After another amazing series of intimate performances in Fall 2011, ESS presents a fresh series of six OE shows throughout the winter of 2012—most with some emphasis on innovative deployment of the human voice.
Performances begin at 8pm.
ADMISSION
$10/8 students/ESS members
01.29.12:
LYNN BOOK & SHAWN DECKER
Transmedia and vocal artist Lynn Book, in collaboration with electronic musician and sound artist Shawn Decker, will perform The Phaedra Escapes—a song-cycle that deploys Phaedra as a divining tool to denature the form by way of voluptuous frictions between release and containment, stasis and white hot freedom. Part history and part possibility, Phaedra is both a mythical figure and a contemporary sign of escape. The artists spring her from a Baroque opera where she migrated from Racine’s stage, having threaded through centuries of story, including conflicting fragments that Euripides wrote, lost, then wrote again in ancient Greece. Phaedra becomes the ideal escape body for our time, resonant with multiple histories and radiant with propositions for possible futures.
Lynn Book has a vibrant stream of transmedia arts practice that cuts across boundaries between performance art, theater, visual art, language, dance, and new music forms resulting in hybrid projects that explore self in the world through embodiment, cultural critique and radical imagination. For more than 25 years, her works have been seen in the U.S. and Europe, and heard internationally, including Roulette, the Kitchen, Bowery Poetry Club and the Knitting Factory in New York City; Hothouse, Experimental Sound Studio, Club Lower Links and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in the US, and in Europe at Emmetrop Festival in Bourges, France as well as Vienna, Berlin, Marseilles and recently Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art in Slovenia.
Lynn lived and worked in Chicago from the mid-80s to the mid 90s where she had the pleasure and privilege of working with many Chicago-based artists including Lou Mallozzi, Robert Metrick, Tatsu Aoki, Kristin Mariani, Michael Zerang, Terri Kapsalis, Sharon Couzin and many others. She currently lives in North Carolina where she develops progressive curriculum at Wake Forest University, and spends the summers, in Europe making performance, music and exhibition based projects and conducting intensive workshops at Transart Institute in Berlin where she is a faculty associate. The work she is developing with Shawn Decker is slated to have its full premiere in Italy in August, 2012 at the Asolo International Art/Film Festival.
Shawn Decker is a composer and artist who creates sound and electronic media installations and writes music for live performance, film, and video. His work has been frequently performed, seen, and heard in the US and Europe at a wide variety of venues. He frequently collaborates with other artists, including most recently Jan Erik-Andersson and Anne Wilson. Recent exhibitions of both solo and collaborative work have shown at venues such as: the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Pritzker Pavillion in Chicago’s Millenium Park, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the 2003 Biennial of Electronic Art in Australia, Art Basel Miami, the Klosterruine in Berlin, ISEA2002 in Nagoya, the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, CAM Houston , ISEA2000 Paris, the Waino Aalto museum in Turku, Finland and numerous others. Decker is a Professor in the Art and Technology and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
http://www.shawndecker.com
02.03.12:
THE CHICAGO BASS ENSEMBLE
Local upright outfit The Chicago Bass Ensemble will perform a program of compositions for four upright basses:
Russell, Ultra-Rondo
Jeff Greene, The Range of Their Vision
Douglas Johnson, Clevenjourney N71
Barry Guy, Anaklasis
Wittgraf, Autogenous Mining for double bass quartet and interactive electronics
Founded by Jacque Harper, The Chicago Bass Ensemble features Anton Hatwich, Julian Romane, and Dan Thatcher. They will be joined for this performance by collaborators Jeff Greene and Doug Johnson.
