collaboratively written, evening-length musical compositions that integrate lighting, video, and choreography, Other season activities include a gala performance hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis, an appearance on the Detroit Institute of Art’s Friday Night Live series in March, a double bill with composer-performer ensemble Grant Wallace Band at Littlefield in Brooklyn, and a National Sawdust Summer Labs Residency.
IA is fiscally sponsored by Bang on a Can, and is the recipient of a 2018 New Music USA project grant, 2018 New York State Council for the Arts grant, and a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Their debut album Dissections was released via New Amsterdam Records in Spring 2018.
Selected Press
"sometimes haunting sometimes hilarious and consistently mesmerizing" - Christian Kriegeskotte, I Care If You Listen
“a flight of musical follies touching down briefly amidst austere harmonic totems, absurdist cowboy music, and vaudevillian settings of warning labels... work that reeks of form, structure, and development.” - Mike Compitello, New Music Box
“A wide palette of musical elements, the puzzle of implications harnessed through sounds and their disparate references... sophisticated and dynamic sense of stylistic hybridity.” - Ted Hearne, Mutterings
Selected Media
Marateck
Marateck is an instrumental rock band that deals in opposites and extremes: minimalist vs. maximalist, consonance vs. dissonance, mechanistic vs. humanistic. Jesse Kranzler (guitar), Brendon Randall-Myers (guitar), Tristan Kasten-Krause (bass), and Mark Utley (drums) bring together eclectic compositional voices and extensive performing backgrounds to create intense, emotional music played with obsessive, focused precision.
The band is named after guitarist Jesse Kranzler’s great-grandfather, Jacob Marateck, a dissident in Czarist Russia who was sentenced to death three times. In his life, Jacob stirred the pot and created dissonance in times of consonance and sought to create consonance in times of dissonance. Marateck’s music embodies this contrarian spirit, foregrounding the tension between the different compositional voices and performance styles in the group. By working through those differences in their writing and rehearsal process, the members of the group take some strange detours but end up somewhere none of them could reach alone.
Marateck's 2017 debut album, Time Is Over, comprises eight works that confront time and rhythm as both immutable and elastic. Much of the music is constructed around the gradual growth or dissipation of rhythmic activity. Other moments combine erratic or free-time elements with constant pulse, either though rapid cuts between contrasting material, or superimpositions of simultaneous disparate elements. The resultant music rides the line between composed and chaotic; the sum of which becomes a sound which is, hopefully, altogether new.
Time Is Over is the result of over two years of writing, rewriting, rehearsing, and touring. It was commissioned, in part, by Roulette Intermedium and the Jerome Fund for New Music; was recorded, mixed and mastered by Colin Marston (Gorguts, Krallice, Behold The Arctopus) at Menegroth: The Thousand Caves, and features synth and keyboard performances from Jeremy Malvin (aka Chrome Sparks).
Selected Press
"Marateck don’t play thirty-second notes and they don’t quickly arpeggiate extended chords, but they ingeniously integrate polyrhythmics and polymetrics into often odd-time signature compositions...Time Is Over is an essential album for any fan of odd rock music." - Dæv Tremblay, Can This Even be Called Music?”
“NYC's Marateck is a gripping math-rock band, combining shattered, wiry abstraction with moments of delicate atmosphere.” - Scott Gordon, Tone Madison
“Marateck's approach manages to wring out everything that its guitar-bass-drums instrumentation (traditionally) has to offer, while still remaining focussed and direct.” - Emili Earhart, Tone Madison
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