Oren Ambarchi / crys cole
February 24 - 8:30 PM - Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Tickets: $17 advance/$20 door
Over the course of two decades the music of composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi has demonstrated an inexorable sense of development and exploration. The Australian native has enhanced his sublime guitar playing with electronics and signal processing, applying his sound-making to countless, evolving practices, drawing upon traditional song-form, minimalism, free improvisation, and abstract composition in ever-shifting combinations and contexts. Ambarchi, who played the music of Alvin Lucier as a member of the Ever Present Orchestra on a Frequency Series concert in 2017, will play solo, mixing guitar and electronics.
crys cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, performance and sound installation. Generating subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials, she creates texturally nuanced works that continuously retune the ear. She has ongoing collaborations with Oren Ambarchi (AU) and with James Rushford (AU) (under the name Ora Clementi, which performed a Frequency Series concert in 2015), and tonight she will perform a new solo work.
Jacob Wick with
Phil Sudderberg
February 25 - 6:30 PM - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (220 E. Chicago Ave.)
A Chicago native based in Mexico City, Jacob Wick is an improviser, writer, and artist. His work is dedicated to and informed by queer feelings and queer politics. “Playing until he physically can’t, playing outside the boundaries of the trumpet’s conventional voice, and de-naturalizing listening encounters, are all of cornerstones of Wick’s work,” says the Wire. Wick will perform solo music from his acclaimed 2019 recording Feels and play in a duo with Chicago drummer Phil Sudderberg.
Julia Eckhardt and Nate Wooley play Éliane Radigue
February 26 - 8 PM - Bond Chapel, University of Chicago (1025 E. 58th St.)
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sounding arts and at the intersection of composed and improvised music. As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated extensively with composer Eliane Radigue, and worked with artists such as Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Jennifer Walshe, Rhodri Davies, Taku Sugimoto, Manfred Werder, Angharad Davies, and Lucio Capece, among others. She has been lecturing about topics such as sound, gender and public space, and is (co-)author of The Second Sound, conversation on gender and music, Grounds for Possible Music, The Middle Matter – sound as interstice, and Éliane Radigue – Intermediary Spaces/Espaces intermédiaires. In her Chicago premiere she will perform Occam IV, a piece composed for by Radigue.
New York trumpeter Nate Wooley moves easily and nonchalantly between the worlds of contemporary classical, jazz, noise, and electronic music as an interpreter, improviser, and composer. He leads several of his own projects including Battle Pieces, Columbia Icefield, and Seven Storey Mountain, while maintaining a rigorous solo practice and collaborating with a wide array of artists including Ken Vandermark, Ashley Fure, Anthony Braxton, Yoshi Wada, Matthew Shipp, and Annea Lockwood (whose work he performs on Friday night’s portrait concert at Constellation). He played the music of Radigue with clarinetist Carol Robinson on a Frequency Series concert in 2014, and tonight he’ll play the composer’s Occam X.
Julia Eckhardt’s appearance in Chicago is presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society and in cooperation with Goethe Institut Chicago, and is made possible in part by the generous support of the Flemish Government.
Charles Curtis plays
Éliane Radigue
February 27- 7 PM - Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago (111 S. Michigan Ave.)
Tickets: $10/$5 for AIC members
Called by ArtForum "one of the great cellists" as well as "spellbinding and minimal," Charles Curtis has woven a unique career through the worlds of classical performance and musical experimentation. For more than twenty years Curtis has been closely associated with the legendary avant garde composer La Monte Young. As soloist and as director of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music String Ensemble, Curtis has participated in more performances and premieres of Young's music than any other musician. French composer Éliane Radigue created her very first work for a purely acoustic instrument for Curtis, the hour-long solo "Naldjorlak I," for which he will give its Chicago premiere this evening.
Annea Lockwood portrait concert with a.pe.ri.od.ic and Nate Wooley
February 28, 8:30 PM, Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Tickets: $15
Composer Annea Lockwood has been a pioneer in the world of sound art for more than five decades. Early in her career the New Zealand native explored the sonic possibilities of glass, initiating a life-long fascination with new timbres and sound sources. Her notorious Piano Transplants series created events in which non-functioning pianos were either set ablaze, submerged in water, covered in sand, or eventually buried in an English garden. She’s also created a series of studies of rivers and their attendant sound worlds, mostly recently with Sound Map of the Danube, which will be presented as an installation at Experimental Sound Studio. This evening Chicago ensemble a.pe.ri.od.ic will perform the first-ever survey of her works in Chicago, and New York trumpeter Nate Wooley will play “Becoming Air,” a work she created specifically for him.
