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Concert Thu Feb 05 2015
Arnold Dreyblatt is giving you (nodal) excitations at Lampo
Long-running Chicago experimental arts and music organization Lampo soft-launched its Winter 2015 season with a very surprising and exciting opener. This Saturday at 8 p.m., the Graham Foundation's Madlener House (4 W. Burton Pl.) will host the legendary composer Arnold Dreyblatt. Dreyblatt will perform two pieces; Spin Ensemble (2011), a piece created with recordings of an MRI machine, and a live performance of his best known piece, Nodal Excitation (1979).
If you are of a certain age, you might remember Dreyblatt from his CD on John Zorn's Tzadik label (Animal Magnetism, 1995). If you're a bit older, you might remember the Nodal Excitation LP on India Navigation (or its reissue on Dexter's Cigar). He's best known for his shimmering, overtone-rich pieces involving taught strings and wires set to vibrating by plucking, bowing, or hammering. The opening piece sounds equally intriguing: "In Spin Ensemble (2011), Dreyblatt creates a palette of acoustic signals and patterns from recordings of an MRI machine (specifically the "Siemens Magnetom Symphony Maestro Class") in the Martin-Luther-Hospital in Berlin. He considers the device something like a giant Tesla coil, in which the alignment and resonances of a powerful magnetic field are gradually altered by rotating radio frequencies. Under Dreyblatt's direction, Siemens technicians operated the machine expressly for these recordings, searching for software settings to generate a desired sound. Later he analyzed the audio segments, and grouped them by pitch, rhythm and density. For the resulting composition, these files have been combined and fused, but they have not been digitally treated in any way."
Tickets are FREE with RSVP. Click here to reserve. (update: tickets are sold out, but it might not hurt to wait around to see if any claimed tickets open up.)