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Winter/Spring 2013
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HONG CHULKI & CHOI JOONYONG
SAT FEB 9 8pm
Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Admission FREE; RSVP here.
Lampo and the Graham Foundation are very pleased to welcome Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyoung, two leading figures from Seoul's emerging experimental music community, as they make their Chicago debut.
And if global sameness has you down, this might be your remedy. Hong and Choi are part of a South Korean scene recognized for its unique style and creative approach, distinct from strategies in Japan, Europe and the U.S. Their noise music is less about taking non-musical amplified and synthesized sounds and organizing them into musical forms. Instead, they're fascinated by non-musical practices, where the sonic results may be nearly inaudible or very loud, acoustic or electronic, and, they say, "barely musical."
In concert, they'll combine their individual interests: Hong's pursuit of continuity between acoustic and amplified noise, using turntables with and without cartridge pick-ups, making sound from the friction between mute and empty surfaces, and Choi's roving performance, where he pushes an amplifier in and around the audience as if he were a noise vendor.
Hong Chulki (b. 1976, Seoul, South Korea) is a noise / improvising musician known for his cartridge-less turntable, and as the founding member of Astronoise, Korea's first live noise act (with Choi Joonyong). He has focused on free improvisation since the early 2000s, collaborating with musicians including Ryu Hankil, Jin Sangtae, Joe Foster, Kevin Parks, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M., Jason Kahn, Takahiro Kawaguchi, Nick Hoffman, Robbie Avenaim and Zbigniew Karkowski. Festival appearances include All Ears, Against, Kitakyushu Biennale and NETMAGE 10, and he has been a musician in residence at Cafe Oto and STEIM. Hong has composed pieces for several Korean experimental films, especially, Goksa (Kim Gok / Kim Sun). He also has been a long-time collaborator in the audio-visual performance project Expanded Celluloid Extended Phonograph, with the Korean film artist Lee Hangjun, who works in 16mm multi-projection performance. Hong's recordings both in solo and collaborative format have been released on his own label, Balloon & Needle, co-founded and co-run with Choi, and by Manual, Celadon, Pilgrim Talk, Hanson Records and Audition Records.
Choi Joonyong (b. 1977, Seoul, South Korea) started Astronoise with Hong Chulki in 1997, and has been playing noise / experimental / improvised music since. Primarily using playback devices such as CD-player, MP3-player, tape player, VCR, or loud-speaker, Choi works with sounds from the mechanisms, exposing the innate qualities of the players themselves. He has released many albums, including five solo albums made with the malfunction of a CD-player. He is interested in control and failure of playing through improvisation and composition. Choi's label, Balloon & Needle, has released experimental music from Korea since 2000. His latest release, Danthrax features his unique approach to dance music.
Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; organized in cooperation with CEAIT (Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology) at CalArts, the Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Sound.
VALERIO TRICOLI
SAT MAR 30 8pm
Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Admission FREE; RSVP here.
Valerio Tricoli offers a special program for Lampo to mark the 100th anniversary of Luigi Russolo's Futurist manifesto, "The Art of Noises" (March 1913), one of the most influential texts in 20th century music. For the first time, the idea of noise-sound becomes part of musical discourse, creating the conditions for a radical advancement in sonic art, indeed anticipating and informing the whole experience of musique concrète, electronic music, and of American experimental composers such as John Cage.
In the manifesto, Russolo argues that the current musical avant-garde, even though seeking harmonic and timbre complexity through dissonance, fails in its task of renewing musical language. Orchestras are "hospitals for anemic sounds," he writes, capable only of limited range of tones, or "a repugnant mixture… of monotonous sensations."
Russolo lays the foundation of a new music, based on what he calls Futurist noise-sound. All sounds of life, whether natural or derived from man-made devices and machines, should be incorporated into music. He also strongly encourages the development and design of new instruments capable of producing new kinds of noises, suitable to the mise en etre of the now expanded acoustic imagination of the composer. Russolo himself, some months after the publication of the manifesto, would present his own Intonarumori (Noisetuners).
