RENOWNED COMPOSER/GUITARIST KAKI KING RESCHEDULES JANUARY PERFORMANCE CANCELLED DUE TO SNOW THE MULTIMEDIA WORK THE NECK IS A BRIDGE TO THE BODY WILL NOW BE AT OZ ARTS NASHVILLE APRIL 15 & 16, 2016 - OZ Arts Nashville

Algorithms Transform King’s Playing into Rich Visuals by Glowing Pictures (Animal Collective, David Byrne & Brian Eno, The Beastie Boys)

“I’ve never seen anything like it… a sumptuous feast for the senses, a dizzying display of sound and vision by a guitarist already renowned for her innovation… I repeat: Do not miss this.”
—The Boston Globe

“It’s a beautiful thing when two entirely different art forms fit so well together that the boundaries between vision and sound, hand and ear, line and note, begin to blur. We’re feeling that particular kind of synesthesia…”
—The Huffington Post

NASHVILLE, TENN. – OZ Arts Nashville is pleased to welcome master guitarist and composer Kaki King for two performances of her groundbreaking multimedia work The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, in which King’s melodies, scratches, taps and strums trigger visuals crafted by Glowing Pictures (Animal Collective, David Byrne & Brian Eno, The Beastie Boys). January performances cancelled due to snow will now take place April 15 & 16, 2016, at 8pm (with doors opening at 7pm). Tickets are $40 and can be purchased at www.ozartsnashville.org. OZ Arts is located at 6172 Cockrill Bend Circle in Nashville, Tenn.

In The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, King’s all-white Ovation Adamas acoustic six-string—customized for this production—doubles as a video monitor, with luminous textures and imagery appearing on it throughout the performance. Additional visuals are projected onto an on-stage cinema screen backdrop. The result is a one-of-a-kind experience that is at once mesmerizing and thought-provoking.

Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” Kaki King is a true iconoclast. Over the past 10 years, the Brooklyn-based artist has released six extraordinarily diverse and distinctive albums (plus 2014’s Everybody Glows: B-sides & Rarities); performed with such icons as Foo Fighters, Timbaland and The Mountain Goats; contributed to a variety of film and TV soundtracks, including Sean Penn’s Golden Globe-nominated Into The Wild; and toured the world as a headliner numerous times. In addition to her own solo work, Kaki sometimes performs accompanied by NYC-based string quartet ETHEL, which performed at OZ Arts Nashville last year. She also recently performed a Carnegie Hall premiere of a classical piece commissioned by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang.

“The guitar is a shape-shifter,” King says, “something that plays all types of music and really fills all kinds of roles. It’s not always the six-string guitar that we all know and love. I’ve been playing guitar for more than 30 years. It’s who I am and if anything, The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body has made me even more familiar with it.”

The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body premiered at Brooklyn’s BRIC House in in 2014, and has been touring extensively in 2015. She released an album version of the work in March 2015. Relix wrote of it, The Neck… is cinematic in scope, even without the optical component. Incorporating sweeping ambience and jagged, sonic mood swings, intricate fingerpicking and a string quartet, industrial racket and pastoral, close-miked lushness, there’s more than enough going on within to compensate for the absence of graphics.” The album prompted PopMatters to write, “King has defined herself not only as simply one of the best guitarists that the world may have ever come to know, but one of the most interestingly ingenious innovators of music at large.” Describing the live show, PopMatters continued, “The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body accentuates the guitar as a shape-shifter, gliding across genres such as jazz, shoegazing, Latin roots, and heavy alternative rock across about an hour’s worth of a spectacle unlike any other.”

About OZ Arts Nashville

As the newest 501(c)3 contemporary arts institution in the Midsouth Region, OZ Arts’ particular style of programming has begun to transform the cultural landscape of Nashville. Utilizing the venue’s flexibility, OZ Arts presents the work of leading artists from around the world, offering an intimate context for performing and visual art programs that challenge and inspire a diverse range of curious audiences.

OZ Arts also serves as a catalyst for local creativity through a program called TNT (Thursday Night Things). TNT is a quarterly series of unexpected collaborations with Nashville-based artists from varying creative disciplines. OZ Arts’ “blank slate” provides a platform onto which these artists can create, develop and present a one-time-only event that would traditionally not be seen in a visual art gallery or theatre.

OZ Arts is located in the former C.A.O. cigar warehouse owned by Nashville’s Ozgener family. Their generosity provided the seed money that breathed new life into the column-free, 10,000 square-foot space nestled amidst artfully landscaped grounds.

Since it opened in February 2014, OZ Arts Nashville “has fundamentally changed the creative landscape of Music City” (ArtsNash). Under the artistic leadership of Lauren Snelling, its first two-seasons have brought to the city luminaries such as Philip Glass and Tim Fain, Tim Robbins’ The Actors’ Gang, Peter Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Vijay Iyer, Laurie Anderson, Wayne McGregor’s company Random Dance, ETHEL, BANDALOOP, Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, SITI Company and Bang on a Can. These programs have consistently played to sold-out audiences and local and national acclaim.

http://www.ozartsnashville.org/

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