November 12, 2009
7:00pm - 9:00pm

Cost: $15 / $10 Students and Seniors

On Thursday evening, November 12th, 2009, Unseen Worlds presents a night of piano music at 15th Street Friends Meetinghouse in Manhattan, only 3 blocks walking distance from 14th Street Union Square.

Composers “Blue" Gene Tyranny and Lubomyr Melnyk will each perform full sets of their own piano works.

“Blue" Gene Tyranny's piano work, well-known in the Downtown New York scene since the 1970s and proven beautifully in the Lovely Music releases The Intermediary and Take Your Time, has only become more and more well loved and revered with each passing year. His appearance at this concert is very special and greatly appreciated.

Lubomyr Melnyk's reputation has been slowly and quietly building. Over the last 30 years Melnyk has crafted a massive catalog of artistically demanding and aesthetically beautiful works, outpacing a means of documenting and publicizing them. Recently, with public admiration from popular musical figures like James Blackshaw and Jim O'Rourke, Melnyk's reputation and fan base is larger than ever. This event is only his second New York appearance ever and his first in 20 years since he first performed at the Ukrainian Institute in 1989. Please join us in welcoming his music back into the States.

It's with great honor and excitement that we present these two artists in a truly rare meeting. We look forward to seeing all who attend. Special thanks to the Arts Committee at the Meetinghouse for making this event possible.

BLUE GENE TYRANNY, composer and pianist of avant garde music, is known equally for his brilliantly inventive compositions for keyboards and electronics as he is for his inspired performances of other composers' works (e.g. Robert Ashley, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Leroy Jenkins, David Behrman, Jon Gibson, William Duckworth, Carla Bley, Iggy Pop and many others). He has toured extensively in solo and group concerts throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. His most recent releases include reissues of his first three albums on Unseen Worlds and Lovely Music, as well as the new works The Somewhere Songs / The Invention of Memory on Muteable.

LUBOMYR MELNYK is a pianist composer with newly resurgent interest in his work. Born in 1948 to Ukrainian parents, Lubomyr Melnyk and his family fled the Communist expansion and settled in Winnipeg in the early 1950s. In the early 1970s he lived for two years in Paris, accompanying the contemporary dance of Carolyn Carlson at the Paris Opera. During this period and with assistance from the Canada Council, Melnyk developed his original 'continuous music' approach to piano playing and composition, described in his book Open Time: The Art of Continuous Music ([Toronto] 1981). Since the mid-1970s Lubomyr Melnyk divides his time between Sweden and Canada, where he has toured with performances of his own compositions. He is the recipient of commissions from the Canadian Music Centre and the CBC.

Press for “Blue" Gene Tyranny:

“Science cannot explain the speed with which trillions of inspired brain impulses zip through his ... hands, resulting in note-perfect works ... At his schmaltziest ... he's like Keith Jarrett on an extremely good day. At his best, it's like listening to Ives improvise 'Hawthorne' from the Concord Sonata." Kyle Gann, The Village Voice

“There's something wonderfully, almost perversely singular about “Blue" Gene Tyranny. Here's a fellow capable of virtually anything pianistic, immersed in the avant-garde from a variety of angles, yet his music sounds as though he feels utterly uncompelled to acknowledge it, as if he'd be content to serve as a pianist in some distant cocktail bar where only one person out of a thousand would realize something special was afoot ... more than once I found myself making a comparison to images from David Lynch, things that can be seen (or heard) from two conceptual angles at once ... a territory no one's quite heard before." Brian Olewnick, The Squid's Ear

Press for Lubomyr Melnyk:

“Lubomyr Melnyk's music sounds like nothing else...One of its most striking attributes is its rhythmic complexity, which makes playing it a major feat of virtuosity; polyrhythmic patterns of three and four and seven and eight, for instance, going on simultaneously create an enormously rich contrapuntal texture, out of which new melodies are constantly emerging... Any fans of minimalism and maverick experimentalism with an immensely attractive sound should check out Melnyk's phenomenal performance of his unique music." Stephen Eddins, All Music Guide, Five Stars

“Layers of notes are dexterously built up, seamlessly overlapping to produce a continuous, multi-dimensional sound strata. Trace elements of Debussy and Satie drift into focus, be the entire piece also recalls Charlemagne Palestine's shamanistic Bosendorfer excursions, or even the mechanical outpourings of Conlon Nancarrow's work for player piano. Melnyk's tightly patterned playing achieves a natural effect that relies less on sustained repetition and more on atmosphere. On the cover of this reissue, a photograph of low hanging, leafy branches suggest a kind of secret forest cave - the mood is perfectly in tune with Melnyk's dense piano playing, which evokes white shafts of sunlight shining through the foliage." Edwin Pouncey, The Wire

For further information and questions contact:

Tommy McCutchon
Unseen Worlds Records
P.o. Box 644, Austin, TX 78767
tommy@unseenworlds.net