Counterfeit Madison
Ryan Gaston / Sarah Belle Reid
Join us at the Music in the Garden Festival Season 3 at Elastic Arts Foundation!
Music in the Garden presents a 2-day music festival with Chicago-based improvisers and creative musicians, featuring an art installation by Christina Sadovnikov inspired by the works of Moki Cherry and a feature film by Gabe Udofia.
Come enjoy a night of music and rest. This event is the perfect opportunity to relax, unwind, and feel a sense of community after the 2024 election season.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID
$25 Two Day Pass / $15 w/ Student ID
Agenda
November 9th
8pm Counterfeit Madison
9pm Sarah Belle Reid & Ryan Gaston
10pm The Mouth is the Beginning (improvising vocal ensemble)
Artists: Ben Zucker, Roberta Brenza, Paige Brown, Carol Genetti, Janna Lee, Julian Otis
Artist Bios
Counterfeit Madison is the musical manifestation of Sharon Udoh, a Nigerian-American pianist, composer, arranger, and vocalist based in Chicago. Her work combines vocals that seemingly erupt from the center of the earth with a stage presence that somehow feels both dangerous and kind, abandoning genre for the expansive. Their collaborators have included Marvin Tate, Dr. Adam Zanolini, Cristal Sabbagh, Tune-Yards, clipping., Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus, D-Composed, Ben Lamar Gay, and Angel Bat Dawid. His performances have been described as a warm bowl of soup, a tornado, a jalapeño pepper, a Jackson Pollock painting, a bulldozer, and magnetic. She has an absurd millennial addiction to sparkling water. Find out more at counterfeitmadison.com.
The Mouth Is The Beginning is a gathering of Chicago experimental vocalists, putting its members' varied singing backgrounds into dialogue through collectively improvised turns ranging from the wordy to the sing-song to the guttural to the soulful to the the richly choral. Convened by Ben Zucker, and featuring Roberta Brenza, Paige Brown, Carol Genetti, Janna Lee, and Julian Otis.
Sarah Belle Reid is a performer-composer who plays trumpet, modular synthesizer, and an ever-growing collection of handcrafted electronic instruments. Her unique musical voice explores the intersections between contemporary classical music, experimental and interactive electronics, visual arts, noise music, and improvisation. Often praised for her ability to transport audience members through vivid sonic adventures, Reid's sonic palette has been described as ranging from "graceful" and "danceable" all the way to "silk-falling-through-space," and "pit-full-of-centipedes" (San Francisco Classical Voice). Reid holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from California Institute of the Arts, with a research focus on the development of new electronic instruments and musical notation systems as interfaces for exploring temporal perception and co-creation. Her debut album for trumpet and interactive electronics, "Underneath and Sonder," was released on pfMENTUM in October, 2019. In March 2024 she released a tape-music inspired electroacoustic record titled “MASS”, featuring trumpet, voice, electronics, and amplified objects, on Aurora Central Records. As a soloist, Reid frequently performs her own original music for trumpet and electronics across North America and Europe, often presenting work in quadraphonic or multi-channel surround sound. She has performed as a featured artist / collaborator with Julia Holter, Charlie Haden, Carolina Eyck, Vinny Golia, David Rosenboom, James Fei, Todd Barton, Kris Tiner, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, among many others.
Ryan Gaston (b. 1990) is a performer/composer, instrument designer, and writer who makes devices and music that combine sonic elements of noise, free improvisation, and experimental electroacoustic music. Gaston's creative work explores temporal perception—memory, preconception, time travel, and the concept of the "present"—by using chaotic, unpredictable electronic structures as the conceptual basis for both electronic instruments and musical compositions. His writing focuses on the history and techniques of experimental electronic music and electronic musical instrument design, with a special focus on American west coast trends in the second half of the 20th century.
Ryan Gaston holds an MFA in Music Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts (2016) as well as a BA in Music Composition from Hendrix College (2012). His writing and instruments have been featured at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, the Canadian Electroacoustic Community's eContact!, the Southern California Institute of Architecture's Offramp, the CalArts Digital Arts Expo, and elsewhere. He is the editor of and frequent contributor to Signal, an online publication managed by California-based electronic musical instrument retailer Perfect Circuit.
Learn moore at https://ryangastonmusic.com/