Ballroom and Marfa Book Co. welcomed Julianna Barwick for a special performance in Ballroom’s galleries. 

Louisiana-born/Brooklyn-based Barwick performed from many of her recent releases: Florine, her EP from 2010, opens with a song Pitchfork describes as a “halogen hymn.” Producer Diplo, announcing his contribution to her 2011 Matrimony Remixes EP, introduced her music to his followers as the sound of “Care Bears making love.” Dolphins, angels and cathedrals are reference points used to describe the sounds she makes, compositions often characterized by reverberating vocal loops with minimal instrumental accompaniment.

Barwick’s breakthrough came with the 2011 album The Magic Place, its title is a reference to a beloved tree on the farm where she was raised, and also to the fruitful year when it was recorded. In addition, she produced a remix for Radiohead, an improvisational album with composer Ikue Mori, and recorded her 2013 album Nepenthe in Iceland at Sigur Rós’ studio and with contributions from the Amiina post-rock string quartet.

As part of the 2013 Marfa Dialogues program in New York City, Ballroom Marfa presented the exhibition Quiet Earth at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Project Space. Curated by Fairfax Dorn, the exhibition engaged current environmental issues, particularly climate change, and included environmentally-engaged artwork from the 1970s to the present. Featured artists included Amy Balkin, Larry Bamburg, Agnes Denes, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Maya Lin, Trevor Paglen, and Robert Rauschenberg. 

Marfa Dialogues was conceived in 2010 by Ballroom and the Public Concern Foundation with the aim of bringing together artists, scientists, writers, and critical thinkers to consider a range of social issues, from immigration to the environmental crisis. Since its conception in Marfa in 2010, the program has traveled to the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, to Houston as part of Fotofest, and to New York with the Rauschenberg Foundation. 

Quiet Earth takes its inspiration in part from the 1985 New Zealand post-apocalyptic film of the same name, and serves as an abstract documentation of the ways that humans have responded to the ecological crises of climate change with scientifically informed aesthetic practices. Quiet Earth is about an awareness of volume: That which we create, that which we consume, and that which may, in turn, consume us.

At the Rauschenberg Foundation In New York, Ballroom presented Agnes Denes’ Pyramids of Conscience – a large-scale work that was commissioned from the artist in 2005 for the Ballroom exhibition Treading Water. The Pyramids of Conscience were recently included in a major retrospective of Denes’ work at The Shed. Click here for more information. 

Ballroom Marfa welcomed Autre Ne Veut for a special performance on October 9th, 2013 debuting their new album Anxiety. 

“Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love” – Sigmund Freud

Anxiety was the full-length follow up to Autre Ne Veut’s 2010 self-titled debut, which was for many the definitive post-millennial Failure Pop statement outside of time and style. Born April 20th, 1982 Arthur Ashin is the first of two children and the only son of American ex-patriots living in rural Kenya. He’s struggled with minor bouts of depression throughout his life, but a year of intensive psychoanalysis helped Arthur to realize that anxiety was at the crux of his problems.

Anxiety is in some sense Ashin closing a chapter on his adolescence through song-form depictions of his own relationship struggles and ecstasies. Like a collection of photographs, each featuring our anti-hero surrounded by lovers, friends, and family and, ultimately, the world, Ashin himself is peripheral to the action. He is always a little too aware of the joke, laughing at the wrong time.

The influences on Anxiety range from David Byrne to Lee “Scratch” Perry, Laurie Anderson and Annie Lennox to Katy Perry and Rihanna. But Arthur’s primary influence – and the influence most evident in his music – is of karaoke – the solitary person singing along with their favorite song. In karaoke we get to be someone bigger than who we usually are. When we sing karaoke or when we sing in the shower, we get to be gods; gods with bars of soap, gods with plastic cups in our hands.