http://www.chicagobassensemble.com
02.25.12:
BILLY GOMBERG
BLOCK/GENETTI/YOUNG
Billy Gomberg was born in Chicago and lives and works in Brooklyn NY. His studio practice incorporates analog synthesis, digital treatments, acoustic recordings and custom programming that gives rise to electronic sound caught gazing at its own physicality, acoustics in love with their own abstraction. Formed of equal parts of futuristic electronics, exacting improvisation and sensual spaces, his CDs Comme (mOAR), Days (The Land Of) and Flyover Sound (Experimedia, a collaboration with Offthesky) have all been met with fascination and surprise. Flyover Sound received a nomination in the Experimentation/Research category of the 7th Qwartz Awards in Paris. Billy has exhibited or performed in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Providence, Paris, London, Lisbon, Graz, Zurich, Barcelona, Vancouver and elsewhere. August 2009 saw the successful west coast tour of Delicate Sen, the trio of Billy Gomberg, Anne Guthrie, and Richard Kamerman. A committed improvisor, he performs solo, with Anne Guthrie (as Fraufraulein), in trio w/Joshue Ott & Robert Dick, and in Charles Lindsay's "Trout Fishing In Space" project.
Olivia Block creates original sound compositions for concerts, site-specific multi-speaker installations, film, and performance. In a recent feature article in the April 2011 issue of The Wire magazine, Julian Cowley describes Block’s compositions as “finely nuanced textures of environmental material and occasional surges of sonic power blended with an elegant instrumental architecture.” Her compositions often include field recordings, scored segments for chamber instruments, and electronic textures. Additionally, she performs her own partially improvised compositions for inside piano and electronics. She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan for nearly 20 years. Her works have premiered at La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music among many other festivals. Her release Mobius Fuse (Sedimental, 2001) was voted one of the best albums of the decade by Pitchfork. Her 2008 DVD release with film artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Untitled (SOS editions), was included in the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and theExpanded Cinema symposium at the Tate Modern in London.
Carol Genetti is a vocalist, composer and installatiion artist. Her work is focused on the interplay between the voice as an expressive musical instrument and its extension into the sound-making realm. She has studied a variety of techniques including Western singing, Hindustani classical voice and Bulgarian folk music. Through these studies and her own explorations, she has developed a personal yet universal palette that is an abstraction of "extended" voice sounds — breaths, overtones, and disconnected textual bits, squeaks, growls, non-verbal tones – sounds that evoke unconscious emotions and human physicality. Genetti has toured throughout the US, Canada, France and Germany and has performed numerous live concerts as an improvisational vocalist. She has collaborated with a large number of like-minded artists in both ad hoc groupings and long-standing partnerships, including her duos with electroacoustic improvisor Eric Leonardson; bassist Tatsu Aoki; the trio Nom Tom with saxophonist Jack Wright and percussionist Jon Mueller; collaborations with composer Adam Sonderberg; and multi-disciplinary performances with dancer Asimina Chremos. Labels that have published her recorded work include Balance Point Acoustics, Crouton, Dead CEO, Last Visible Dog, Recorded and Spring Garden Music.
Katherine Young creates acoustic and electro-acoustic music that uses curious timbres, expressive noises, and kinetic structures to explore suspended time, genre fiction, the communication of ensemble energies, and the tension between the familiar and the strange. Recent projects include a new work for TimeTable percussion with Issue Project Room’s Emerging Artists Commission, composing for dance, and a commission for the String Orchestra of Brooklyn. Katherine has documented her work on numerous recordings, including a 2009 solo bassoon release, which garnered praise in The Wire (“Bassoon colossus”) and Downbeat (“seriously bold leaps for the bassoon”). Katherine’s solo project employs pedals and amplification, and she leads the quartet Pretty Monsters featuring bassoon, violin, electric guitar, and drums. As an improviser, Katherine has toured with Anthony Braxton and recorded with Hans Joachim Irmler from Faust and F.M. Einheit from Einsturzende Neubauten. Active projects also include: chamber music collective Till by Turning, the duo Architeuthis Walks on Land, and chamber-pop quartet the Fancy.
03.11.12:
JAAP BLONK
In addition to his performance, Jaap Blonk will lead a workshop in voice and movement in collaboration with Chicago dancer/choreographer Jonathan Meyer.
