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Press Contact: Adrian Rew [email protected] 312-351-3232

Okkyung Lee: Yeo-Neun Quartet

Tuesday, May 1st, 2018 – 8pm Blank Forms presenting at San Damiano Mission 85 N. 15th St, Brooklyn, NY 11222 $15 General / $11.25 Members

Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser interested in pushing contemporary cello performance to its extreme limit without abandoning a reverence for its tradition. Classically trained in her native South Korea, Lee discovered jazz as a student in Boston before immersing herself in the avant-garde community surrounding New York’s now-defunct Tonic, developing a polyvalent approach to cello that spans tonal elegance, turbulent improv, and the noisiest reaches of extended technique, sometimes Okkyung Lee: Yeo-Neun Quartet | Tuesday, May 1st, 2018 | Blank Forms

within minutes. Her penchant for pushing boundaries breaches space itself, as she routinely departs from the concert stage in an exploration of each venue’s structure, audience, and other furnishings in her expanded performances. In demand for her versatile, visceral playing, she has recorded and performed as bandleader, sideman, solo, and in intimate improvisation settings with the likes of Cecil Taylor, Laurie Anderson, Jim O’Rourke, Ikue Mori, Vijay Iyer, Mark Fell, Christian Marclay, and John Zorn.

Lee currently leads the Yeo-Neun Quartet, an experimental chamber music ensemble featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivynd Opsvik. Improvising upon dramatic compositions influenced by Korean traditional music and the pop ballads Lee grew up listening to, the quartet’s tightly woven, intricate layers of sound are, even at their most tender, at constant risk of being torn apart by the lacerating, groaning rosin-abuse of Lee’s capricious cello playing.

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Blank Forms is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists working in a range of time-based and interdisciplinary art practices, including experimental music, performance, dance, and sound art. We aim to establish new frameworks to preserve, nurture, and present to broad audiences the work of historic and emerging artists. Blank Forms provides artists with curatorial support, residencies, commissions, and publications to help document, disseminate, and advance their practices.

Press contact: Adrian Rew, [email protected] 312-351-3232 blankforms.org