John Niekrasz
Tom Borax
Ishmael Ali
Zachary Nicol + Meg Leary
At our first CLEAT Series show of the month, we’re happy to welcome Chicago ex-pat John Niekrasz to present new multichannel work on the system for percussion and electronics. We’ll also welcome back Baltimore artist / organizer Tom Boram aka Borax to Elastic for his first go on the 16 speakers. Ishmael Ali returns with his Archipelago project with new music.
Marking the 20th anniversary of his death, A Sestina for Malachi Ritscher is John Niekrasz’s new composition for the CLEAT system. With grant funding from the Oregon Arts Commission, movement by Zachary Nicol, and vox by Meg Leary, this work contends with the complex legacies of extreme acts of protest by individuals of conscience.
Cello, archival news reports, samples from Malachi’s Chicago 90s band Want Not, and the incidental sounds of immolation will be routed through the CLEAT sound system via Sensory Percussion technology, allowing for precise, improvisational, spatial sound control while maintaining the human expressiveness of the acoustic drum set.
Utilizing a self-built analog synthesizer, Borax employs a performance technique that is more physical and "virtuosic" than what is usually associated with live electronics. His improvised performances are both cartoon-like and frantic, and both surreal and meditative. A live set can include the recounting of a strange story but musically also is like story – but a told in evoking the sounds of cars, disasters, frogs, owls, pigs, broken phones, broken radios, lungs, stomachs, the ocean, the kitchen, and rocket launches.
8 years ago Borax shifted SOME of his attention to the development of mathematical tunings for the harpsichord. Using only fingering and keyboard techniques, Borax turns the harpsichord from a traditional accompaniment instrument and into a solo machine of stark melodic dissonances and industrial, insectoid rhythms and timbres.
For this performance, Ishmael Ali works with a musician playing live from an adjacent room. Their sound is fed into CLEAT, where Ali processes and moves it through the 16-channel system, building up a larger electronic environment from what is happening next door. The piece plays with the separation between the musician, the sound they’re making, and where that sound is heard.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bio
Tom Borax, aka “Tom Boram” is a musician and multi-media artist from Baltimore USA. He has played in electronic noise duos Leprechaun Catering and Snacks and has improvised with musicians around the world for 30 years. He is a founder of the international High Zero Festival of Experimental Music.
John Niekrasz is a Chicago-raised, Portland-based artist working in sound, language, performance, and movement. His work has been commissioned by Cite des Arts Paris, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Stone, Issue Project Room NYC, and Oregon Contemporary. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, studied classical percussion in India, music and dance in Havana, and improvisation with Milford Graves. John’s work bridges the musico-poetic divide through text-based composition and syllabic musical notation, grappling with ideas around poverty and ornament, rigor and effortlessness, justice and militancy. Liberatory texts are at the heart of his work. John publishes essays and fiction, makes music for dance, theater, and film, and dances for Emma Lutz-Higgins. He performs solo and with ensembles Methods Body, LTD Time, Ixnay, and Orchestra Becomes Radicalized. John pioneered and continues to develop the use of Sensory Percussion technology for 16-channel sound systems.
Zachary Nicol is an artist, choreographer, and performer based in Chicago, using research in dance, writing, video, and sound to elaborate problems of representation and paradox.
Meg Leary is a former opera singer and sound, visual, and performance artist in Chicago. They recently founded Arts First, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes resources and organizes creative communities to build power for artists.