2022 Program
Bill Nace & Haley Fohr /
Lia Kohl & Macie Stewart
Tuesday: 8:30 PM February 22, 2022 - Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Philadelphia’s Bill Nace (Body/Head) and Chicago’s Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux) are two of the most dynamic and distinctive voices in experimental and rock music today. The former has carved out a sui generis strain of guitar that channels noise into a limitless array of possibilities, from pin-drop quietude to a tsunami roar. Working with producer Cooper Crain (Bitchin Bajas), he revealed new dimensions on his head-tripping 2020 album Both, masterfully layering disparate sound streams of noisy abstraction. A devoted collaborator, Nace has previously worked with Chris Corsano, Okkyung Lee, Steve Gunn, Samara Lubelski, Leila Bordreuil among many others. Haley Fohr is best-known for stunning art-pop project Circuit des Yeux in which her force-of-nature voice is meticulously situated within ever-shifting arrangements that collide post-Nico wanderlust with orchestral grandeur. Her acclaimed 2021 album _io featured majestic string arrangements recorded in piecemail fashion during the first year of the pandemic. On her own she remains committed to fearless experimentation, blending electronics with gripping vocal improvisations. This concert marks the duo’s first-ever performance.
//\\//\\
Lia Kohl and Macie Stewart are a Chicago-based duo creating freely improvised music that explores rich harmonies, timbres, and textures. Starting from the quartet of their two voices, cello, and violin, the duo’s varied sound centers curiosity and an uncanny receptivity to each other. They have recorded two albums, Pocket Full of Bees (2019) and Recipe for a Boiled Egg (2020), both on Astral Spirits. Downbeat magazine calls their music “more filling than a four course meal.”
Photos: Chelsea Hogue/Evan Jenkins/Maren Celest
Matchess / Jeff Kimmel & Ryan Packard
Wednesday: 8:30 PM February 23, 2022
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Sonescent (adj):
1. (of sound) showing advanced signs of aging
2. (of music) elderly, not functioning as it once did
3. describing the last minutes in the life of music
Sonescent will be released on February 25th as a stereo LP on Drag City. The album was conceived during a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation in Joshua Tree where Whitney Johnson perceived sound and music in the body, psyche, and beyond. Without access to pencil and paper in the moment, she later recollected, reconstructed, and transcribed the sonescent music that had passed in and out of thick waves of cognitive consonance and dissonance. A band comprised of Haley Fohr, Tim Kinsella, Brian J. Sulpizio, Rob Frye, and Kalina Malyszko performed these scores, and the resulting compositions are represented here tonight.
//\\//\\
Clarinetist Jeff Kimmel and percussionist Ryan Packard are long-time collaborators who have worked together in many settings, including Packard’s chamber piece For Lying Down and Breathing (released on the Amalgam label in 2020), numerous ad hoc improvisation groupings, as well as performances with experimental music ensemble a.pe.ri.od.ic.
Their 2021 release Contrast Shifting on the Dinzu Artefacts label documents their first meeting as a duo, with both players augmenting their instruments with synthesizers and electronics. The session dates from early 2020, when recording engineer Alex Inglizian invited Kimmel and Packard to perform for his recording techniques course at Northwestern University. Their shared history and camaraderie result in a set of improvisations that highlight the subtleties and extremes of their instruments, ranging from serene and atmospheric to pointillistic and playful.
Photos: Marzena Abrahamik/Julia Dratel/Erika Råberg
Ryan Packard’s appearance is made possible thanks to a generous contribution from Konstnärsnämden.
Hanna Hartman
Thursday: 8 PM February 24, 2022
William Eckhardt Research Center(5640 S. Ellis Avenue, Room 161)
Hanna Hartman is a Swedish composer, sound artist and performer living in Berlin. She has composed works for radio, electroacoustic music, ensembles, sound installations and given numerous performances all over the world. Her many awards and grants includes the Karl-Sczuka-Preis, the Phonurgia Nova Prize, a Villa Aurora grant and the Rosenberg Prize. During 2007 and 2008 she was Composer-in-Residence at the Swedish Radio and in 2019 at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
Hartman is a meticulous weaver of sound, and according to an informative Philip Clark feature in the Wire this in 2019 she’s been recording and amassing a huge catalog of hyper-specific recordings going back decades, and somehow she has mental access to them for something a new piece she’s working on might require. While it’s fascinating to learn where some of the sounds come from—in the Wire piece she describes rolling a ball in potato starch, noting that you need “exactly the right weight, and you must also have a lot of potato starch,” to say nothing of an excellent contact microphone—that’s hardly necessary to be knocked out by these worlds she creates. Obviously her processes relate to musique concrete, although she downplays any connections. This concert is her Chicago debut.
