Sean Ali + Leila Bordreuil + Joanna Mattrey

Spiral Music presents acoustic music every Wednesday evening at the base of the Museum’s spiral staircase. Artists who specialize in music from the Himalayas and South Asia are invited to forge a connection between their music and the art in the galleries.

About the Musicians

Sean Ali is a bassist, composer, and improviser from Dayton, Ohio. He has been participating in New York City’svibrant experimental music scene both as a performer and occasional curator since 2003. His current projects include: Fester, Hag, LathanFlinAli, Mattrey.Bordreuil.Ali, Natura Morta, and PascAli. His solo performances feature text and sound-specific preparations for the bass. He is co-founder of the experimental music label Prom Night Records.

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn based cellist, composer, sound-artist, and curator. Her cello playing is often improvised, and primarily focuses on texture variations and a collage of phantom overtones and pitched utterances. Through an original vocabulary of extended techniques, preparations, and imaginative amplification methods, her instrument is used as an abstract resonant body to challenge conventional cello practice. Her compositions draw from a similar texture-based aesthetic, but also focus on the relationship between sound and space.

Joanna Mattrey searches for moments of connectedness; between players, between performers and audience, between thoughts and sounds. These investigations have led her through different genres, but especially to new and improvised experimental music. She finds fulfillment in the challenges of working with composers on premieres and in the interpretation of graphic scores. Joanna is a cofounder of WhoThroughThen, a performer/composer collective, which has recently released ‘Ponticular’ on Not Art Records. Joanna’s collaborations include a string trio with Sean Ali and Leila Bordreuil, Ancient Enemies, and Matt Mitchell’s Mad Homonyms among others. She is also working on a solo project, Codex, that interprets the graphic scores of Cardew’s ‘Treatise.’