Tonight's concert program will be divided in two parts:
"An Homage to Luigi Russolo," a live electro-acoustic improvisation for electronic devices, self-built instruments, found sounds and voice. This structured improvisation will deal with all the sonic practices and possibilities suggested by Russolo in "The Art of Noises." The work is a tuned noise mix that includes references to F. T. Marinetti's concrete poem "La Battaglia Di Adrianopoli," which was sent by the author to Russolo only a few months before the conception of "The Art of Noises" and indeed represents a major influence on Russolo's revolutionary ideas. Later this poem was included in Marinetti's book, "Zang Tumb Tumb." Tricoli's performance will aim at setting the audience in that Futurist no man's land, where music hovers between the "brutal recall to real life" and the infinite realm of imagination.
"La Solidità Della Nebbia," a multi-channel diffusion of the tape composition. Inspired by the painting of the same name (Luigi Russolo, 1912) and composed for this occasion, this 4-channel, 30-minute tape composition will emphasize Russolo's generally unacknowledged interest in the occult, and how his aesthetics of noise were intended to "boost practitioners and listeners into higher states of spiritual consciousness" (Luciano Chessa, "Luigi Russolo, Futurist," University of California Press, 2012). The piece uses heavily processed samples of Intonarumori, which Tricoli manipulated with tape recorders, filters and reverb, as well as imitations or approximations of Intonarumori sounds, created by Tricoli with self-built long string instruments, horns, objects and musique concrète sound design techniques. The opening ten minutes of the work are based directly on the only existing Russolo's score -- the first seven bars of "Risveglio di una Città." The rest of the score was lost during World War II.
Valerio Tricoli (b. 1977, Palermo, Italy) is a Berlin-based composer, improviser, sound installation artist, producer, sound engineer and curator bridging musique concrète and conceptual forms of sound with a radical interest in how reality, virtuality and memory relate to each other during the acoustic event. He mostly uses analogue electronic devices (reel-to-reel tape recorders, synthesizers, microphones, light effects, ultrasonic speakers). The structure of the set-up is ever-changing however, seeking multiple relations between the performers, the device and the space in which the event takes place. He is one of the founders of 3/4HadBeenEliminated and the Bowindo label / collective. More recently Tricoli presented a new interpretation of the seminal 1952 John Cage electro-acoustic tape piece "Williams Mix" with Werner Dafeldecker, which premiered at Maerz Musik, Berlin in 2012. He is at work on two compositions for piano and electronic sounds (with Anthony Pateras) and on a concrete music cycle inspired by the Book of Qohelet.
Valerio Tricoli made his U.S. debut at Lampo in March 2008, when he performed, "Take Thy Horoscope and Walk," a multi-sensorial set of live concrete music in quad sound with strobe lights.
Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; made possible with generous support from the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago.
TAKEHISA KOSUGI
SAT APR 20 8pm
Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Admission FREE: RSVP here
In this very special solo performance, Takehisa Kosugi performs several compositions for multi-dimensional live electronic music -- most works originally commissioned for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Tonight he will revise his material for quad sound, presenting shortened versions, using homemade audio generators, ready-made sound processors and light/sound interactive materials. The program includes "Cycles" (1981), "Streams" (1991), "Op Music," (2001), "Music for Nearly 90, Part-A" (2009) and "Octet" (2011).
Takehisa Kosugi (b. 1938, Tokyo, Japan) is a composer for mixed-media music, and an early member of Fluxus. In 1960, he co-founded Group-Ongaku ("music group"), with Yasunao Tone, Mieko Shiomi and others, the first collective improvisation group in Tokyo. And by the early 60s, Fluxus was performing his event pieces in Europe and the U.S. Kosugi stayed in New York from '65-'67, creating new works and collaborating with Nam June Paik and other Fluxus members. In 1969 he co-founded the Taj Mahal Travellers, an itinerant septet for mixed-media improvisation that toured England, Europe and the Near East in 1971-72 and visited the Taj Mahal in India before returning to Tokyo. He joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1977 as a composer and performer, toured with John Cage and David Tudor, was appointed its music director in 1995, and worked with the company until 2011.
Kosugi has received grants from The JDR 3rd Fund in 1966 and 1977, a DAAD fellowship grant to reside in Berlin in 1981, and the John Cage Award for Music from Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in 1994. He has performed in countless international festivals, and his installations have been presented in exhibitions throughout the world.