Program:
SOLO for amplified and moving objects
FRACTURE commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur
Hanna Hartman’s appearance in Chicago is presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society and in cooperation with Goethe Institut Chicago and STAGE (Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration) at the University of Chicago.
Photo: Göran Gnaudschun
Susan Alcorn / Jordan Dykstra
Friday: 8:30 PM February 25, 2022
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
One of the world’s premiere exponents of her instrument, Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics. Though known as for her solo work, she has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Chris Cutler, the London Improvisors Orchestra, the Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra, Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, Ingrid Laubrock and Leila Bourdreuil, Evan Parker, and Mary Halvorson among others. For this special solo performance Alcorn will play music by Astor Piazzolla and Olivier Messiaen, as well as her own compositions.
//\\//\\
In Better Shape Than You Found Me is a one-hour piece jointly composed by Jordan Dykstra and Koen Nutters in the year 2020. The two bring together their sounds and structures in very organic ways, merging into a single, intriguing sound world. Sparsely created minimal sounds from various instruments (piano, cello, free-reed, and percussion) and electronics intersect and move organically in a geometric pattern, linearly or ascendingly, while retaining a calmness and a sense of spatial expansion over the subtle presence of field recordings, occasionally hovering at the edge of harmonies or assimilating into silences.
This concert is the US premiere of the work, and will be performed by cellist Lia Kohl, percussionist Ryan Packard, pianist Jonathan Hannau, and Dykstra.
Photos: David Lobato/Gabe Long
Tomeka Reid, Sam Bardfeld, Curtis Stewart & Stephanie Griffin* / Krista Franklin, Ben LaMar Gay, Sam Scranton & Katherine Young
* Play the music of Julius Hemphill
Saturday: 8:30 PM February 26, 2022
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
In late 2020 New World Records released The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony, a stunning boxset of previously unissued music by the singular St. Louis reedist, composer, and improviser Julius Hemphill. Among the treasures was a recording of Mingus Gold, for which he created dazzling string quartet arrangements for three of Charles Mingus’ most beloved tunes. Chicago cellist Tomeka Reid has assembled a superb string quartet with violinists Sam Bardfeld and Curtis Stewart and violist Stephanie Griffin to perform that rarely heard piece—its Chicago premiere—along with a selection of other Hemphill transcriptions for string quartet.
//\\//\\
Krista Franklin, Ben LaMar Gay, Sam Scranton and Katherine Young—four artists who work between and across media, histories, genres, and practices—perform a set of improvised music. Composer and cornetist Ben and writer and visual artist Krista first worked together performing in response to a Folayemi Wilson’s 2019 Hyde Park Art Center solo exhibition Dark Matter: Celestial Objects as Messengers of Love in These Troubled Times. Sam and Katie play together in the duo Beautifulish and released their first album in 2020 on Shinkoyo. For the online interview platform Documented Dialogues in spring 2021, Sam and Katie invited Ben and Krista to join them in a free-wheeling conversation. The four jammed over Zoom about play, intensity, noise, early morning rituals, trust, and other things connected to music and collaborative arts. By the end of the hang, there was a feeling in the air and across the ether that something special had happened and that more would be fun. As Ben said at one point in the conversation, “We all create music without our instruments. You know, the music happens way before we touch our instruments.” In a way, that was the quartet’s first session. This is the group’s first public performance.
Photos: Cristina Marx (Reid)/Rogelio Bucareli (Griffin)/Roberto Cifarelli (Bardfeld)/Deidre Huckabay (Young)
Ensemble Dal Niente
Sunday: 8:30 PM February 27, 2022
Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.)
Tickets: $15
Ensemble Dal Niente closes the 2022 Frequency Festival with a program centered around Garden of Earthly Desire, Liza Lim’s sensual, labyrinthine chamber work for 11 musicians that made a name for the composer when it was first performed in 1989. The program opens with Murat Çolak’s hypnotic Nefes.Pas.Cira.Isi for piccolo, percussion, and sin wave, and closes with the brand-new musical branchings of Linda Catlin Smith’s chamber work New Vine.
Program:
Murat Çolak, Nefes.Pas.Cira.Isi (2015) for piccolo and percussion
Liza Lim, Garden of Earthly Desire (1989) for 11 musicians (flute, oboe, clarinet, percussion, mandolin, electric guitar, harp, violin, viola, cello, contrabass)
Linda Catlin Smith, New Vine (2021) for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, viola, cello, and contrabass
Photo: Aleksandr Karjaka