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Chris Cochrane, Performance Space 122 & tbspMGMT invite you to the
THEM CD Release Party at LePoisson Rouge

The CD is comprised of the music and narration of THEM, a performance by Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper and Ishmael Houston-Jones originally presented in 1985 by Performance Space 122 and again in 2010 by PS122, the New Museum and tbspMGMT. Cochrane's music & Cooper's narration is raw and edgy, the perfect sonic description of the improvised, entangled struggle of bodies in this historic performance piece.

On Sunday, November 13 Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper, Ishmael Houston-Jones will be joined by several dancers from the 2010 edition of THEM as well as musicians Kato Hideki, Richard Dworkin, Doug Wieselman to present excerpts of both the album and performance.

"[THEM] is poetic and disturbing, backed by the full force of its history without being diminished by it." - The New York Times (October 2010)

"In 1985, as many of our friends and colleagues were dying of HIV/AIDS - still a new phenomenon at the time - we created a performance piece investigating how men interact with men. THEM combined Ishmael's dancing, Dennis's words, and my music into a work of bracing, collaborative art. The lives of our friends and community - the loss of their lives - grew to became part of the piece. The infamous final scene, in which Ishmael dances with a dead goat, became a symbol of what we were all going through: grappling and fighting with death every day." - Chris Cochrane

Cochrane co-produced the album on John Zorn's Tzadik Label #7627 - Key Series with Kato Hideki. The CD unfolds in "real time," following the time frame and structure of the performance piece.

Chris Cochrane is a guitarist, singer, songwriter, improvisator and producer. Since moving to New York City, he has performed regularly in bands and improvised with hundreds of players. In addition to his rare solo recordings and work with a number of bands, including the legendary, groundbreaking experimental prog unit No Safety which he co-founded with harpist Zeena Parkins; Cartwright's band "Curlew". He has worked with a vast array of great artists as T Bone Burnett, John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, Eszter Balint, Richard Buckner, Derek Bailey, Kato Hideki, Kramer, Bob Ostertag, Annie Gosfield, Ikue Mori, Jim Staley, Jim Pugliese, and many more. Also he has composed music for John Jasperse, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Nayland Blake, Dennis Cooper, Jennifer Monson, Circus Amok, and others.

Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam, Holland where he lived for two and a half years before returning to New York. While in Amsterdam, he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. In 1990, he moved back to Los Angeles. His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and his most recent novel, the highly acclaimed God, Jr. Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and arts activist. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York City, across the United States, in Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America. Houston-Jones' Nowhere, Now Here was commissioned for Mordine and Company in Chicago in spring 2001 andSpecimens was commissioned for Headlong Dance Theater in Philadelphia in 1998. In 1997 he was the choreographer for Nayland Blake's Hare Follies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From 1995-2000 he was part of the improvised trio Unsafe/ Unsuited with Keith Hennessy and Patrick Scully. In 1990 he and writer Dennis Cooper presented The Undead at the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts. In 1989 he collaborated with filmmaker Julie Dash on the video Relatives, which was aired nationally on the PBS series Alive From Off-Center (Alive TV). In 1984 Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie Award” for their Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders.

Kato Hideki (Kato:family name; Hideki: given) is a Japanese-born musician, composer, audio engineer. His work resides in both fields of music and sound art. He is the co-founder of Death Ambient with Ikue Mori & Fred Frith and released three titles on Tzadik records. His other groups as a leader are: Green Zone with Otomo Yoshihide & Uemura Masahiro; OMNI wtih Nakamura Toshimaru & Akiyama Tetsuji; Plastic Spoon with Karen Mantler, Doug Wieselman & Shahzad Ismaily. His compositions include: solo bass piece Turbulent Zone, Mystic Ship of Life, (commissioned by the Kitchen, NYC), audio / visual installation pieces Slash, Elevator 55 with Ursula Scherrer and Tremolo of Joy for his quartet with Charles Burnham, Briggan Krauss & Calvin Weston. Besides his own projects, Kato collaborated with Nicolas Collins, James Fei, Christian Marclay & Esther Venrooy. As a musician, he has worked with / for Eyvind Kang, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York City Ballet, Zeena Parkins, Marina Rosenfeld, Bruce Springsteen & John Zorn among many others. He also has taught lectures / workshops at Bates College, Chukyo University, Nagoya Universiy of Art and Science, IAMAS, The School of Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an adjunct professor at NYU/POLY. Kato co-produced CD "THEM" with Chris Cochrane. (katohideki.com)

Doug Wieselman has worked as composer, arranger and musician with a variety of artists in different fields - in theater - with director Robert Woodruff and the Flying Karamazov Brothers, in dance with Jerome Robbins and Paul Taylor, and as musician with Victoria Williams, Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz, Lou Reed, Tricky, Anthony Coleman, Laurie Anderson, Syd Straw, Steven Bernstein, Joan as PoliceWoman and John Lurie, among many others. He is currently composing music for the animated Nickelodeon show "The Backyardigans" in association with Evan Lurie.

JD Foster has had a varied career as musician, composer and record producer. He has collaborated with Dwight Yoakam, Richard Buckner, Patty Griffin,T-Bone Burnett, Cassandra Wilson and Marc Ribot to name but a sampling. He lives in NYC.

Richard Dworkin has been a member of the Microscopic Septet since 1980 and has played with Alex Chilton, James Chance, Michael Callen and Fast n' Bulbous among others.