Obsequies
Aine Nakamura (photo by Ayaka Fujii)
Bonnie Han Jones
Jenny Graf
An evening of experimental voice and performance at IMS! Aine Nakamura, visiting from the Bay Area, leads a deeply-embodied international collaboration with sound artists Jenny Graf (Copenhagen) and Bonnie Han Jones (Chicago). Janna Lee and Corey Lyons open with their dark, vast noise duo Obsequies.
8:30 - Obsequies
Janna Lee - vocals, electronics
Corey Lyons - electronics
9:30 - Nakamura/Graf/Jones
Aine Nakamura - voice, performance
Jenny Graf
Bonnie Jones -
Aine Nakamura is a performer of voice and body, poet, and artist. She focuses on the potentialities of an injured voice and the listening and sensing bodies. She often writes words and considers shapes as if her throat is a membrane and each body part is a shape, phenomenon among worldly phenomena, in relations. Through her practice, while aiming to be a vessel, she understands about herself and pursues meanings of lines, seeing and connecting. She is currently based in the Bay Area/East Bay, and presents works locally and internationally. Her recent works include solo performance "Breath in this World" premiered at Indexical in SC, which continues to evolve at ZK/U Berlin, Baiju Theater near Beijing, UrBANGUILD in Kyoto, and will be presented on October 24th after the Improvised Music Series at Elastic Arts; month-long site-specific exhibition and performance project hands on tape, presented at The Lab in SF; solo performance "Under an Unnamed Flower" during an invitation to the 50th International Theatre Festival at the Venice Biennale; solo multiple performance project "Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains" presented at Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele after its premiere at the Gallatin Galleries in NY. She also engages in listening in relation to wounds and soul work, which resulted in her performance at The Listening Biennial Singapore. She is also a committed collaborator and improviser. Through collaborations, she develops her approach to attunement, spaces and listening.
Bonnie Han Jones is an Korean American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work is iterative, multidisciplinary, and typically involves building concepts through research and study and then moving these ideas through a variety of different mediums, methods, and forms. She uses electronic music, recorded sound materials, text, video, performance, and score with attention and focus on listening and improvisation as a core theme and generative method. The work broadly explores noise, sonic identity, listening as thinking and sound as knowledge. www.bonnie-jones.com
Jenny Gräf Sheppard is an artist and musician based in Copenhagen. She activates peripheral places and states through sound composition, improvisation and participatory works. Her recent works deal with the multi-sensory aspects of listening and how relations and ecologies can be sensed and enacted. Her recent development of tactile speakers led to development of The Pidgin Choir (2022), and Speaker Release (2024) a spatialized sound installation with a choir of 15 speaker-instruments made of porcelain, copper and magnets. Speaker-instruments filter, translate and voice sound sources variously due to their design and performed manipulations, reflects an interest in deconstructing the enclosed, control over sound that the conventional speaker offers, replacing it instead with unpredictability, interference, noise and the possibility for performers and audience to manipulate the transduction of sound in live performances.
Obsequies is a Chicago-based experimental noise duo formed in 2018 by vocalist Janna Lee and multi-instrumentalist Corey Lyons. Their improvised performances combine haunting vocals with crackling, static-laced textures pulled from homemade instruments to conjure dark, brooding soundscapes charged with an undercurrent of death and transformation. They have released tapes on Career Planet, Lurker Bias, and Personal Archives.