Curated by Norman W. Long, Myth/Science Dubcology is a tribute to Sun Ra on the 100th anniversary of his birth, and to Washington Park, reflecting on the creative and cultural space the composer and the park creates. Myth/Science Dubcology follows Norman W. Long's practice of gardening, collecting and creating as a way to connect people to history, space, ecology and community. This practice fulfills a need to understand ecology, history and sense of place through sound, and ultimately aims to improve our communities. Long will be improvising and processing recordings (including materials from the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection in the Creative Audio Archive) with Avreeayl Ra (percussion), Dan Godston (trumpet, small instruments) and Angel Elmore (piano, clarinet).
Saturday, October 11th
Doors at 7pm, Music at 8pm
$10/8 students & members
About the performers
Norman W. Long (b. 1973, Chicago, IL) is a local sound artist/designer/composer born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. His current work focuses on sound art production within the larger context of landscape. He has exhibited and/or performed in galleries in Chicago, Ithaca, New York, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The processes involved in his practice lie within the area of field recording, electro-acoustic composition and dub technique. His art/studio practice involves gardening, collecting, performing and recording to create, objects, environments, situations in which the audience and myself are engaged in an open-ended dialogue about memory, space, value, silence and the invisible.
Angel Elmore is a multi-instrumentalist, multi-media visual artist, vocalist, composer and music producer living and working on the South Side of Chicago. Her work incorporates found objects, found images, found sounds and energies she discovers and excavates from around her home studio on 68th and Dorchester. In making use of things discarded, she discards distinctions between genres and art forms. Elmore has served as the musical director of the MB Collective and has performed also with the Borderbend Arts Collective, David Boykin Expanse, and Renee Baker's Chicago Modern Orchestra.
Dan Godston is an educator, musician and writer who lives in Chicago. His chapbooks include Splice Poems (Argotist Ebooks) and Sonic Textures Triptych (Linguiscope), and his writings have appeared in RHINO, Chase Park, After Hours, Beard of Bees, Drunken Boat, Horse Less Review, Requited Journal, Certain Circuits, Sentinel Poetry, and other publications. He works on musical projects and interdisciplinary collaborations, and he directs the Borderbend Arts Collective. www.dangodston.com
Chicago master drummer/percussionist AVREEAYL RA was born in Chicago on May 21st, 1947 and still lives there today. He is a renowned musician always in demand among visiting jazz artists in Chicago. Avreeayl’s father, Arthur “Swinglee” O’Neil, was a tenor saxophonist who was mentor to many young Chicago musicians, including John Gilmore, later the mainstay of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. (Avreeayl reports that John Gilmore had a crush on Avreeayl’s sister and so spent as much time as he could at the family house.) Swinglee O’Neil played in one of Sun Ra’s early Chicago bands, and Sun Ra played in one of Swinglee’s groups as well.
Avreeayl is a long-term member of the Chicago AACM, his relationship with the seminal music organization having begun with early studies with AACM co-founder Kelan Philip Cohran. Avreeayl has performed and /or recorded with Fred Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Fontella Bass, Lester Bowie, Ari Brown, Oscar Brown, Jr., Henry Butler, Henry Byrd (”Professor Longhair”), Hamid Drake, Malachi Favors, Donald Raphael Garrett, Charles Gayle, Henry Grimes, Billy Harper, Joseph Jarman, Edward “Kidd” Jordan, Nicole Mitchell, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Malachi Thompson, and many more.