L.A.-based Joseph Hammer premieres Road Less Traveled in his first solo Chicago performance.

The new work is Hammer’s take on road music, or “a soundtrack for the time spent between home and destination,” he explains. “My intention is to create a composition that is at the same time abstract and yet has the quality of hooks found in mostly popular music.”

Joseph Hammer (b.1959, Hollywood, Calif.) uses computerized sources, abstracted by hand, playing tape loops on vintage magnetic audio gear. His instrument is a high fidelity, full track mono analog tape recorder. Hammer employs a series of real-time mechanical interventions to transform and layer the source material. By physically manipulating the degree of exposure the tape has to an erase head, he varies the layers of old and new information on the loop of magnetic tape. He also manipulates the surface region used for the recording to create a discrete multi-track composition. Because he’s accessing the very guts of the machine, its moving parts are also fair game for his record/playback permutations.

In various collaborations, solo, and as a founding member of Points of Friction, Dinosaurs with Horns and the trio Solid Eye, Hammer has performed widely and been an influential contributor to the Los Angeles underground music scene since the early 1980s, including as part of LAFMS (Los Angeles Free Music Society), the fringe collective of the mid 70s-80s. His practice draws on the complexities of the process of listening and playing, using music as it influences our notion of time, memory and intimacy as the basis for improvisation and abstraction.