Today Lampo announces its WS20 season, which begins in late February with new work from Chicago artist Whitney Johnson (aka Matchess) and concludes in June with a special performance by the Jessica Pavone String Ensemble, as we also celebrate 10 years of Lampo at the Graham Foundation. In between, we bring you new projects from … Continued
Lampo director Andrew Fenchel and musician Steve Hauschildt will talk about experimental music and conduct a hands-on workshop at Apple Michigan Avenue on Saturday, January 25 at 2:00 p.m. Steve also will perform a short set. Music Lab: Sonic Landscapes with Lampo and Steve Hauschildt. Details here.
Lampo is very pleased to announce its FW19 season of programs—with special new projects from artists Sarah Davachi, Laura Steenberge, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, Caterina Barbieri, Catherine Lamb and Rebecca Lane. On October 5, Sarah Davachi premieres a new long-form composition for pipe organ and two French horns, in the soaring interior of Rockefeller Chapel. … Continued
Lampo director Andrew Fenchel looks back at Resonance: A Sound Art Marathon at the Walker Art Center, in this review for the Walker Reader. The May 2019 festival, organized by Pavel Pyś and Doug Benidt, included artists Philip Blackburn, Christine Sun Kim, Walter Kitundu, … Continued
Today Lampo announces its WS19 season, featuring projects by artists Florian Hecker, Peter Rehberg, James Hoff, Jon Davies and DeForrest Brown Jr., and Anthony Pateras—with five special performances across Chicago, at the Poetry Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the new Green Line Performing Arts Center in the city’s Washington Park neighborhood. Lampo WS19 begins in … Continued
Reducing the Tempo to Zero is Ben Vida’s new long-form composition for four vocalists and electronics.
Please note, audience members may come and go throughout the near five-hour performance. Guest vocalists include Melina Ausikaitis, Nina Dante and Dan Mohr. Lighting design by Christine Shallenberg.
Informed by Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, the extended performance length of RtTtZ acts to complicate the listeners’ relationship to memory, absorption and attention. The timeline of this piece takes hours to unfurl, which means some audience members may only experience segments of the overall composition; this eliminates basic structural signifiers (like a strict beginning, middle and end) and leaves room for reconsidering how the developmental arc of a composition can function.
As an example of expanded composition, RtTtZ also takes historic cues from works like Stockhausen’s Sternklang and Le Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House. In much the same way those pieces used staging and site specificity as elemental compositional building blocks, RtTtZ uses direct intervention with the gallery space to oscillate between installation and performance. Not only does this prompt a reinterpretation of agency for the audience (both by encouraging them to experience the piece from a number of different locations as well as having them determine their own length of engagement with the work), but, in terms of audience expectation, context and perspective, it also actively sets up a different kind of experiential proposal.
Ben Vida (b.1975, Dubuque, Iowa) is an artist and composer living in New York. He has been an active member of the international experimental music community for two decades with a long list of collaborators, projects and releases to his credit. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the group Town and Country and has since worked as a solo artist with releases on such labels as PAN, Alku, Shelter Press, Future Audio Graphics and Kranky. Vida has been the recipient of several awards including the ISSUE Project Room Artist-in-Residency Commission; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Composing with Process Exclusive Works Commission; Unsound Festival New Works Commission, and a Swedish Arts Committee Travel Grant. Recent residencies include EMS Studios, Stockholm; EMPAC, Troy; and the Clocktower, Manhattan. His work has been performed and presented at the Guggenheim, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; The Kitchen, New York; Leap Gallery, Berlin; The Artist’s Institute, New York; the Sydney Opera House; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Borderline Festival, Athens, Greece and the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival in London. Recent solo exhibitions include [Smile on.]…[Pause.]… [Smile off.] at Lisa Cooley Gallery, New York, and Slipping Control (West) at 356 S. Mission Rd, Los Angeles.
Ben Vida first appeared at Lampo in October 2013, presenting the video Tztztztzt Î Í Í… and his electronics work Damaged Particulates.
Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; support provided by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant