A genre-defying adventure into the orchestra as sound-art. How can orchestral sound become the material for artistic exploration? Find out how sound artists reinvent what the orchestral medium can mean.
ESS presents Nina Dante, Jim Baker, Lia Kohl + Katinka Kleijn, Bill MacKay, Julia Holter + Olivia Block, and Spectralina, performing on the Quarantine Concerts.
Radius premieres Episode 91 & 92 on the Quarantine Concerts for the opening reception of Radius: DECADE, on exhibition via the Audible gallery at ESS May 14 through June 14, 2020.
8:00pm - Tyondai Braxton
8:30pm - Ben Vida
9:00pm - Olivia Block
9:30pm - Emmett Kelly
10:00pm - Byron Westbrook
OLIVIA BLOCK and JULIA HOLTER’s Outer Ear Residency culminates in a premiere performance at May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery.
2016 marks the 30th anniversary of Experimental Sound Studio. To celebrate 30 years of incubating, presenting and documenting innovative work in sound from around the world, ESS is throwing a blow-out gala at Constellation Chicago. The evening will feature luminaries from throughout ESS’s diverse history, including MacArthur Fellow and OPTION programmer Ken Vandermark; Chicago composer and sound artist Olivia Block; Instrument inventor and improviser Hal Rammel; and internationally acclaimed Dutch vocalist, sound poet, and composer Jaap Blonk.
Composed by Chicago artist Olivia Block and commissioned by Experimental Sound Studio, Sonambient Pavilion is a multi-channel sound installation that envelopes listeners at the pasture-like lawn of Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion. Sounds from two "sonambient" sound sculptures by Harry Bertoia (1915–1978) in the Aon Plaza on Randolph Street are amplified and electronically manipulated, then spatialized into the array of 50 loudspeakers above the Pavilion's lawn, creating a shifting, shimmering sonic architecture superimposed on the Pavilion's visual architecture.
In collaboration with the Rebuild Foundation's Black Cinema House and Chicago Film Archives, ESS is proud to present a pilot project of live music/sound performances with cinema.In two mini-residencies, two pairs of collaborating sound/music artists will each spend 4 to 6 weeks studying and working with several short films selected from CFA’s extensive vault.
In collaboration with the Rebuild Foundation's Black Cinema House and Chicago Film Archives, ESS is proud to present a pilot project of live music/sound performances with cinema.In two mini-residencies, two pairs of collaborating sound/music artists will each spend 4 to 6 weeks studying and working with several short films selected from CFA’s extensive vault.
In conjunction with The Patient, Joseph Clayton Mills' exhibit in Audible Gallery, Mills will present the performance of an original composition based on fragmentary texts by Franz Kafka, composed as mundane communications from his deathbed, rendered mute by tuberculosis of the larynx. He will be joined by ESS regulars Olivia Block, Noé Cuéllar, Steven Hess, and Jason Stein.
OUTER EAR WINTER 2012: BILLY GOMBERG, BLOCK/GENETTI/YOUNG
Laughter and Tears was a surround-sound installation that used the Pritzker Pavilion's state-of-the-art sound system in a unique way, creating a fluid, highly evocative sonic architecture within the Pavilion's lattice-covered lawn. Starting with recordings of laughter from a variety of sources, including improvising vocalists, anonymous audiences, and ordinary citizens, Chicago composers Olivia Block and Joseph Mills employed numerous electronic and acoustic techniques to transform and structure these sounds into a coherent musical form that explored laughter in all its range and nuance, from the comic to the devious. Sound artist Lou Mallozzi will worked with the composers to shape this composition into a surround-sound format intended as an immersive installation environment, a sonic architecture superimposed onto the material architecture of the Pavilion. Laughter and Tears was commissioned and presented by Experimental Sound Studio, and ran continuously November 4 and 5, 2011, from 10AM to 10PM. It was a follow-up to ESS’s enormously successful Train Time, which was presented at the Pavilion in fall of 2009. The piece was presented in partnership with the Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture and is scheduled to coincide with the Sound Art Theories Symposium organized by the Sound Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
A stunning sound portrait incorporating the clank of wheels over rail ties, the hiss of boilers, the roar of diesels, the call of train whistles, the whoosh of tomorrow’s super-fast trains–a rhythmic reminder that today’s downtown lakefront park was once a huge rail yard extending to the water’s edge.
Commissioned by and co-presented with the 2008 Chicago Humanities Festival.
