the critique of pure reason presents:
TRACY AND THE PLASTICS
and special guests wikkid and annie clark
9:30PM (THE 11PM SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELLED)
(if you bought an advance ticket for the 11pm show, you can use it for the early show. if you can’t make the early show, email stacie (at) thecritique (dot) org and we’ll work out how to get you a refund.)
9:30 PM
with
annie clark
and
wikkid
all ages, $8
advance tickets available at
lorem ipsum books
this show will definitely sell out!
if your heart’s set on seeing it,
please get a ticket in advance so you aren’t disappointed!
Tracy and the Plastics is an electronic art/new media punk band conceived and performed by lesbian feminist video artist Wynne Greenwood. Greenwood started the band in 1999, while running an underground moviehouse called ‘The Murdra,’ dedicated to showing independent films and videos by women and queers. Culture for Pigeon is Tracy and the Plastics’ second full-length record, to be released on Troubleman Records with an accompanying DVD this April.
The music on this record is a combination of a stumbling fury of sampled drums, insistent bass loops, and weary keyboard melodies. Drum sounds were sampled from Rachel Carns (King Cobra, The Need), bass grooves and beats created with JD Samson (Le Tigre), and vocals were recorded at Studio G by Joel Hamilton and Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu). This record wanders through some woods, some fields, through some strange buildings, and back into the nighttime parking where friends are hanging out, radically having a lifetime.
And then there’s the live show.
To watch Tracy and the Plastics perform is to watch a quilt get made, or a song get sung by you and the birds in the tree next to your window, or to watch one woman become an entire band. Greenwood takes the forms of all three band members, live on stage and in prerecorded video projections. She sings live as Tracy while interacting with the other band members (Greenwood as both Nikki, the keyboard player, and Cola, the drummer) on the video screen behind her.
“We are really interested in creating new mythologies about the construction of cohesive identities from fragmented parts of fragmented culture, and performing that through the relationships of our sounds and images.” The shake of the nail-polish bottle in the video becomes the tick of the high hat cymbal in the song. These elements play off of each other to create an imagined world through which Tracy guides you with her hopeful vocals.
The DVD released with Culture for Pigeon includes two videos by Greenwood. The first, “We Hear Swooping Guitars,” enacts a Tracy and the Plastics band practice. Set in a carpeted landscape, this video recalls the magic of making up songs in one’s bedroom. “Sounds come from us and what we have around us.” The second, “Just the Beginning of Something,” carries the ideas the band sets forth into other worlds of memory and empowering reenactment.
Tracy and the Plastics will perform as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and Greenwood will complete her MFA from Bard College this summer. Tracy and the Plastics has performed at and been presented in venues all over the country including Harvard University, LTTR (the radical feminist art journal), CCA in Detroit, and Ocularis in Brooklyn.
Website: http://www.tracyandtheplastics.com
Label: http://www.troublemanunlimited.com
advance tickets will be available starting sunday, 11 april at lorem ipsum books
Production: Stacie Slotnick (stacie at thecritique dot org)
the critique of pure reason