If we define our ideals by the heroes we choose, let Lampo choose Leif Elggren. The Swedish artist makes his first Chicago appearance in nearly five years, offering new work for voice and live electronics.

Here, he performs It Is Said That No Queen Is A Queen. Elggren has refined his text-sound work and created a notebook of accompanying drawings during a week-long Chicago visit. Text and drawings are published as Lampo Folio No. 3. He also presents a collaboration with 18th century philosopher and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg and improvises with twin hair clippers jammed with saw blades.

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, solo and with the Sons of God (with Kent Tankred), is often created as the soundtrack to an installation or experimental stage performance, and has been released on 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.

Elggren last performed at Lampo in February 2007, together with Kevin Drumm. In that concert he presented, If Other People Exist Then They Are Totally Sealed Secrets (The Voice as an Irregular Sound Generator), a work for spoken word, electronics, motors and vibrating tin can crowns. Elggren’s text from the piece was printed in a leaflet designed by Lampo, and published in a 2011 monograph by Firework Edition under the title, Something Like Seeing in the Dark.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation; support provided by the American-Scandinavian Foundation