Bandcamp Daily describes Fure as pushing past the limits of sound. “While it may seem impossible to bring a story to life without words, in [Fure’s] music, it’s the sounds that are alive, and they speak as much as words do, or perhaps even more.” Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s full-bodied sonic architectures work on the senses in startling ways.
ANIMAL: A Listening Gym offers, in the artist’s words, “an underworld of sound.” Fure added, “The project features full-body sonic machines that function like a sensory circuit workout: you press, you lift, you lean, you lie, you exercise your animal capacity to sense.” Fure performs live on a custom gym rig at designated showtimes throughout the run, and a team of listeners works the circuit with the crowd in the wild acoustics of The Dome, the Schwarzman Center’s most intimate performance space.
“In her work, Ash Fure invites audiences to bring their minds and bodies fully into the space. Like a HIIT workout for your senses, ANIMAL triggers the listener’s imagination creating an out-of-the-ordinary sonic and somatic experience,” said Jennifer Harrison Newman, associate artistic director. “By combining sculpture, light and sound, Ash’s listening gym brings sound to a dimension that reshapes our surroundings and has people exercising their ears and minds.”
Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College and co-artistic-directs The Industry. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music, two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant-for-Artists, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, a Busoni Prize, a Stuttgart Prize, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.
Fure’s Schwarzman Center engagement is part of Yale alum Bryce Dessner’s multi-year residency as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence in Music at Yale Schwarzman Center, in collaboration with extraordinary musicians, artists, thinkers, and doers at and beyond Yale, and produced in partnership with ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann.