Dallas Collective (Michael Corris, William Binnie, Soraya Abtahi, Jenna Barrois, Ellen Smith, Alexandra Monroe, Dylan Wignall, Rhyanna Odom, Nina Davis, Elainy Lopez, Hannah Tyler, Michael Deleon,and Braeden Bailey, Kelly Kroener, Travis LaMothe, Michael M. Morris, Melissa Tran)

2013 Texas Biennial Commissioned Project
Presented by Ballroom Marfa

Ballroom presented Laura Marling at the Highland Annex for an intimate encounter with a rising star. Willy Mason opened. Marling’s music belongs to the traditions of both British and American folk music. Her fourth album, Once I Was An Eagle, was nominated for the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize.

Marling’s musical background is well-documented: Her father taught her guitar at a young age, and her early work references English pastoral folk artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s like Pentangle, Fairport Convention or Nick Drake. In 2008 at the age of 18 she released her first album Alas I Cannot Swim, which was quickly recognized as a landmark document of the aforementioned scene. Two more records followed in 2010 and 2011. In the years since her debut her achievements also include the 2011 Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist, two Mercury Music Prize nominations and the NME Award for Best Solo Artist.

Though her work is lumped in with folk revivalists Mumford & Sons and Noah and the Whale — two groups with whom she was entangled professionally and socially — Marling’s music stands out for the ways in which it breaks with those traditions. She incorporates an adventurous sonic palette that feels more aligned with the experimental impulses of Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch and Richard Thompson or even to Bob Dylan and Laurel Canyon-era Joni Mitchell, while other critics hear the expansive psychedelia found in Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd’s mellower fare. 

New York’s Devin Gary & Ross, the visually inclined trio of cartoon animator Devin Flynn, photographer and sign painter Ross Goldstein, and illustrator, designer, and all-around Renaissance weirdo Gary Panter (and art director for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”), performed at the opening of Ballroom’s 2013 exhibition Comic Future, at Ballroom Marfa. They were joined by special guest Kramer – musician, composer, record producer and founder of the New York City record label Shimmy-Disc.

Comic Future featured work by artists who employ various approaches to language, satire and representation to explore visions of the future. Drawing from the art historical lineage of cubism, cartoons, figurative painting and gestural abstraction, and appropriating subjects from mythology, advertising, print culture and consumerism, Comic Future addressed the breakdown of the human condition and the absurdities which define the perils of human evolution.

Showcasing works from the 1960s through 2013, the exhibition surveyed political satire and cultural commentary through movements ranging from capitalist realism to contemporary pop art. The works included early drawings by Sigmar Polke, collage by Walead Beshty, painting by Carroll Dunham and Peter Saul, alongside newer works by Dana Schutz, Sue Williams, Michael Williams and Erik Parker and sculpture by Aaron Curry, Liz Craft and Mike Kelley. For the exhibition Ballroom also commissioned a new, site-specific wall installation by artist Arturo Herrera.

This exhibition was curated by Fairfax Dorn.

For our fifth annual New Year’s film program, Ballroom Marfa hosted a film screening of Philippe Garrel’s 1968 film Le Révélateur, with a live score by Philadelphia harpist Mary Lattimore and synth player Jeff Zeigler at the Crowley Theater.

Mary Lattimore is a classically trained harpist, whose collaborations have seen her working with such esteemed luminaries as Kurt Vile, Meg Baird, Thurston Moore, Ed Askew, Fursaxa, Jarvis Cocker and the Valerie Project. On her debut record, The Withdrawing Room, she found a worthy sideman in Philadelphia’s Jeff Zeigler, whose contemplative Korg echoes & holds a mood for Mary’s runs.

Zeigler has amassed quite the resume in recent years, between his space-rock outfit Arc in Round and his production work for local luminaries Kurt Vile, Purling Hiss and The War on Drugs. Zeigler’s also been expanding into the solo / collaborative experimental zone, playing solo shows with Lattimore and opening for English ambient artist Benoît Pioulard.

William Tyler played with $3:33 at the Highland Annex in Marfa, TX on August 6, 2013.

