Event details
Saturday, December 7, 2024
2 pm

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.

Clear Air is a collaborative sound-and-text performance by Ben Estes and Ben Vida, taking place in the Felix Gonzalez-Torres galleries at Dia Beacon. In Estes’s text, performed by Estes, Tom Cole, Randy Danson, and Jane Gregory, formless voices of human awareness travel down beams of light, hang still in midair, appear as shadows on furniture, or are broadcast on radio waves; they may be the voices of spirits caught between worlds. Drawing on spiritualism, concrete poetry, and Quakerism, Clear Air behaves like a text written in the ether. Giving sonic form to Estes’s translucent streams of thought, composer Ben Vida contributes a hypnotic electronic music score. The arrangement of voices and electronics acts to produce an atmosphere of ambient language, abstracted narrative, and vocal texture.

Ben Estes is the author of the poetry collections Illustrated Games of Patience (2015) and ABC Moonlight (2022). He is the editor of A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, with Alan Felsenthal (2013); Photographs: Together & Alone by Karlheinz Weinberger (2020); the 50th anniversary poetry anthology On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, with Joel Weishaus (2021); and The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield (2023), among others. Together with Felsenthal, he runs the small literary press the Song Cave. Estes’s paintings were most recently shown at Bad Water, Knoxville; Headstone Gallery, Kingston, New York; James Fuentes Gallery, New York; Kobo Chika, Shibuya, Japan; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Estes lives in Kingston.

Ben Vida is a composer, improviser, writer, and artist. His practice encompasses works for voice and ensembles, musique concrète, text-based compositions, and electro-acoustic improvisation. In the mid-1990s he was involved in Chicago’s multifaceted experimental music scene, co-founding the quartet Town & Country. In the mid-2000s he relocated to New York and began producing electronic and systems-based compositions, which focused on psychoacoustics and advanced synthesis techniques, releasing records on PAN and Shelter Press, as well as exhibiting video art, text drawings, and sound installations. Since 2013, he has been composing pieces that combine his interests in group vocalization, durational performance, and typographical scores. In 2023 his piece The Beat My Head Hit, composed for the quartet Yarn/Wire and vocalist Nina Dante, was released on Shelter Press, and this past summer his composition Vocal Trio was released on Blume Editions. Vida teaches in the Sonic Arts MFA program at Brooklyn College.