The August Elastro Series welcomes DC-based Matthew Byars’ project Attorneys General. Byers will bring together artists into an ensemble where they will make sounds which are then filtered through Byars’ rig. He live mixes, loops, distorts, and mangles into a sometimes beautiful, sometimes cacophonous sound. On this occassion he brings together Tim Kinsella (Joan of Arc), Jenny Pulse (Spa Moans), Whitney Johnson (Matchess), and Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux). Opening the night is Elastic regular, but first time on our stage, Joel Berk’s ragenap project. Here he utilizes guitar, percussion, and effects to create large swells of brooding beautiful sound worlds. This will be a great way to kick off August. Join us!
Artist Bios
Attorneys General is a project led by Matthew Byars of DC-based band The Caribbean and NPR-distributed podcast Essential Tremors. A formative experience for Byars as a listener was hearing the work of sound engineer Martin Swope of Mission of Burma on their seminal 1985 live record, The Horrible Truth About Burma, in which Swope, using a reel-to-reel tape machine, captured, looped, manipulated, and destroyed elements of the band’s sound in spontaneous and unexpected ways. Byars has adapted this approach to having three-four people (different players every time, mostly) generate utterly improvised sound through a mixing board he controls, which allows him to capture, loop, manipulate, and destroy the sounds they create. Results vary from the transcendent to the disastrous, but the inherent risk involved is, ultimately, the point.
Tim Kinsella and Jenny Pulse
Kinsella and Pulse have spent years making thoughtful and unpredictable art, whether musically as Joan of Arc or Spa Moans, or under their given names as writers and visual artists. To assemble Giddy Skelter, the married duo aggressively culled their tracklist until they had a lean and impactful 11 songs, unlike anything either musician has released before. By mixing live instrumentation with samples so manipulated it’s impossible to identify their origins, Kinsella and Pulse create music that feels both eerily familiar yet inarguably the product of their effort, a testament to their exacting process.
Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux)
Haley Fohr (b. Dec 16 1988) is a vocalist, composer and singer-songwriter based in Chicago, Illinois. Her musical endeavors focus around our human condition, and her 10-year career as Circuit des Yeux has grown into one of America’s most successful efforts to connect the personal to the universal.
Whitney Johnson (Matchess)
Whitney Johnson (Clearfield, Pennsylvania) is an artist who interprets the unknown with sound. She composes with the viola, as well as sine waves, tuning forks, electronics, organ, vocalization, reel-to-reel tape looping, cassette tape sampling, and field recording. Her latest release, Sonescent (2022, Drag City), recreates the experience of 10 days of silent Vipassana meditation in Joshua Tree, CA where she heard “the last minutes in the life of music.” Three recent works have engaged with skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on the body. The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) each consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique that uses binaural beats to induce a relaxed or energized mental state.
"Chicago zoner ragenap, AKA Joel Berk, is a true disciple of minimalist maximalism, using his Bass IV, a couple of pedals, an amp and a handheld recorder to create cavernous tunnels of sound through which subtle melodies travel at the pace of glaciers." - J Moss, the modern folk
$15 - Tickets Available at the Door