Brooklyn’s “Music at First” features musical innovators Eleonore Oppenheim and Lesley Flanigan October 8, 2010

Bassist Eleonore Oppenheim (www.eleonoreoppenheim.com) and sound artist Lesley Flanigan (www.lesleyflanigan.com) will perform as part of Music at First on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 7:30pm. This new music series is held at First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, located at 124 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. Tickets are $10 at the door. Contact musicatfirst@gmail.com for more info. Directions are at www.fpcbrooklyn.org.

MUSIC AT FIRST, curated by Wil Smith (composer who also serves as organist at First Presbyterian), occurs monthly, featuring two performers or ensembles per evening. A diverse mix of New York City's best ensembles and performers, accessible to a wide audience of both community members and seasoned listeners, Music at First has been described by Steve Smith in The New York Times as a “vibrant, eclectic new-music series.” The second season opened earlier this fall with Kyle Bobby Dunn and electric guitar quartet Dither. Future performers will include pianist Isabelle O'Connell and Flutronix on Nov. 5th; and Phithia with Slow/Fast on Dec. 3rd.

A tireless champion of new music, bassist ELEONORE OPPENHEIM is quickly gaining a reputation as an engaging soloist who has built a rich repertoire of solo pieces commissioned from a wide array of talented up-and-coming young composers. This program features solo bass with electronics -- most pieces (composed by Florent Ghys, David Lang, Jenny Olivia Johnson, and Wil Smith) are electroacoustic and are written specifically for her. Equally at home in a variety of disparate genres, she has performed with the Philip Glass Ensemble, bandsemble Victoire, Signal Ensemble, Meredith Monk, the pioneering indie rock band the Instruments, Dan Zanes and Friends, and others. She has appeared at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Ravinia Festival, Spoleto Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Knitting Factory, the Barbican Centre, the Stone, and the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, to name a few. Eleonore was a Bang on a Can Fellow in 2006, and is an alumna of Juilliard and of the Yale School of Music.

Artist/vocalist LESLEY FLANIGAN sculpts electronic music by hand using the physicality of sound produced from her own handmade speaker feedback instruments and singing voice. Moving among a cluster of wires, speakers, and microphones, her music is a choreographed musical landscape of electric tones and rhythms resonating from noise, feedback, voice, and the actions of amplifying. In her first New York appearance after a European tour, she offers a special performance that highlights the reverberant architectural amplification of First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. Performing works from her album "Amplifications" and improvised solo voice pieces, her intimate concert will showcase the exquisite beauty of her voice layered among the feedback tones of her wooden speaker instruments. Actively working within the experimental electronics and music scene of NYC, she collaborates and tours with R. Luke DuBois in Bioluminescence (for voice and video), the Loud Objects (live circuit construction), and Tristan Perich (soprano voice for "Lit" and "Untitled by Bernadette Mayer"). Her performance work has been presented internationally at theaters, museums, festivals and art spaces including the Guggenheim, Issue Project Room, Sonar (Barcelona, Chicago), Transitio MX (Mexico), and Bent (LA and NYC).

FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN (FPC) is committed to supporting the arts in the community, and has been noted by Lucid Culture blog as as “doing double duty as comfortable neighborhood hang and avant garde central for the budget conscious.” FPC is an open and intentionally diverse congregation, by race, culture, age, theology, and sexual orientation.