Composer and performer Ben Neill and percussionist Don Yallech will perform “ITSOFOMO” (“In the Shadow of Forward Motion”) tonight at Cedars West End, 706 Steel St., Youngstown. The multi-media performance begins at 8 p.m. Admission is $10.
The Youngstown performance comes as Neill and Yallech rehearse the work for upcoming presentations in London and Paris.
The local performance is also a homecoming. Neill and Yallech both attended the Dana School of Music at YSU and formed the new wave band The B-Minors in the early 1980s. They were the first musicians to perform at the original Cedars Lounge when Tommy Simon was the owner, pioneering the independent music scene that grew around the club and has endured in Youngstown for more than four decades.
For Neill and Yallech, bringing the work to Youngstown adds another layer of history: two musicians who began experimenting together there in the early 1980s return more than 40 years later with a work born from another pivotal cultural moment and prepare it for its next chapter in Europe.
Created at the height of the AIDS crisis, “ITSOFOMO” combines Neill’s music, recordings of Wojnarowicz’s fiercely personal spoken texts and four simultaneous videos in an intense meditation on acceleration, politics, technology, sexuality, mortality and the body.
Wojnarowicz, one of the most important artists and writers to emerge from New York’s downtown scene of the 1980s, died of AIDS-related complications in 1992.
Nearly four decades after its creation, “ITSOFOMO” has acquired a new resonance. Wojnarowicz’s personal texts confront political power, social exclusion and the forces acting upon individual bodies; Neill’s music, composed for his unique Mutantrumpet and live electronics with orchestral and electronic percussion, transforms those ideas into an accelerating sonic experience.
The work premiered in 1989 at The Kitchen in New York and has subsequently been presented at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), San Francisco Art Institute, Institute of Contemporary Art (London), the Kunsthalle (Vienna), the Whitney Museum, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and other venues.
The New York Times called the work “a scathing indictment of the government, the medical establishment, and the religious right.” UK music magazine The Wire found it “exhausting yet exhilarating,” art critic Jennifer Doyle said the piece “binds its audience together in a shared sense of exposure,” and French philosopher Sylvere Lotringer spoke of it as “a battle to reclaim the organism of life” in his liner notes to the recording, which was re-released in digital and vinyl on Jabs Records in 2018.
“ITSOFOMO” (“In the Shadow of Forward Motion”). 8 p.m., Friday, Nov. 13 at Cedars West End, 706 Steel St., Youngstown 44509. The multi-media performance is 50 minutes. Admission is $10.
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