FLOWN at Frieze

FLOWN @ Naama Tsabar's "Without" / Frieze Projects / curated by Mindy Abovitz / Tom Tom Magazine

Randall's Island

May 2014

Mother's Day

This coming Sunday is Mother's Day. It is a day that marks exactly one year since my mother suffered the hemorrhagic stroke that was the beginning of the end of her life, although we didn't know that then.

This time last May my band FLOWN was working hard on the release of our self-titled 7", a beautiful document of a project that has been wrought out of our collective experience with loss, pain, love, and the need for catharsis and transformation through songcraft, ritual and HEAVY FUCKING METAL. 

We chose Hecate, the triple goddess of the crossroads and the liminal spaces between life and death, as the face we turned to the world on the cover of our record. 

Hecate stood watch this year as I sat by my mother's side in the hospital, communed with her spirit in the kitchen, wept and sang for her with my feet in the mud of a North Carolina summer. Hecate stood watch as my bandmates sang for my mother at her funeral, and Hecate stood watch as my partner's mother left this world just a month after my mother died.

Hecate also stands watch as my guitar player, muse and dear friend Margot carries and prepares to birth her first child, who is due to arrive in this world sometime next week. Hecate stands watch as my drummer, birthday twin, muse and best friend Kate carries and prepares to birth her first child, who is due to meet this world this fall. 

This Mother's Day, FLOWN will be performing as a part of Naama Tsabar's piece Without at the Frieze Art Fair on Randall's Island, an architectural intervention turned music festival curated by Mindy Abovitz and Tom Tom Magazine. Tsabar has removed the floor from a booth inside the fair and used it to create an outdoor stage that will feature a mini-music festival comprised of underground bands with female percussionists, thus activating the space outside the confines of the fair tent and leaving an empty space inside. 

FLOWN offers our performance on this stage as a testament to the presence of the goddess at these intersecting crossroads of birth and death, presence and absence, joy and sorrow, grief and love. AKA my mom died a year ago and Margot might go into labor on stage. 

I am so grateful that I get to spend this day playing music outdoors with my favorite people. I mourn for my mother and I celebrate my bandmates' transition into motherhood in one great swell of the heart. Its gonna be loud. 

You are cordially invited to come and bear witness. 

Admission to the music festival is free and open to the public. The art fair requires admission fees. FLOWN takes the stage on Sunday May 11th at 1pm. 

Click here for directions.

Click here for a complete line-up and list of set times.

Click here for information about Frieze Art Fair and admission fees.

Click here to read some recent press about FLOWN.

Click here to listen to our record.

Kate Ryan (FLOWN) Interview on Tom Tom TV

June 2013

Tom Tom Magazine Lady Drummer Takeover @PS1

The Oral History of Female Drummers

A live drum performance spread throughout MoMA PS1’s floors engaging in a call and response with one another. The beats are passed along from drummer to drummer via a beatboxer who visits each woman and re-interprets her respective beat. The performers play on painted drum heads with sticks by the artist Itta. With each strike on the drum head they are chipping away at their own histories. 

Performers include Tom Tom Magazine founder/editor Mindy Abovitz, and musicians Kristin Mueller (of The Caulfield Sisters, Lucinda Black Bear, Christy & Emily) and Sean Desiree (of Bell's Roar), Chloe Saavedra (Chaos Chaos, Smoosh), and award winning beatboxer Ashley "Say Wut?!" Moyer.

I.U.D. performance to follow at 4 pm.

Drummers and Locations:

The Pit: Mindy Abovitz
Boiler Room: Kate Ryan (FLOWN)
Lobby: Kristin Mueller
Stairway E: Chloe Saavedra
Stairway B: Linnea Lamon / Sean Desiree
Conference Room across from the Turrell Room: Kiran Gandhi

* Beatboxer Ashely "Say Wut?!" Moyer will be traveling throughout the piece

January 2013