Join us as we celebrate the closing of Hali Palombo’s gallery exhibition Nothing to Write Home About with an open gallery and performances from Andy Ortmann and Signal Decay! The visual works are calligraphy ink drawings on vellum paper of similar liminal spaces - places you might think about for just a moment and then never again.

Andy Ortmann

Andy Ortmann has been working in experimental, electroacoustic & musique
concrète for 30 years. He has been awarded numerous Arts Grants for the
better part of two decades and has earned an MFA in Sound from SAIC in 2012.
Ortmann runs the Nihilist Recordings label, home to a cavalcade of international
avant garde artists; Schimpfluch-Gruppe, Nocturnal Emissions, Kevin Drumm,
Thurston Moore, Dissecting Table, The Hafler Trio, etc.
Ortmann has performed extensively throughout the USA, Europe & Japan.
In addition, Ortmann hosts the weekly podcast 'The Eternal Now' on WFMU,
a show dedicated to the more challenging regions of early academic,
experimental & other difficult genres.

For this presentation, Ortmann will show his re-imagined soundtrack for
'Chronopolis' (1982), an animation by Piotr Kamler, (originally scored by
Luc Ferrari). In 2019 Ortmann was commissioned by U of Chicago's film series
'Sonic Celluloid' to present an audio/visual performance, which was to
have taken place at Elastic March 13, 2019. Incidentally, this was the very
first event to be cancelled due to Covid-19. Now for the first time, Ortmann
will screen 'Chronopolis' utilizing Elastic's 16 channel Cleat system.

Signal Decay

Signal Decay was born out of a publishing project which approached Midwestern Noise as a sort of "regional folk music". This play on the idea of musical ethnography was tentatively abandoned in favor of actual sound making. The group will be jamming as a trio of David Nelson, Nick Yeck-Stauffer and Howard Steeley on noise, drone, free music and on American underground inheritance in general. Video artist Tyler Sullivan will provide a live visual accompaniment. Instrumentation will include various electronics & sample sources, hotwired synths, devolved guitar, contact mics, submerged sound poetry, and horn. 

For the performance the group will take inspiration from Palombo's engagement with liminal spaces, and the deep emotional resonances that sometimes charge these inscrutable terrains- the traversal of liminal spaces will be related to the process of grieving, as members have recently contended with loss. The 5 stages of grief (or the Kübler-Ross model) will provide oblique prompts for this set, and these heavy touchstones will be explored with a spirit of inquiry and even a sense of celebration of the sheer intensity of experience - the pain of absence being a reflection of the joy of having known.

$15 tickets at door