60 Strings
Gordon Fung
Jack Swanson
Melon Sprout
The May Elastro Series presents two very different approaches to sound. 60 Strings consists of three Chicago pedal steel guitar players: Justin Brown, Jordan Martins and Sam Wagster. They skip the use of processing and pedals to allow the instrument to shine. We’ll then have a new trio of Gordon Fung, Jackie Swanson, and Melon Sprout. Music at 8pm!
Artist Bios
60 Strings is an all pedal steel trio. Justin Brown, Jordan Martins and Sam Wagster play three double neck pedal steel guitars with no effects or signal processing, showcasing the unique sound and expressive possibilities of the steel guitar. The group creates layered immersive patterns, orchestral textures, hazy vistas, and musical paradoxes.
Gordon Fung (b. 1988, San Francisco) is a transdisciplinary artist who primarily works with multi-/new media performances, experimental film/video, noise music, DIY electronics, installations, and curatorial/collaborative practices. His works highlight unconventional executions like noises, lo-fi presentations, and glitches. Such aesthetics confronts the viewers’ understanding, perspective, and point of view through a more philosophical, if not esoteric, investigation. To expand the possibilities of artistic idioms, he intertwines both analog and digital technologies—also to signify the co-existence of mundane and spiritual worlds. By overloading software and hardware, he collapses the two worlds to expand the audience’s perception of reality. As a break-maker, he employs circuit-bending to regain consumers’ sense of agency through artistic means. His involvement in media archeology strives to unearth unexplored potentials of obsolete equipment and to revive them to artistic life. Informed by his multivalent approach, he forms and directs the experimental time-based arts collective //sense to showcase works through performances, workshops, and seminars. By curating large-scale experimental theater performances, he fosters a collaborative common ground for sound/video/performance/electronic/technological artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy. As a new media artist, he performs with a wide range of gears: synthesizers (audio and video), analog camcorders, webcams, video projections, experimental films, CRT TVs, and Max/MSP/Jitter programming. His works have been shown in major Chicago locations like Comfort Station, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Gene Siskel Film Center, Links Hall, MacLean Ballroom, No Nation Art Lab, Tritriangle, and beyond. As an award-winning but runaway contemporary music composer, his compositions have been performed in Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the US.
Jackie Swanson is a sound and performance artist, continually existing in the betweenness of ambient, drone, and noise. Creating a space of nothingness in order to become a transitive trans-self. Undefinable space is used to focus around physical movement performance, in and around sound. Working with heavy body drones created with traditional instrumentation which is mixed with experimental movement and sounds in order to feel a more subtle body. To fold out in-between through the metaphysical, ritualistic, meditative noise which influences the body between slow and soft, to purged.
Melon Sprout uses ceramic instruments to extend their body physically and sonically. Material and body become a tangible space for the ephemeral. “Ceramusic” - a word for Melon’s ceramic music - encourages viewers to activate, interact with, and extend themselves physically and sonically in the form of ceramic music-making. Their ceramic instruments retain physical traces of the ceramic’s original soft clay state, and the instruments go through many transitions as functional and aesthetic art objects. Sprout’s ceramic instruments are performed, climbed, spun, recorded, edited, and altered. The ceramic instruments become a conduit of reciprocity, and offer non-linguistic communication in order to develop an animated environment where feelings and ideas are free to exchange.
$15 - Tickets Available at the Door