‘ITSOFOMO’ plays Youngstown before European dates
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Ben Neill and Don Yallech performed "ITSOFOMO" at some of the most prestigious museums and arts festivals in the world over the last 37 years.
Before taking it to London and Paris later this year, they will perform it in Youngstown, where they got their musical starts.
Genesis of "ITSOFOMO"
"ITSOFOMO" stands for "In the Shadow of Forward Motion," and it's a multimedia collaborative work between Neill, who studied at Dana School of Music, and artist David Wojnarowicz. Neill moved to New York City in 1983 to attend Manhattan School of Music. Yallech, a Struthers native and fellow Dana student, followed soon after. Neill's interest in visual arts, fostered at Youngstown State University, continued in New York, and Wojnarowicz was one of the first artists who fascinated him.
"His work just really grabbed me," Neill said. "At that time, I was just really starting to develop my Mutantrumpet (an electro-acoustic horn instrument) and my compositional work, and I felt like his his paintings really were almost a visualization of what I was hoping to do in my music, and I was very intrigued and and just really inspired by his work."
When Neill signed a record deal with a German label, he approached Wojnarowicz to create the cover art for the album, which featured Yallech on percussion.
"I didn’t realize that he (Wojnarowicz) had also been making some films," Neill said. "I went and saw some of his films in this downtown New York film festival and found that we had a lot of common interests and started talking about doing a collaboration."
The initial idea was based on acceleration, how technology was speeding up culture and all aspects of life. Neill's score was accompanied by four video monitors of imagery from Wojnarowicz. But it also was created as the AIDS crisis gained greater prominence nationwide. Wojnarowicz lost one former partner and mentor to the disease and later was diagnosed with AIDS himself, and the spoken word elements in particular introduce elements of politics, sexuality and mortality beyond the initial concept.
"The text elements were really the last thing that we added," Neill said.
Neill wrote the percussion parts in collaboration with Yallech, and unlike many multimedia works of the era, the soundtrack of "ITSOFOMO" had a detailed score.
"It's pretty much 90 percent through-composed," Yallech said. "There's a little improvisation in it, but very little."
It debuted at The Kitchen in New York City in 1989. "ITSOFOMO" was performed eight or nine times live -- usually with all three of them but a couple of times with just Neill and Wojnarowicz -- and it was recorded for an Italian label before Wojnarowicz died from AIDS complications in 1992.
Without Wojnarowicz
Both Neill and Yallech assumed Wojnarowicz's death meant the end of "ITSOFOMO," but they were invited to perform it for a couple of memorial events following his death. As Wojnarowicz's reputation and importance as an artist has endured, museums started mounting retrospectives of his work, and Neill and Yallech have been invited to perform "ITSOFOMO" in conjunction with those exhibitions.
Both musicians have busy careers beyond this piece. Yallech joined the Psychedelic Furs around the time "ITSOFOMO" debuted and was recording and touring with that band. He later worked with Furs' frontman Richard Butler in the band Love Spit Love, and stayed busy in New York as a drummer for Off-Broadway productions and a sub in the pit orchestras for Broadway musicals.
"I’m a musician who freelances," Yallech said. "I’m pretty much whore in that regard. I don’t really have a preference."
In addition to inventing the Mutantrumpet, Neill is a composer, educator and author who has performed and/or collaborated with such artists as John Cage, John Cale, Pauline Oliveros, Rhys Chatham, DJ Spooky and Mimi Goese. He also served as music curator at The Kitchen, where ITSOFOMO debuted, from 1992 to 1998.
Neill and Yallech haven't sought out "ITSOFOMO" performances, but they've brought it back when requested, using Wojnarowicz's recorded spoken word track from the album.
Since its debut, "ITSOFOMO" has been performed at Walker Art Center, San Francisco Art Institute, Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Kunsthalle Vienna, Whitney Museum and Bang on a Can Festival in New York City, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
"ITSOFOMO" in Youngstown
Its next appearance will be at Cedars West End at 8 p.m. Nov. 13.
Part of the reason is practical. Neill and Yallech were invited to bring "ITSOFOMO" to the London Contemporary Music Festival on Dec. 3. A second performance was arranged in Paris. Yallech will be rushing back immediately after those shows to lead the Easy Street Little Big Band for Easy Street Productions' annual holiday show, Miracle on Easy Street, at Powers Auditorium.
When it was performed at the Whitney in 2018, Yallech went to New York and they used a theater at Ramapo College, where Neill was teaching, to rehearse. That option wasn't available this time.
"To rent the gear and a rehearsal space in Manhattan was going to cost like $2,500 a day, easy," Yallech said, so he invited Neill to come to Youngstown to rehearse.
Yallech moved back to Struthers in 2004. For Neill it will be his first time back in the Mahoning Valley since the late '80s. He grew up in North Carolina, but one of the teachers at the arts school where he studied was a YSU grad, and he encouraged Neill to at least audition for esteemed Dana professor Esotto Pellegrini. He liked Pellegrini and he liked the idea of moving to Youngstown instead of a larger city, so he enrolled at YSU.
"I’m really looking forward to coming back," Neill said. "I feel bad that I haven’t been back there for so long, because my time there was really formative. I was only there for six years, which doesn’t sound like very long, but they were extremely important."
Playing at Cedars also is important. Neill's and Yallech's first band together was a group called The B-Minors. The original Cedars Lounge owned by Tommy Simpson hosted the occasional jazz night in its early days, but The B-Minors were the first indie, alternative band playing its own material to perform at Cedars in 1980, and it soon became the hub for like-minded musicians who wanted to play originals rather than perform in a cover band.
Yallech said they connected with Simpson through Coy Cornelius, who was an art professor at YSU.
"We were more like a new wave band, but we brought in The 8 Balls and we brought in The Sonics that may have been a little more punk oriented," Yallech said. "We were trying to find a venue to play original music, and Tommy allowed us that."
Cedars relocated to 706 Steel St. and changed its name to Cedars West End after its downtown building was sold in 2012.
Neill said he is looking forward to playing at a venue that has ties to the club that was so important to them 45 years ago.
"I really thank Don for initiating all that, and I'm really grateful that the owners were open to this," Neill said. "It's very exciting for me."
WHAT: Ben Neill and Don Yallech performing "ITSOFOMO"
WHEN: 8 p.m. Nov. 13
WHERE: Cedars West End, 706 Steel St., Youngstown
HOW MUCH: $10 at the door