doors 6pm
sounds 7pm
$10/pwyc
Tongue Depressor is the duo of Henry Birdsey & Zach Rowden (joined this tour by Austin Larkin) from New Haven CT. They have mostly been releasing limited edition, self released cassettes since 2017 and this is their debut LP. Their music represents the next generation of noise, DIY, modern composition, drone & free improvisation (and even some nods to Early Music). Henry is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer originally from Vermont. Zach is a bassist, composer and improvisor from New Haven. Austin Larkin is a composer working within the spectrum of performance and environment.
The music works on a bed of woozy, droning, plucking tape loops of pedal / lap steel and introduces their approach to just intonation and alternate tunings, a more lo-fi, dissonant version of Oren Ambarchi’s early pointillistic guitar work. Sounds move in a more horizontal drone space with microtonal pipe organ and long tone bowed bass layers. Dissonance and beating patterns emerge among the alternate tunings again. [Tongue Depressor] offer up an immersive listening space full of details that reward deep listening. This isn’t placid, background ambient music, its an enveloping & mildly dissonant world to explore that demands your attention not unlike the music of Alvin Lucier, Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt, La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine and more. Step inside and recalibrate your ears!
Whitney Johnson (b. Clearfield, Pennsylvania) is an artist based in Chicago who uses sound to explore relationships between bodies and minds. She composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound from the viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her latest recording, Sonescent (2022, Drag City), recreated the experience of 10 days of silent Vipassanā meditation in Joshua Tree, CA where she heard “the last minutes in the life of music.” Recent performance-installations have considered the effects of sound on the body. FIAT (2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) each consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. In the Matchess Trilogy (2013-2018, Trouble in Mind), she used the limited palette of the Ace Tone combo organ, Rhythm Ace drum machine, viola, and voice to craft transient sound collages on beds of droning ambient noise. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018 and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden in 2022. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sound and Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Lecturer in the Sound Arts and Industries MA program at Northwestern University.