Jaap Blonk is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. As a vocalist, he is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. He has performed in many European countries, as well as in the U.S. and Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa and Latin America. With the use of live electronics the scope and range of his concerts has acquired a considerable extension. Besides working as a soloist, he collaborated with many musicians and ensembles in the field of contemporary and improvised music, such as Maja Ratkje, Mats Gustafsson, Nicolas Collins, Joan La Barbara, The Ex, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble and the Ebony Band. He has premiered several compositions by the German composer Carola Bauckholt, including a piece for voice and orchestra. He was the founder and leader of the long-standing bands Splinks (modern jazz, 1983-1999) and BRAAXTAAL (avant-rock, 1987-2005). He also has his own record label, Kontrans, featuring a total of 15 releases so far. Other Blonk recordings have appeared on Staalplaat, Basta and VICTO.
03.24.12:
DHALGREN
ESS "house band" Dhalgren's appearance at last season's OE series was thwarted by an ill-timed power outage, so we've asked them to give it another go this season.
Taking their name from Samuel R. Delaney's apocalyptic sci-fi classic, Sam Wagster (Fruit Bats, The Singleman Affair) and Dan Mohr (Dan Mohr Trio, DRMWPN, et. al.) formed Dhalgren in 2010 as an outlet to explore ambient improvisation. In 2011, they expanded their personnel, adding Adam Vida (Singer, US Maple) and Alex Inglizian (El is a Sound of Joy). The new four-piece's sound is rich and textured, with all four members contributing to a complex base of synth drone and processed vocals, under which a driving rhythm section occasionally appears to propel the music from dense ambience to ecstatic motorik synth rock.
04.07.11:
CHARLOTTE HUG
Swiss vocalist/violist Charlotte Hug will perform Slipway to Galaxies, a performance influenced by long stays in Ireland, and experiments in sleep research. Hug submitted herself and her creative activity to forty hours of sleep-deprivation in the sleep laboratory at Zurich University. She drew, played and sang uninterruptedly for forty whole hours. She was not concerned solely with remaining awake for forty hours; rather, she wanted to leave the comfort zone that sleep represents, and thus artistically penetrate the blind spot of night. The artist’s experiment on herself in the sleep laboratory was extended by a further experience with another encounter with extreme temporal and physical duress: Hug allowed herself to be immersed in water for 5 hours in a dockyard near Cork in Southern Ireland, as she stood in the Atlantic playing the violin and singing, and the waters rose up to her neck. Her playing became at once almost euphorically light and very powerful. Slipway to Galaxies is inspired and informed by sleeplessness, oscillating between visual experience and unfettered sounds, between the separation and collision of logic and emotion.
Violist, vocalist, composer and artist Charlotte Hug lives in Zurich and on the road. She seeks to develop instrumental techniques to their fullest possible extent, which includes the “soft bow technique”, by means of which she can play up to eight voices on her instrument. She plays a viola made by J.G. Thir in 1763. She also specializes in combining the sounds of viola and voice. What has resulted is an unmistakable and distinct tonal language. Hug is known for her solo performances in distinctive locations such as the ice tunnels of the Rhône glacier, the half demolished bunker in Berlin Humboldthain, the House of Detention, a 250 year old former prison in Farringdon in London, the hot healing sulphur springs beneath the former luxury hotel of Verenahof in Baden, Switzerland or the dockyard in Coph on the Irish Atlantic coast. In the visual arena, as well as in the musical context, her sound-drawings “Son-Icons” have found international recognition. Hug also composes with graphic musical notation. These have resulted in spatial and video scores range of works from solo to orchestra pieces. Solo exhibitions at the Cité internationale des Arts Paris, at the Kunstkeller Bern, Swissnex San Francisco, the Sirius Arts Centre Cobh Cork Ireland and the Musuem of Art Luzern.
http://charlottehug.ch
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