nnirror

Crystina Windham

Ben Zucker Brass Quartet

The May CLEAT Series welcomes nnirror in from Detroit, Michigan for a solo presentation, a brass ensemble from Elastic mainstay Ben Zucker, and a solo performance from Crystina Windham!

nnirror perfoms with custom generative music software, navigating and blurring the boundaries between algorithmic processes in real time. Coming off an opening slot for Autechre on their 2025 North American tour, he creates emotionally intense, highly textural abstract electronics at the bleeding edge with no backup. In this performance on the CLEAT system at Elastic Arts, he will be live-coding sonic motion around the speakers using his custom system, Facet, and Max/MSP. He will also perform a short collaborative piece with the audience using a free synthesizer on the internet that he built called Wax, accessible via QR code. Music will emerge from the semi-chaotic behavior of the distributed audience members following a series of motions he will guide.

Crystina Windham will present That Which Impedes, Those Who Resist (2026), a multichannel audiovisual work that examines resistance through three lenses: personal, material, and political. It weaves together the friction of concrete and foam, dampened and muffled signals, vocal fry, sibilance, stuttering, hesitation, obstructed speech, and political outcries, creating an immersive environment in which these modes of resistance emerge and overlap.

"Jericho-Nigredo" is an ensemble extension of composer/performer Ben Zucker's work with improvisation incorporating feedback and interactive software. Through a series of delays and pitch/envelope trackers, live input is constantly reworked into noise with a life of its own. The setup was originally designed by for solo performance with vibraphone, which has been featured across the Midwest and documented on "Alike Untils" (1473 Recordings, October 2024). This performance marks the first time the setup uses multiple instrumental sources, based on workshopping and performances in 2025 at the Stockholm EMS.

The metallurgic nature of most of my instrumental sound sources (vibraphone, brass instruments) is not underlooked. All of the names of realizations of this project relate to the nature of craft, combination, and energy that inform the project, and give alchemical significance to the live processing that underlies it. Nigredo, the first step towards the production of the philosopher's stone/prima materia/etc., is the 'blackening' or 'putrefaction' of ingredients, in this case sound into noise and feedback. Jericho is the Biblical city whose walls fell to the constant sound of horns (shofars or trumpets, but the latter's connection to Revelations couldn't be resisted). The allusions hopefully makes the goal of this performance's intensity clear -- contemplation though annihilation.

Music at 8pm!

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door