Annea Lockwood’s appearance is made possible through a partnership with the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Annea Lockwood:
Sound Map of the Danube
sound installation
February 29 - 2 PM - Experimental Sound Studio (5925 N. Ravenswood Ave.)
Join us for the opening reception of composer Annea Lockwood’s sound installation A Sound Map of the Danube, an aural tracing of the Danube, interleaved with the memories and reflections of its people. Lockwood will be in discussion with trumpeter Nate Wooley. The installation runs through March 29.
Annea Lockwood’s appearance is made possible through a partnership with the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Keith Fullerton Whitman /
John McCowen
February 29 - 8:30 PM - Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Tickets: $15
Brooklyn-based electronic music artist Keith Fullerton Whitman gives his first Chicago performance in seven years, performing a new iteration of his Redactions series. The Redactions (2015-) constitute an ongoing exploration surrounding the extraction of "peaks," or "transients" from geographically & thematically relevant audio materials given a particular realization or performance; the source materials utilized are invariably derived from a conceptual layer wrapped around the geography or setting of the eventual performance, blurring the line between what is inherently acoustic and/or electronic. In its essence it is a way to improvise within the rigidity of seemingly fixed audio signals. It is exclusively a live-performance work, performed in stereo & 4-channel quad arrays & as of yet remains undocumented by a tangible commercial recording.
John McCowen is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer. His work focuses on extending the possibilities of the clarinet family. John embraces long-form drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensions within - treating the clarinet as an acoustic synthesizer. In his own words he creates “polyphonic drones emitting from a single length of tube.”
Ganavya Doraiswamy & Rajna Swaminathan
March 1 - 2 PM - Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.)
Free
In this duo project, vocalist Ganavya Doraiswamy and percussionist Rajna Swaminathan interweave stories, prayer, and rhythm to create an enveloping, healing soundscape. Drawing on various threads of Indian music and the improvisational textures of creative music, they present a unique meditation on the alchemies of social and spiritual realms.
Ganavya Doraiswamy is a critically acclaimed vocalist, scholar, and composer who has quickly amassed an incredible breadth of contemporary works. She has been featured on various projects, notably on the Quincy Jones produced Tocororo, which hit #1 on jazz charts. Hailed as "extraordinary" (DownBeat) and "most enchanting" (NPR), Ganavya's last album, Aikyam: Onnu was described in The New York Times as “majestic . . . a thick ephemera, like smoke as dark as ink, just coming off the fire.” Rajna Swaminathan is an acclaimed mrudangam artist, composer, and scholar. In her music and research, she explores the undercurrents of rhythmic experience and emergent textures in collective improvisation. Her debut album with her ensemble RAJAS, titled Of Agency and Abstraction (Biophilia, 2019), has been described as “music of gravity and rigor… yet its overall effect is accessible and uplifting” (Wall Street Journal).
Katinka Kleijn /
Julian Otis
March 1, 2020 - 8:30PM - Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Tickets: $15
Hailed as “Chicago’s first lady of the cello” by Timeout Chicago Magazine, Dutch cellist Katinka Kleijn defies today’s traditional definition of a cellist, transitioning comfortably through the styles of classical, experimental, contemporary, improvisatory, folk and progressive rock, as well as across the traditional fields of solo, chamber and orchestral performance. A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble, she’s recently formed dynamic new collaborations with guitarist Bill MacKay and fellow cellist Lia Kohl. Tonight Kleijn premieres new work by Nathan Davis and Aliya Ultan, among others.
Julian Terrell Otis is a genre defying musician dedicated to the advancement of Black Music in America. The utilization of the operatic voice brings new perspective to the creative music, jazz, commercial, and contemporary classical worlds. Otis performed Julius Eastman’s “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc” on the 2018 Frequency Festival. Tonight he premieres Anthony R. Green’s “Empathy I: Diamond Reynolds,” which he calls “an opportunity to process the inner emotional life of Reynolds’ witness to the death of her boyfriend Philando Castille.”