Two artists come from very different ends of the contemporary and experimental music worlds to meet in a program of invented languages and electronically augmented extended vocal performance. Jaap Blonk, internationally renowned sound poet, electronic musician, and composer based in Holland, performs new work with electronics and augmented voice. Blonk’s work builds upon what the early 20th century poet Hugo Ball called “poetry without words,” that is, an arrangement of vocalized sounds that embody “raw orality,” to quote the Canadian sound poet Paul Dutton. His current project is Dr. Voxoid’s Next Move, which writer Kurt Gottschalk explains as his persona of “a professor speaking on the history of sound poetry and falling into the subject.”
Soprano Nina Dante, vocalist with the Chicago-based Fonema Consort, will join a program of scored work by herself as well as composers Aaron Cassidy, Stratis Minakakis, and Pablo Chin. This work stems from the sonic capacities of language; Cassidy’s demanding I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips requires real-time pitch-matching by the vocalist in performance, through a recitation of multiple simultaneous, multilingual texts by Rimbaud and Christian Bök.
Cost: $10-15