Biography::
Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Richard Barrett, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d'Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Black Jackets Company-Brussels. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains:Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam, Miguel Abreu Gallery and The Kitchen. His project with the Bach Cello Suites has toured in Switzerland, Italy, Holland, and the Opera of Monaco. In 2007 Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex is also collaborating and participating in Dexter Sinister's residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Press and Reviews
NY Times Picks for 2007 (B. Holland)
"(Richard)Carrick’s relative gentleness was all but blown out of the room by Alex Waterman’s ferocious reading of Kottos, in which Iannis Xenakis asks the cellist to pressure the instrument into a sputtering explosion of harmonics and noise. The unearthly beauty produced seems borne of a planet in constant, seething turmoil, where snarling, lunging glissandi are the sounds of the day. I can’t imagine a cellist applying more dedication than what Waterman unleashed, like Bartók on steroids."
-Bruce Hodges
ARTFORUM 2007
Art Forum Critic's Picks 9/07
http://artforum.com/archive/id=15806&search=alison%20knowles
Alison Knowles's Top Ten 9/07
http://artforum.com/inprint/id=15664
Eileen Quinlan Top Ten 1/07
http://artforum.com/inprint/id=12260
Alex Waterman's Top Ten Music of 2007
http://artforum.com/inprint/id=18976
Time Out NYC
Top Live Show in Time Out NYC (January 2008)
More kind words:
Excerpt from Bruce Hodges' review in Seen and Heard International .
(This is a review of the concert pictured above at The Kitchen, 2007.)
With the skill and dedication of three archaeologists, Either/Or founders Richard Carrick and David Shively, with the help of cellist Alex Waterman, presented an unusually interesting look at some artifacts from the avant garde of the 1950s and 1960s (with one vault into the 1970s). Held in The Kitchen’s high-ceilinged upstairs gallery, the concert had a “turning back the clock” effect, enhanced by some pillow seating on the floor. On the walls, an exhibit co-curated by Waterman called Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music showed the sometimes-startling variety of composers’ visual notation, from a tightly-ordered pattern of tiny blocks, to a huge sheet of brown paper daubed with wisps of paint.
(...)
Waterman made an intelligent case for one of Morton Feldman’s shorter works, Projection 1, with typical delicate tones competing for attention with pauses. With acute attention to phrasing and dynamics, Waterman breathed uncanny life into a work that seemed over too soon.
BH
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