Leif Elggren & Kevin Drumm

Odum

2116 West Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60622

Leif Elggren and Kevin Drumm perform Elggren’s text and sound work, If Other People Exist Then They Are Totally Sealed Secrets (The Voice as an Irregular Sound Generator). Here, the Swedish artist uses various electronics and his vibrating tin can crowns. He is joined by Drumm, who uses effects pedals, oscillators and analog synthesizer. Elggren’s text from the piece is also printed in a leaflet designed by Lampo.

Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren (b.1950, Linköping, Sweden) is a writer, visual artist, art book publisher, stage performer and composer based in Stockholm. His varied and prolific output routinely involves dreams, subtle absurdities and social hierarchies turned upside-down. His audio work, often created as the soundtrack to an installation or performance, has been released on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition. Elggren also is the benevolent co-monarch (with Carl Michael von Hausswolff) of Elgaland-Vargaland, all areas of no-man’s land, territories between national boundaries on both land and sea, digital and mental spaces. This nation has its own national anthem, flag, coat of arms, currency, citizens and ministers.

Kevin Drumm (b.1970, South Holland, Ill.) emerged from Chicago’s improvised music scene in the 1990s as a tabletop guitar player. In his early works, he made spare and detailed recordings, laying the instrument on its side and playing it with different objects. More recently, recordings like Sheer Hellish Miasma (Mego) and Land of Lurches (Hanson) offer listeners a massive, murky bog of phasing sludge—employing synthesizers, contact microphones, effects pedals and computers. He has performed at many international festivals. In 2000 and 2003, Drumm received awards from Prix Ars Electronica in Austria. In 2001, he completed a project with the architecture collective Simparch that was presented at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and at Documenta in Kassel.

Kevin Drumm last appeared in the Lampo series in February 2003, when he premiered Land of Lurches. In March 2002 he premiered Sheer Hellish Miasma, and in February of that year he joined Taku Sugimoto and Günter Müller for a trio concert. Drumm presented Three in December 1999, as half of a split bill with Ryoji Ikeda. He first performed for Lampo in September 1999 with Martin Tétreault and Jim O’Rourke.