The NY Sun Files: Zeena Parkins

Globalism is nothing new for Zeena Parkins. She routinely zigzags between New York, where she has lived since 1985, and various concert dates in Europe and behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Years before Mikhail Gorbachev was implored to tear down the Berlin Wall, American avantgardists were burrowing underneath it. Two decades on, Ms. Parkins — a one-of-a-kind musician who composes and improvises on electric harp — may play an electronic music festival in Moscow one night, come back home, then fly back for a gig in Lithuania.

“I have my bag of toys that literally expands or contracts depending on how far I’m going,” Ms. Parkins, who also employs various keyboards, samplers, acoustic harps, and a Foley setup in her performances, said. Getting through JFK airport can sometimes be a challenge, but nothing in her travels prepared her for her biggest and most recent move: across the East River from downtown Manhattan to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“I got kicked out,” she said recently, sitting at a 1950s modern dining table in a nook of her new apartment, with a sunny view of a garden and the waterfront a few blocks away. A Brooklynite for all of two days when we spoke, Ms. Parkins was catching her breath before another long trip. “I don’t even know where the coffee shop is where I’m supposed to meet someone later.”

If Ms. Parkins feels a bit symbolic — part of an artistic diaspora that has accompanied the real estate boom in lower Manhattan — at least she is accustomed to thinking fast on her feet. It’s a major part of her process. She has become to the harp, an instrument that suffers from an antiquated image, what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar: She plays it in ways no one has ever thought to, and extracts sounds — often manipulated in mid-strum — that have never been imagined.

Whether her soundscapes evoke pyrotechnic frenzies or cast lyrically hypnogogic spells, Ms. Parkins compels attention with the swirling ease of her hands at play. She often collaborates with choreographers; presently, she’s working on a piece with John Jasperse that will make its premiere this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival. It’s a natural fit: She can make the most immobile of orchestral instruments seem as kinetic as a rocket ship.

Ms. Parkins’s approach, which tends to de-emphasize the harp’s “harpiness,” put her in immediate demand when she first arrived in New York from San Francisco 22 years ago. She began gigging immediately, hooking up with the protean guitarist Fred Frith (with whom she will perform tonight at the Stone) and the late cello player Tom Cora in the trio Skeleton Crew. Over the years, she’s been a versatile collaborator, playing alongside such pop acts as Sonic Youth and Björk, on whose 2001 album “Vespertine” she proved essential.

“I lucked out,” Ms. Parkins said, eager to note that the harp was forced on her while she took music classes at her Detroit high school. “I came to New York and started playing in John Zorn’s game pieces — like ‘Cobra’ and ‘Darts’ — and met Fred and Tom.” She also began working with the percussionist Ikue Mori. A few years ago, the pair formed the band Phantom Orchard, which will perform Friday at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

“With any improvisation, it’s all about being profoundly in the moment and out of the moment,” Ms. Parkins said. “It’s really a moment of inhabiting opposite states. It’s a unique position to be in, and I think it’s taken me a long time to be able to articulate that. You can say: ‘I don’t know what happens.’ But it’s much more than that.”

Her work with Ms. Mori actually comes closer to the song form — or what the duo calls songs. The partnership has evolved such that Ms. Parkins handles the hardware — an array of keyboards, her harps, and various baubles — and Ms. Mori peddles the software, conjuring homemade percussive samples on her laptop and projecting short films she has made.

The duo’s performance this week will take advantage of a 16-channel speaker array installed at the Issue Project Room, a former oil silo adjacent to the Gowanus Canal. The venue will move at the end of June, according to its director, Suzanne Fiol, due partly to landlord issues but also because a pending shutdown of the canal will turn the area into “a rat-infested garbage bath.” The show will be one of the last at what has been one of the city’s most distinctive performance spaces, although Ms. Fiol intends to continue at a new Brooklyn address in July.

“We’ve never played there,” Ms. Parkins said. “So it will be a first and a last. It’s not often that Ikue and I are here at the same time, so it’s nice to play for our friends in New York.”

Speaking of final shows, the recent closing of the Lower East Side experimental music club Tonic has sent a chill through Ms. Parkins and many of her peers. It’s the first time in more than a decade that Manhattan has lacked a sizable venue catering to the amorphous avant-garde scene, which is most visibly championed by Mr. Zorn’s tiny nonprofit club, the Stone.

“It’s kind of inexcusable that the city can’t support it,” she said. “Hopefully, this is some kind of strange transitory moment. It’s an economic problem and it has to do with greed and all those tall buildings going up downtown.”

Ms. Parkins, who still manages to keep a rehearsal studio in Manhattan, is nonetheless happy to embrace Brooklyn. She’s carved such a singular niche for herself, that the relative inconvenience of the G train will not impede her career. “If you want that thing I do, you know where to go,” she said with a laugh. “You thought it was in Manhattan, but check that new address.”

The NY Sun Files: Nico Muhly

Originally published Aug. 22, 2008.

Nico Muhly may not get the kind of attention that is lavished upon some of his collaborators, such as Björk or Rufus Wainwright, but the New York-based composer may be the most buzzed-about musician in the city right now.

Click Image to Enlarge

Michael Schmelling

TONGUE-TIED The composer Nico Muhly.

The prolific Mr. Muhly, who turns 27 on Tuesday, has had his pieces performed uptown (at Carnegie Hall) and downtown (at the Kitchen), created music that was adapted from sources as unlikely as “The Elements of Style,” and worked closely for a spell with the almost painfully ethereal vocalist Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. As obsessed with choral music a millennium gone as he is with next-generation electronics — he pays the rent working as a keyboardist and conductor for Philip Glass — Mr. Muhly has no problem constructing pieces through instant messaging while digging back into the primal sources that make music at once visceral, ecstatic, and cerebral.

“He is not afraid,” Mr. Hegarty said of his colleague. “He hears things vividly.”

Mr. Muhly also speaks vividly. Grabbing a happy-hour cocktail at Good World, an Orchard Street bar not far from his Chinatown loft, the composer, who is nearly always described as boyish, was indeed … boyish. But if he looks a good bit younger than his years, the Vermont native displays a thriving intellect that connects seemingly random topics as swiftly as a Google search — whether he’s talking about Thomas Tallis or “Top Chef.”

“There’s something so manic about the chefs,” Mr. Muhly, who graduated from Columbia and Juilliard with dual degrees in English and music composition, said. “The knives and the heat. And Padma. She’s so out of control. Have you read her cookbook? It’s ridiculous. Like this fake Nigella Lawson supermodel vibe.” He mimed Padma Lakshmi, host of the hit Bravo reality series “Top Chef”: “‘I love to go and pamper myself silly and eat so much Korean barbecue. Because I’m wild!’”

Mr. Muhly laughed so hard he was about to fall off his chair.

“It’s great.”

Maybe one day Mr. Muhly will write an opera based on “Top Chef.” If you spend a little time with him, the idea begins to seem awfully normal. Or, spend some time listening to his new album “Mothertongue” (Bedroom Community/Brassland). His fusion of folk music and electronics provides a backdrop for Saturday’s performance at (Le) Poissin Rouge in Greenwich Village. The show, which Mr. Muhly described as a “bistro version” of the recording, also features his key collaborators Sam Amidon, Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), and the violist Nadia Sirota.

Though he cheerfully concedes the pervasive influence of new-music kingpins such as Mr. Glass and John Adams on his own writing, Mr. Muhly took on “Mothertongue” as an occasion to reimagine much earlier incursions into his aesthetic consciousness. His original influences were his parents, whom he described as being “older than hippies” yet devoted enthusiasts of the folk-music revival of the early 1960s, as symbolized by such singers as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

Check out Mr. Muhly’s seemingly radical adaptation of a lyric called “The Two Sisters.” Titled “The Only Tune,” it features Mr. Amidon’s singing and string-plucking, a lot of electronic manipulation, and three separate variations on the song that veer from sonic chaos to a transcendently soulful viola solo by Ms. Sirota that ties everything — the lyric’s tragic theme and Mr. Muhly’s extremely creative interpretations of it — together, juxtaposing the analytical and the passionate. The composer’s reaction against one tradition is actually a re-embrace of an older one.

“I hate seeing people singing folk songs and smiling,” he said. “When you listen to the Child Ballads, it’s some crazy old man in Scotland and you know he’s not smiling. Because the songs are all so horrible. They’re so vicious and pagan. Even the ones that aren’t pagan. I’m way more interested in these heavily stylized things. Like [English countertenor] Alfred Deller singing Elizabethan minstrel songs. It’s like Butoh, but way more text-appropriate.”

As a child, Mr. Muhly remembered, his parents sang him the song about the two sisters. The older one pushes the younger one into a stream. Later, the body is fished out of a mill pond and gets refashioned into a violin, an instrument whose only sound is of cold wind and rain.

“I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you’re singing this like it’s nothing. This is infanticide.’ There’s this texture of chilled-out-ness in folk music. So I was trying to do a piece to insist on how nasty it is. I want to own the murder. Jerry Garcia made a recording of it. It’s so dopey. It plods along. I mean, they push her in and make a fiddle.”

Mr. Muhly, whose speech can carom a bit like a pinball going “ding-ding-ding-ding,” has a way of making a strongly felt point through a tone of sheer dumbstruck wonder rather than, say, assuming the role of a didactic snoot.

“Someone took a girl’s body and made a violin. Like, that’s amazing. It requires some focus. We’re going to have bone. We’re going to have flesh. We’re going to have hair. Making that cut was the most fun thing ever. It was crazy to do and it felt so delicious.”

Recorded in Iceland at the studio run by the producer and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson, “Mothertongue” is the product of a highly inclusive process.

“When you think about classical composers, you think about the composer being isolated,” Mr. Amidon said in a separate interview. “But with Nico, there’s a social element that’s really important.” The guitarist also noted Mr. Muhly’s reluctance to prefabricate anything. “We started with drawings on a piece of paper,” he said. “There was no score until the piece was done. And it’s very harmonically complex. I would mess something up, and he clearly was so open to the moment that he would keep my accident-laden version.”

Cracks in the veneer are valuable to Mr. Muhly, who actively resists the incessant pigeonholing that American popular culture imposes on its artists. It’s one reason he enjoys working in Iceland, where, he said, someone is either “indie” or is not.

“You can get away with a breadth of influence there,” he said.

As a cozily somnambulant ballad by Cat Power drifted into the early-evening bustle of the street corner outside, Mr. Muhly mimicked those who don’t quite get that there’s nothing to get. It’s all there. Always. All the time.

“People here, there is no end to asking, ‘How do you reconcile this plus this?’ It’s really boring. People asking, ‘How do you bridge the two different worlds?’ What worlds are you talking about?”

The composer mentioned a well-known music critic whose approach drives him crazy. “It’s unbearable. It’s always in the first person, and it’s always, ‘It sounds like this plus this.’ It does not. This is your dumb hermeneutical exercise. What is that narrative? If people ask me what my music sounds like and I’m feeling charitable, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, it’s like John Adams plus 16th-century choral music.’ And then I feel stupid for six weeks after. Dirty. I have to loofah.”