The CLEAT Series focuses on work composed for the 16-channel speaker system in our space, allowing audiences to experience different approaches to spatial audio. April’s edition features solo work from Billie Howard, a piece from Kieran Daly titled MONOPHONIC STRUCTURES WITH NON-INTERSECTING DIFFUSION FOR MULTI-CHANNEL SPEAKER ARRAY, and a duo piece from Bill and Teresa Parod titled Crossroads AR - Visual Art and Spatial Music in Augmented Reality. Every month is an exciting opportunity to see our room transformed from the more common concert stage format. Join us!
Artist Bios
Billie Howard is a pianist, violinist, and improviser. As Akosuen, she composes experimental music that focuses on breathing cycles, chronic pain, and mediation on both quiet and extremely loud sounds. Billie is a founding member of the contemporary music collective a.pe.ri.od.ic. and the experimental improvisation group NbN Trio. In addition to classical music, she writes and performs with her band The Paver and plays keyboards and violin with countless bands in both recording sessions and live performances. She holds a M.Mus. in piano performance and pedagogy from Northwestern University and B.A. in piano and violin performance from Montana State University. She is a 2021 3Arts Make a Wave grant recipient. In 2019, Billie started studying the Ikenobo school of ikebana (traditional Japanese floral arts). Over the pandemic, her ikebana cohort realized they all practice different artistic mediums. Inspired by the group, Ikenobo Professor Charles Harris proposed a multimedia installation and performance piece featuring traditional Japanese arts of chado (tea ceremony), kado (ikebana) and origami fused with contemporary music, video, and dance. Two consecutive nights of exhibition and performance will take place at Elastic on April 29-30. Tonight, Billie will present an excerpt of her 16- channel sound installation titled Enso (the circular Zen image that begins and ends at the same time and place.)
Painter Teresa Parod and Composer and Software Developer Bill Parod work together on multi-media public art. Their work combines mural paintings with situated spatial music and sound art through Augmented Reality mobile apps.
Crossroads AR is a project to bring this approach into a concert setting. Each painting is paired with a "behavioral ensemble" that is visually tracked in painting fragments. The paintings for this performance will be projected. The piece will release new ensemble groups into the CLEAT 16-channel grid while projecting its AR scene for viewers in the space. Gestural improvisation with the phone will also affect the ensembles’ performance.
“We come to crossroads all the time in our lives. When two roads intersect, they present three choices in where to go or which direction to take. That impact might be immediate or delayed, minor or profound. You make a decision which direction to go. Either direction could have been a very nice life, but we have pivotal choices.” - Teresa Parod
“The music draws from my enjoyment of listening to birds and the shapes of their daily dramas. Characters’ personalities emerge in these interactions - as characters cross paths, change course, change attitudes - heading towards a spontaneous living music, emergent in ways both natural and surprising.” - Bill Parod.
For more information, see Crossroads AR
Kieran Daly is a composer and performer currently residing in Chicago. Using improvisation and iterative nonlinear processes as primary means for constructing a (mostly) monophonic music from first principles, his prolific work has been featured by the Chicago Reader, Flea, Hibari, Issue Project Room, Lateral Addition, Madacy Jazz, Paid, Pitchfork, Triple Canopy, and Wire Magazine. Daly will present new music specifically composed for the 16-channel CLEAT system entitled MONOPHONIC STRUCTURES WITH NON-INTERSECTING DIFFUSION FOR MULTI-CHANNEL SPEAKER ARRAY. The composition shows 16 disparate musical processes generated by direct sound synthesis and arbitrarily distributed to each Hemisphere omni-directional speaker. No more than one speaker diffuses each process at a time. Thus, the composition maintains a monophonic texture albeit with a spatiotemporal structure determined by the conditions of the multichannel array.
$15 - Tickets Available at the Door