Heaven Gallery

Tristan Perich, Lesley Flanigan and Joseph Grimm at Heaven Gallery

Thursday, November 12, 2009
8:00 PM, $10
Heaven Gallery
1550 N Milwaukee Ave (at N. Damen Ave)
Chicago, IL 60622

New York artists Tristan Perich and Lesley Flanigan team up this Fall for a series of unique electronic music performances across the United States. Perich's duet Dual Synthesis (for harpsichord and 1-bit electronics) and Flanigan's Amplifications (for voice and speaker electronics) explore the viscerality of electronic music. Mixing primitive sounds from their own hand-constructed instruments with the harpsichord and voice, each choreographs intersections between acoustic and electric sound.

Joining Perich and Flanigan at Heaven Gallery is local Chicago noise artist Joseph Grimm (aka Wind-Up Bird).

From art galleries to noise venues, Perich and Flanigan stage their physical approaches to the construction of sound. Regular staples of the New York City experimental scene, they create music that spans electroacoustic, classical and noise. In addition to their solo work, they are also known for collaborative projects with the Loud Objects (Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta, Katie Shima) and Bioluminescence (Lesley Flanigan, R. Luke DuBois). The Loud Objects will perform several guest shows, soldering electronics live on an overhead projector or with hybrid fluorescent bulb guitars to create electronic noise. R. Luke DuBois' live video artistry will be woven throughout Flanigan's performances.

For composer/inventor Tristan Perich, Dual Synthesis comes on the heels of finishing his new album, 1-Bit Symphony. An electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip, 1-Bit Symphony expands on the format of his 2005 release, 1-Bit Music. A departure from traditional recordings, 1-Bit Symphony literally ‘performs’ its music live when turned on. A complete music circuit, programmed by the artist and packaged inside a standard CD jewel case, plays the composition through a headphone jack mounted in the case itself. Probing the foundations of digital sound, 1-Bit Symphony celebrates the virtuosity of electricity. The new album, to be released by Cantaloupe Music, will be available exclusively for presale at performances during the tour.

Artist/vocalist Lesley Flanigan's tour of Amplifications introduces her first solo album for speaker electronics and voice. Moving among a cluster of wires and microphones, she builds compositional frameworks that grow and break apart. Her speaker instruments, employing a built-in microphone, create pulsing tones through their own feedback, which Flanigan samples and weaves into her own vocal patterns. The result is music that hovers somewhere between noise experiments and lyrical song, resonating with organic transparency.

JOE GRIMM:
DIRTY GOGGLES OF PERCEPTION (LEFT AND RIGHT)

A synaesthetic performance for modified 16mm projectors and audio circuitry, this piece negotiates the space between the physically real and the perceptually real; between noumena and phenomena. Photosensitive circuitry translates light waves into sound waves, sonifying flickers that are sometimes slow enough to be visible to the eye - and sometimes fast enough to be perceived only by the ear. A monolithic light/noise blast that goes literally to the limits of the senses and beyond them, provoking a confrontation with that ultimate unattainable reality: The World of Things In Themselves. In memoriam Immanuel Kant. Warning: Unsuitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy

- Tristan Perich (http://www.tristanperich.com)
- Lesley Flanigan (http://www.lesleyflanigan.com)
- Joseph Grimm (http://www.myspace.com/thewindupbird)