ARCHIVE

On this month's edition of "Specific Objects: Talks on Art in the Catskills," host Miriam Atkin speaks with musician/writer Erica Dawn Lyle. We discuss her new album, On Fire, in which she transforms and deforms Van Halen's classic live opener and "tunes her antenna deeply to The Moment, channeling abandon and grief in equal measure." Lyle also gives a reading of recent poems that explore the body as a site of personal and collective experimentation-as-resistance.

Erica Dawn Lyle is a writer, curator, experimental musician, and cultural instigator who lives in New York City and Florida. The former touring guitar player for Bikini Kill, as a solo performer, Lyle has released musical collaborations with Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Bernadette Mayer, Kathleen Hanna, Brontez Purcell, and many more, and she performs in the improv free jazz activist duo, MYKAWARA, with drummer, Marshall Trammell. Lyle is the author of Streetopia(Booklyn, 2015) and On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City (Soft Skull, 2008) and has written for Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and NPR's This American Life. Her most recent book is The Knight of Cups (Belladonna, 2023). 

"Specific Objects" is a monthly freeform discussion hosted by Miriam Atkin that invites artists from a variety of disciplines to describe, ponder, interrogate, interpret, and celebrate their current projects. The focus is on guests who live and work in the Hudson Valley/Catskills region, though people will occasionally visit from farther afield. Tune in to learn what artists in your neighborhood are thinking and making right now.

Miriam Atkin is a Catskills-based writer whose work concerns the possibilities of poetry as a medium in conversation with avant-garde film, music, and dance. She is cofounder of Pinsapo, an international publishing collective, and teaches writing around the Hudson Valley region at Bard College and the Otisville Correctional Facility.

Intro music: "Sing Out" by Joanna Mattrey