Sunday, March 7, 2021
2pm CT
Streaming on Twitch
FREE, $5+ suggested donation (100% goes to the artists!)
PERFORMANCE LINE-UP
2:00pm CT - Emma Hospelhorn - (Brittany J Green’s performance has been postponed to a later date)
2:30pm - Viola Yip
3:00pm - Edward Wilkerson, Jr.
3:30pm - molaq
About the Artists
BRITTANY J. GREEN
Brittany J. Green (b. 1991) is a North Carolina-based composer. Described as “cinematic in the best sense” and “searing” (Chicago Classical Review), Brittany’s music is centered around facilitating collaborative, intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses. The intersection between sound, movement, and text serves as the focal point of these musical spaces, often questioning and redefining the relationships between these three elements.
Her research and creative interests include mapping aural gestures to gestural recognition technology and exploring virtual reality platforms as a tool for experiencing immersive, intimate musical moments. Her music has been featured at concerts and festivals throughout the United States and Canada, including the Society of Composers National Conference, New York City Electronic Music Festival, SPLICE Institute, the West Fork New Music Festival, Music by Women Festival, and Electroacoustic Barn Dance Festival. Current projects include commissions from the JACK Quartet as an inaugural member of JACK Studio Artists and Mind on Fire, along with an artist residency with TimeSlips. Brittany is a Dean’s Graduate Doctoral fellow in Music Composition at Duke University. More info at www.brittanyjgreen.com
VIOLA YIP
A Native of Hong Kong, Viola Yip is an experimental composer, performer, improviser, sound artist and instrument builder. She has been interested in creating new self-built instruments and sound works in the intersection of composition, performance and improvisation, exploring various relationships between materiality, space and our musical bodies in music.
Viola's instruments and performances have been presented in major music festivals and concert series in New York, Missouri, Chicago, San Diego, Boston, Bowling Green (Ohio), Pittsburgh, Ithaca, Saratoga Springs, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Dublin, Belfast, Manchester, Huddersfield, Madeira, Ghent, Amsterdam, The Hague, Brussels, Basel, Zurich, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Munich and Darmstadt.
More info at www.violayip.com
EDWARD WILKERSON JR.
Edward Wilkerson Jr. is one of the great saxophone and clarinet players on the Chicago scene, but from the '80s into the new millennium may have become best known as a bandleader and composer, particularly associated with medium- to large-scale projects (somewhat daunting in an era when creative music bandleaders are challenged to keep even small ensembles together). He has also been a major presence in Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), teaching composition at the organization's music school and serving for a time as AACM president.
The AACM collective, with its spirit of community as well as unbridled creativity, has been a predominant nurturing force for Wilkerson and has informed much of his work. He was an original member of the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble (formed by percussionist Kahil El'Zabar upon El'Zabar's 1976 graduation from the AACM school) and remained with the group until 1997 when replaced by Ernest "Khabeer" Dawkins. However, while appearing on such Ethnic Heritage Ensemble recordings as Three Gentlemen From Chicago (Moers), Hang Tuff (Open Minds), and Dance With the Ancestors (Chameleon), Wilkerson was also becoming more involved in leading his own projects, which characteristically saw the reedman thinking big. His most ambitious project, Shadow Vignettes, was initiated in 1979; with 25 musicians and incorporating dance, poetry, and visual arts, the ensemble's influences include the big band work of Muhal Richard Abrams, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Sun Ra. Shadow Vignettes released one CD, Birth of a Notion, on the Sessoms Records label in 1985. One of Shadow Vignettes' major pieces is entitled "Defender," commissioned by the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund and featured in the tenth anniversary of New Music America, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.
Wilkerson's best-documented ensemble as a leader is 8 Bold Souls, an octet initiated in January of 1985 with a series of Thursday night concerts at the Chicago Filmmakers performance space. The popularity of the concerts led Wilkerson to establish 8 Bold Souls as a working band, and since their formation, four Souls CDs have been issued: 8 Bold Souls on Sessoms Records, Sideshow and Ant Farm on Arabesque, and Last Option on Thrill Jockey. Influenced by the small groups of Duke Ellington and Jimmy Lunceford, 8 Bold Souls also makes plenty of room for adventurous experimentation in the AACM spirit, drawing fully on the unusual sonic possibilities of the group's instrumentation of two woodwinds, trumpet, trombone, cello, tuba, bass, and trap drums. Overall, Wilkerson's work may be heard on 14 recordings, including two film soundtracks. In addition to his work with 8 Bold Souls, Shadow Vignettes, and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Wilkerson has also played with the AACM Big Band, Roscoe Mitchell, Douglas Ewart, the Temptations, Chico Freeman, Geri Allen, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Muhal Richard Abrams, Aretha Franklin, and George Lewis.
MOLAQ
Molaq is concentrated long-form electronic music.
Murat Çolak and Marek Poliks created Molaq together in 2017.
Murat is a New York-based composer and mastering engineer, and the founder of the music label Geryon. Marek makes hardware techno as Muxer, works on AI-driven synthesis with a research cluster in Hong Kong, and designs interactive systems for an audio scenography agency in LA.
https://molaq.bandcamp.com/
https://www.marekpoliks.com/