Sonic Pavilion Redux: Exhibition

Description

Free and open to the public. No RSVP Required.

Sonic Pavilion Redux is an iterative expansion of this summer’s Sonic Pavilion Festival, staged for Experimental Sound Studio’s Audible gallery. Eight multichannel sound compositions originally created for the 24-channel trellised speaker system at Jay Pritzker Pavilion are reimagined here for ESS’s 8-channel system. This presentation offers a second chance to experience the work after the festival’s final outdoor performance was cut short by severe weather. Featuring work by ten artists from the 2025 Sonic Pavilion Festival, Sonic Pavilion Redux invites audiences to encounter the same dynamic sound worlds within the focused acoustics of ESS’s gallery space.

ARTISTS & WORKS

Angel Bat Dawid & Eyeisha Sistrunk
Liberation in Sound: A Sonic Tribute to Maya Angelou’s Seminal Work “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”
This piece weaves sonic narrative into an immersive, multi-layered soundscape that embodies the essence of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” exploring the juxtaposition of confinement and freedom. This project also highlights the importance of mentorship in supporting emerging Black sound artists as Composer/Sound Artist Angel Bat Dawid will mentor high school graduate Eyeisha Sistrunk in sound design, recording, and composition. The collaboration promotes Black women’s representation in electronic arts.

Anna Friz & Jeff Kolar
The Other Spectrum
Drawing inspiration and material from archivist Rick Prelinger’s personal radio listening archives and the artists’ own collections of recordings, The Other Spectrum evokes a radiophonic world of conversations between people and between devices. We tune and detune the ordinariness, the urgencies, and the intimacies of everyday radio communications, exploring the musicality and the geographies of transmission ecologies by spatializing Chicago-area overheard radio, such as air traffic control chatter from O’Hare, as well as historical and recent radio recordings that reveal ways that radio is implicated in systems of state command and control.

David Bird
Aleatoric Tilt
Drawing inspiration from Chicago’s industrial past and its culture of mechanical ingenuity, this piece transforms the Pavilion’s overhead loudspeaker array into an enormous, kinetic sound field, an imagined pinball machine, toy box, and circuit board all at once. Aleatoric Tilt places the audience at the center of these systems, allowing them to witness the rolling of cascading marbles, spinning reels, connections of electrical circuits, and items cycling and ricocheting across the spatial field.

Glenn Kotche
Love Beats All
Love Beats All is about the intersection of rhythm and movement. It is comprised of the 64-second evolution, realization, and dissolution of 10 rhythm-based compositions occurring in succession. Each composition is realized concurrently in four ways: as a drumbeat, on pitched percussion, as a collage of Chicago field recordings and with human voices – specifically those of Laurie Anderson, Yuka Honda, Nathalie Joachim, Cate Le Bon, Gabriela Da Silva-Riley, Elena Setien, Jonna Tervomaa and Amalia Tshilds, —singing the word LOVE in a variety of languages in a nod to the great diversity of our city.

Myles Emmons
Cloud Listening
Cloud Listening is analogous to cloud gazing. This work uses generative synthesis and spatialized audio to provide a dynamic experience based on where the listener is positioned on the lawn, similar to the different shapes we see in clouds. Dark and light, airy and heavy, fluffy and electric are just a few examples of cloud qualities this piece explores as it moves through all ten cloud classifications, expressed in playful lyrical bursts, rhythmic entanglements, and detailed textures.

Paige Alice Naylor
Currents
Currents is a composition for Chicago’s new experimental choir (lead by Chris Wood) of 30-40 members. In this recording (Constellation, 2025) performers circled around the microphone to sing assigned melodies, with the freedom to vary in speed and intensity throughout. By not prescribing a tempo, time dilates, and we float together. The spatialization mirrors this circular image, starting at the perimeter, and like waves flowing in and out, the voices slowly expand and retract, eventually dissolving into nothing.

Saapato
Ponds Appearing Overnight
Ponds Appearing Overnight immerses the listener in a system of New York’s vernal pools and woodland ponds across a season and the delicate lives of the amphibians that inhabit them. Beneath and between these natural voices, evolving synthesized textures act as the ‘water’ in which these amphibian voices live. Amphibians are among the most sensitive indicators of climate change and ecosystem health. Their presence or absence tells a story. In a highly urbanized setting, this piece invites reconnection with seasonal time, wild sound, and the fragile nuances of the biosphere.

Zouning Anne Liao
Dust Storm
Inspired by the visceral force and delicate granular detail of dust storms, this piece captures their paradoxical nature: violent yet intricate, monumental yet ephemeral. Layers of turbulence spiral and fracture, then are swept away by wild, unpredictable winds. Dust Storm unfolds the distant, forgotten journey of dust grains—eroded sands shaped by ocean waves along shorelines, particles lifted from the Sahara and carried across continents by shifting weather systems. These restless grains are sculpted by water, heat, and time before converging into a fierce and fleeting atmospheric tempest