WS19 at Last

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 early March, when German composer Florian Hecker presents Inspection II. His immersive, seven-channel work uses computer-generated sound and synthetic voice, with libretto in the form of a dialogue between an analyst and his patient (March 9, Poetry Foundation).

Just one week later, artist and Editions Mego label boss Peter Rehberg (aka Pita) performs at the Graham Foundation with a new modular synthesizer set-up—in his first U.S. solo date in more than a decade (March 16).

On April 27, James Hoff offers a site-specific version of his most recent audiovisual project HOBO UFO, which uses a modified version of Google Maps’ Street View that responds to sound. Hoff’s performance takes place physically and virtually in Chicago, starting at Madlener House and then moving beyond, driven by the real-time music the artist creates from pilfered radio frequencies. (Graham Foundation).

Ahead of the performance, Hoff describes his studio practice as a painter and sound artist, including his reliance on self-distributing and language-based systems, which for him are both metaphors for creation and generative tools (April 26, Lampo Annex).

On May 11, U.K. sound artist Jon Davies (Kepla) and New York based-media theorist DeForrest Brown Jr. perform Substantia Nigra. This is the duo’s first U.S. appearance and the first Lampo event at the new Green Line Performing Arts Center, which we present with our friends at the Smart Museum and the Arts + Public Life program at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with the Smart Museum exhibition, “Smart to the Core: Embodying the Self.”

Davies and Brown Jr. consider notions of “coolness” and what they describe as “the archetypal dichotomy of the Black Body and the Whites as central nodes of American industrialized identities,” in both the Saturday GLPAC performance and a Friday artist talk at the Lampo Annex.

On June 8 the great Anthony Pateras premieres This Ain’t My First Rodeo—his new work that explores the psychoacoustic interactions between two synthesizers with additional material generated by 1/4-inch tape delay (Graham Foundation).