Takehisa Kosugi performed in the Lampo series in March 2000, in concert with Jim O'Rourke at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; organized in cooperation with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Sound.
JOHN BISCHOFF
SAT MAY 4 8pm
Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Admission FREE; RSVP here
John Bischoff, an early pioneer of live computer music, presents four recent works. His stuff is precise and textured, spare, at times delicate, and really lovely.
We blurb. For John, it's the method that matters:
He explains, "The work projects sounds from an analog circuit into juxtaposition with raw digital audio generated from a laptop. As a performer interacts with the circuit, which consists of two square-wave oscillators activated by pressure sensors and shorting disks, instances of pulsed and modulated sound are triggered in the circuit and the laptop as well in a manner that couples the analog and digital sources together."
Bischoff continues, "In these pieces the detailed nature of the performer's actions with the circuit -- the initiation of sound events, the timing between them, and their spectral characteristics -- are analyzed in real-time and used to construct an extended computer-generated response."
The set includes "Surface Effect," "Field Transfer," "Vocal Imprint (Test Pressing)," and a new untitled work.
John Bischoff (b. 1949, San Francisco, Calif.) has been active in the experimental music scene in the Bay Area for over 40 years as a composer, performer and teacher. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his pioneering development of computer network music. In the early 1970s he studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, Robert Ashley and David Behrman. In '78 Bischoff co-founded the League of Automatic Music Composers, the world's first computer network band, and from 1985 to the present he has performed and recorded with the network band, The Hub. His performances around the U.S. include New Music America festivals in 1981 and 1989, Roulette and Experimental Intermedia in New York City, and Lampo in Chicago. He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künste in Berlin, STEIM in Amsterdam, and Fylkingen in Stockholm. In 1999 Bischoff received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in recognition of his music. Two important retrospective CD packages documenting computer network music were released in 2007 and 2008: "The League of Automatic Music Composers: 1978-1983" (New World Records 2007) and a 3-CD set of recordings by The Hub titled "Boundary Layer" (Tzadik 2008). A new solo CD, "Audio Combine," was recently released on New World Records and was picked as one of the Best of the Year 2012 by The Wire magazine. Bischoff is currently Associate Professor of Music at Mills College in Oakland, California.
John Bischoff performed at Lampo in October 2004 and March 2008, presenting works "Decay Trace," "Audio Combine" "Local Color," and "Tesla Sync."
Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation.
JASON LESCALLEET
SAT JUN 8 8pm
The Renaissance Society
Bond Chapel, 1050 East 59th Street
Admission FREE; No RSVP required.
Something new from Jason Lescalleet, tape-looper and chart-topper (e.g., here, here, here and here). Here, in his much anticipated return to Chicago, he'll play with the resonance of Bond Chapel's neo-Gothic space.
Lescalleet makes his music using a collection of vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders and simple electronics, running loops of crumpled tape between machines. He blends layers of found sound, amplified silences, and artifacts of everyday noise, all transformed through various microphones and speakers.
Jason Lescalleet (b. 1968, Worcester, Mass.) explores a sound world that occupies a space between noise, contemporary composition, and minimal electronics. Using decidedly primitive tactics and equipment his work focuses on microscopic audio detail set awash in exaggerated and exploited site-specific acoustics. He has collaborated with Graham Lambkin, Aaron Dilloway, Phill Niblock, Joe Colley, John Hudak, Greg Kelley, Rafael Toral, Thomas Ankersmit, Ron Lessard (as Due Process), and nmperign. He has released recordings on such labels as Erstwhile, RRR, Intransitive Recordings, Kye, Celebrate Psi-Phenomenon, Hanson Records, Chondritic Sound and his own label, Glistening Examples. Jason Lescalleet has built a solid reputation for delivering a visceral live experience in his concert performances. He lives in Maine.
Jason Lescalleet last performed at Lampo in March 2007. In a two-night stand, he and Joe Colley performed one night of solo sets and one night of duos.
Presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; generously sponsored by Leslie Bodenstein and Jason Pickleman.
The Lampo series of performances is a project of Lampo, Inc., a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit organization. Current programs are supported in part by the MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, mediaThe foundation inc., the John W. and Clara C. Higgins Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and a CityArts Program 1 grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.


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