In the early 1960s a number of Western musicians began turning on to the mesmerizing sound of Indian ragas. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are the most widely-known of these dilettantes, while composers like Terry Riley, Simone Forti and Catherine Christer Hennix brought transcendent drone concepts to the West as disciples of the Hindustani singer and teacher Pandit Pran Nath. Likewise, sitarist Ravi Shankar found a constituency among Western hippies, while Brij Bhushan Kabra started playing traditional ragas on guitar for Indian classical audiences.

We find Henry Flynt — self-described “cognitive nihilist,”— in-between these pop and avant-garde camps. Flynt blended Hindu and hillbilly aesthetics, merging the holy music of India with Western religious music, Southern blues and finger-picking from Appalachia. The result was a new transnational folk music and an evolution of the hypnotic structures of Indian devotional jams.

Nashville-based guitarist William Tyler is a practitioner of such mystical music, and proof of it as a living tradition. Tyler can be heard on records from, Lambchop, The Silver Jews and Charlie Louvin. But it’s on his own albums where he stakes his claim as a member of the traditions outlined above.

His 2013 album, Impossible Truth, exists as part of this lineage but adds dimensions to the sound that are all his own. He attributes the album’s origin to readings about Southern California, its relationship to the apocalypse and ecological disaster and the self-involved social dynamics of the Laurel Canyon scene. He describes the resulting LP as his “’70s singer-songwriter record; it just doesn’t have any words.”

Marfa-based musician Celia Hollander opened for Tyler in her $3:33 guise. Hollander makes electronic compositions that range from meditative pieces for keyboard and treated voice to collaged battle raps from underground YouTube MCs. Her music shares a similar openness to aesthetic cross-breeding, a sound born as much from the ominous heavy-lidded hip-hop of Three Six Mafia as the pastoral digital abstractions of Asa Chang & Junray.

Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa, The Country and Western Big Band Suite was the first installment of The Marfa Triptych, three portraits of West Texas envisioned by Graham Reynolds. The project was an instrumental suite for 14 players, described by Reynolds as “classic instrumental country meets Western soundtrack meets power jazz rhythm section.” The project culminated in a live performance at the Crowley Theater in 2014 and a full-length album released in November of 2019.

The album features legendary country guitarist Reid Volkaert (Merle Haggard), the celestial pedal steel of Ricky Davis (Dale Watson), and adventurous contemporary string quartet Invoke, all alongside a horn and rhythm section comprised of several of Reynolds’ longtime cohorts. The opening track “Good Morning, Marfa” evokes the warmth of the sun emerging over the peaks of the Davis Mountains and introduces one of the album’s central musical themes. The up-tempo train anthem of “Union Pacific” pairs nicely with the rollicking ranch and cattle themed “Stampede.” “Highway 67” conveys the majestic and ethereal dip south from interstate 10 just past Fort Stockton, which geographically continues on to the Mexican bordertown of “Ojinaga.” Dazzling and virtuosic guitar work courtesy of Redd Volkaert is highlighted on “Redd Redd Redd” and “Goat Herd.” The string quartet “Runaway” builds on the earlier ride on the rails, while “The Uninhabited” mixes western soundtrack with the often-overlooked keyboard sorcery of Graham Reynolds; a meditation on the vast and rugged West Texas landscape that is also apparent on “The Chihuahuan Desert.”

The project was inspired by Reynolds’ trips from his base in Austin, Texas to the high desert grasslands of Far West Texas. His approach combines local musical traditions – from cowboy songs and Southern jazz to the norteño music of Northern Mexico – with a personal perspective that comes from years of scoring film, theater and modern dance performances.

Reynolds spent a significant amount of time working with Ballroom Marfa to coordinate research trips throughout the region. His itinerary included visits with musicians, historians, storytellers, artists and local legends from Terlingua, Alpine, Presidio, Shafter, Fort Davis, Valentine, Marfa and other far-flung locales in the Big Bend region.