Doug Wieselman in concert

As a vital force in the New York music scene, muti-instrumentalist Doug Wieselman has been an intrepid adventurer in the world of sound. Wieselman has worked extensively with a variety of ensembles and situations – including improvisers, art-rockers, jazz inflected bands and contemporary music. The breadth of his collaborators includes Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Bill Frisell, Coco Rosie, Yoko Ono, Martha Wainwright, Jerome Robbins, Jolie Holland, Tricky, Cibo Matto, Marianne Faithful, Hal Willner, Iron & Wine, Kronos Quartet and Robert Wilson. He co-led the Kamikaze Ground Crew for over 30 years, was the featured guitarist in the last iteration of the Lounge Lizards, and is currently a member of Sex Mob. He also was co-composer for the Nickelodeon children animated show The Backyardigans, with Evan Lurie.

Wieselman’s most recent project, From Water, is inspired by sounds he has heard when listening to bodies of water from the West Coast to the Hudson Valley. The album is thus a largely benign and meditative experience, though rippled with a mental tumult and tension buried beneath the waves of spontaneous structural approach and harmonic interplay/distortion among digitally multiplied clarinets. This solo recording, in which his clarinets, played through a loop pedal and Fender amp, singularly and quietly present a world rich with the sensation of personal intimacy, seductive and persuasive.

“This is music primarily made from melodies that I have heard from bodies of water – ocean beaches, streams, hot springs as well as wind. These melodies sound to me like a chorus of exuberant voices. Each melody is specific to the place. If I return to a beach, even after many years, I hear the same song. I think this has something to do with what the earth can tell us, if only we can take the time and patience to listen. This is an attempt to share what I have been hearing, through the filter of my perception, from water.”

This solo performance marks Wieselman’s first visit to New York’s North Country. The concert is on the evening of October’s Hunters Full Moon.

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts.