Coppice

We are excited to present The Pleasance & The Purchase, our new 7″ release on Italian label Senufo Editions. Join us at the listening party on Saturday, May 12, at 8 PM at High Concept Laboratories!  It will be followed by a live set of new works for prepared pump organ and electronics developed during our HCL sponsorship.

We will be joined in performance by our friend, Chicago-based artist Holly Murkerson, who created the artwork for the record, and has produced a set of limited edition prints for this occasion.

This evening will also mark the first phase of a dialogue between our live setting and the work of artist Tara Hills.

Also join Maria Jönsson as she presents the culmination of her residency at HCL, Lawn Sculpture: a new body of work exploring the found object as maquette. Additional viewing hours Sunday May 13th, noon-5 PM.

As Sponsored Artists at High Concept Laboratories we have developed a new work for tape: Pied (soon to be released by Notice Recordings), and expanded our live repertoire with two new compositions for prepared pump organ and electronics: Bramble and a second yet to be titled. In the process of the sponsorship and many conversations, we have refined our communication as collaborative composers and entwined our performance techniques elaborately. We are very thankful of the HCL team’s support and services, for allowing us to delve into our collaboration in search of brand new works.

Our Stasisfield release Vinculum (Courses) has been reflected upon by Disquiet as one of the top 10 free netlabel releases of 2011.

The netlabel Stasisfield, at stasisfield.com, run by John Kannenberg, has ventured deep into rarefied sonic territory in the past, but its current release may be its most sonically remote yet. [Continue reading...]

In late January we began an artist residency at Chicago’s creative incubator High Concept Laboratories. Check out our first HCL blog entry about our process composing Pied, our second work for tape and first project of the residency. We’ll continue to make updates there as the residency continues.

Details about Notice Recordings‘ release of Pied on cassette will be announced shortly! Sign up for our e-mailing list to stay tuned, the link is at the bottom of every page on our website.

Check out photos from the Close/Far Family Tour throughout the Midwest this past October with Awn, Quarry House, NNN Cook, and Coppice.

We’re looking forward to present a custom-design instrument for Coppice by Andrew Furse (of Tiny Music).

Apiary couples twin-bellows into a new musical instrument; a free-reed expression box. Similar to how a music hold perforated discs containing songs, the instrument holds up to two slides containing free reeds in various tunings. The instrument is activated  by manually operating the bellows. You can read Andrew’s notes about the instrument here.

We’re looking forward to compose new works for the Apiary in the coming year, and hope you can join us at our first presentation of it:

Packer Schopf Gallery
942 W. Lake St., Chicago

Sunday, November 20, 2011, 3 PM – donation-based admission

The event will also include a performance of Seam as a trio with electro-acoustic cellist Sarah J. Ritch.

Quarry House

The Close/Far Family is an artist collective and record label initially based in Springfield, MO. Since its inception in 2000, the bands, musicians, engineers, and sound artists have moved across the country to Chicago, Brooklyn, and St. Louis. Despite these geographic distances, the label and its constituents still actively collaborate in music production, commercial recording, and playing live.

This October, Close/Far is planning a midwest tour, in which groups from the collective will perform a single morphing set of music / sound art. The various groups will intertwine, shape-shift, and transition between each other. Material will range from composition to semi-improvisation to completely spontaneous. Our goal is to expose the process and lineage behind the forming of these groups, sub-groups, and solo acts. It will be a showcase of the artists’ sensibilities and vocabularies through the display of individual adaptations as groups are formed, juxtaposed, and re-contextualized.

Groups and artists will include:

• Awn: Electroacoustic improv trio (Springfield, MO / St.Louis, MO / Chicago, IL )
• Quarry House: Haunting avant-pop (Springfield, MO / Brooklyn, NY / Chicago, IL)
• Coppice: Bellows and electronics duo (Chicago, IL)
• N.N.N. Cook: Overtone wave drones laced with acoustic embellishments and tapes (St. Louis, MO)
• With possible appearances of The Current Group: An intermittently occurring ensemble formed when any number of players spontaneously joins another pre-existing group or solo performer in improvisation (Springfield, MO / St.Louis, MO / Chicago, IL / Brooklyn, NY).

The tour will begin on October 8th, 2011, in St. Louis. Free downloads and more information can be found at www.close-far.com. Full details here.

N.N.N. Cook

On September 6th we will perform The Flavor of Missing Mortar for shruti box and electronics, and Brim with parlor organ and electronics, at Bond Chapel in Music Searching for a Body:

A concert gathering 4 sets of experimental musicians from the Chicago electro-acoustic music community: Soundbeast (Anita Chari & Carol Genetti), Coppice (Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer), Jim Baker, and Joseph Clayton Mills.

Presenting a variety of instrumentation and styles, Music Searching for a Body will explore manifold dynamics between improvisation and composition, both through embodied and disembodied sound.

Soundbeast is a duo of two female voices, which explores the embodiment and physicality of singing, the interplay between different traditions of vocal production, as well as how the body interacts with thought in the process of singing. Coppice’s delicate compositions integrate variable bellowed instruments and custom electronics, adapted in ways responsive location and aural perspectives.  Jim Baker will play a solo set on the pipe organ, comprising music likely to be mostly or entirely improvised. Finally, Haptic’s Joseph Clayton Mills constructs semi-improvised performances that explore the timbral and tonal properties of everyday objects, repurposed electronics, and traditional instrumentation.