April 1, 2019
Doors At 7. Music At 7:30pm
Chicago native musician and filmmaker Matt Mehlan and guitarist and composer Cyrus Pireh perform solo and in duo for their debut performance on the Option stage. Not to be missed!
Set 1 - Matt Mehlan (Shtar, electronics, voice) solo, Cyrus Pireh (guitar) solo
Set 2 - Mehlan/Pireh duo
“Chicago native musician and filmmaker Matt Mehlan and guitarist and composer Cyrus Pireh perform solo and in duo for their debut performance on the Option stage. Not to be missed!”
Cyrus Pireh was born in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, usa on March 22, 1981. Cyrus studied violin, electric guitar, saxophone, and percussion as well as composition, music theory, electroacoustic music, and electrical theory. Cyrus holds bachelor's and graduate degrees in Music Composition from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a composer, Cyrus' works involve sign manipulation with the purpose of keeping the interpretive field open. As a guitarist, Cyrus seeks the limits of the body and the self as a pathway to transcendence parallel to the quotidian. As an anarchist, Cyrus actively works to dismantle hierarchy and to heal the damages done by industry's division of people into performers and audience; producers and consumers. In music, it is not possible to obstruct one sound with another. All sounds combine to create one harmony. Humans in harmony liberate each other.
Matt Mehlan has been recording his songs, wherever and whenever he can, since he was a kid. Raised a Midwestern hustler in the City That Works™, his longing for a kind of Transcendental Escape in Music was always coupled with a worker’s pragmatism. When he moved to New York in 2005, abandoning his mall job in the Chicago suburbs, the reasoning was as practical as it was whimsical: live with the band, wake up and hit record, subsidize costs and share, build a self-reliant community for making art and music in the City That NeverSleeps™.
Photo credits: Meg Krausch (Cyrus), Nina Mehlan (Matt)
April OPTION performances are generously sponsored by Petzel gallery.
