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
Madalyn Merkey makes her Lampo debut and premieres Digital Concert Creatures, a quadraphonic work for synthetic computer sounds and voice. Merkey sets autonomous sonic characters, or “creatures,” in motion, building sound by layering frequencies.
“The main idea is that each letter on the keyboard has a different personality defined by four columns of numbers on the computer screen,” she writes. “Each keystroke catches a snapshot of the ‘creature’ as it moves along a compositional path, which then becomes complicated or influenced by the other keys being pressed.”
Through a mix of control and chaos—and informed by mathematics more than traditional musicianship—Merkey’s new work is as playful as it is dense.
Madalyn Merkey (b.1988, Oklahoma City, Okla.) is a composer and performer of live computer music based in Oakland. Her practice began as a visual artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she transitioned to sound and time-based art in 2010. Her recent work is concerned with using principles of logic to create computer programs that generate distinct sound surprises in a live setting.
Merkey is also the English translator of Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia, a pioneering electronic music text written by Enore Zaffiri in the 1960s. Her translation, Two Schools of Electronic Music, is forthcoming from Die Schachtel. Recordings of Merkey’s work Scent (2012) and Valley Girl (2014) are available on New Images Ltd.
Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation
Artist Talk: In 2013, Madalyn Merkey used her spring break to look through every book about electronic music in the Mills College library. There she found Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia (1968) by Enore Zaffiri. At first, drawn to the Italian composer’s simple visual scores, she used Google Translate to decipher the text and found unexpected parallels to her own development as a sound artist. Due scuole… became the focus of her M.F.A. thesis, with additional research completed at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence. In this artist talk for Lampo, Merkey discusses Zaffiri’s early work and provides visual and audio examples from her translation process, along with unreleased historical recordings from the first Turin course of electronic music. Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #1656. Friday, November 16, 6 p.m.