pan y rosas release fifty-one aural selfies // real time by Klaysstarr Nets

Klaysstarr Nets (Iain Findlay-Walsh he/him) is a sound artist, musician and writer based in Glasgow. He teaches sound art and experimental practice at the University of Glasgow.

His first album on pan y rosas discos is a nested problem that captures a listening process. A self-occupation and a form of dreaming. One that listens to solitary listening and documents life at close proximity. Restless street sounds turned inside out. Networks feel for a now that sings.

Get the album here!

Library Experimental with Amanda Kraus and Helena Ford – April 23, 2023

Library Experimental is an ongoing series focusing on Chicago’s experimental musicians. It is happening at the Chicago Public Library in Jefferson Park on Sunday, April 23 from 2-4pm.

Early! Free! Kid friendly! If the kids are patient!

The first show after a pandemically long hiatus features Amanda Kraus and Helena Ford.

Jefferson Park library is located at 5363 W Lawrence. Convenient to both bus and blue line. https://www.chipublib.org/locations/38/

Amanda Kraus photo by Daniel Kraus.

photo by Daniel Kraus

Amanda Kraus is a local educator/percussionist. She can be found online at amandakraus.org/music.

Previous work in various ensembles:
Arc Pair (ongoing)
March 25, 2020 ESS Quarantine Concert
Previous Jefferson Park EXP performance Nov 1, 2020
Boob Sweat (2017)
PLAN Quartet (2019)

***

Helena Ford (Chicago, IL) is a Chicago experimental musician. Her practice focuses on drone and durational performances, incorporating elements of musique concrete, minimalism, and free improvisation. Her primary instruments include no-input mixing board, baritone guitar, and synthesizers.

https://helenaford.bandcamp.com/

pan y rosas release Wasserläufer by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Markus Reineke

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen is Finnish composer, writer and musician who makes music in the worlds of free improvisation, electronics, and (live) coding using electric guitars, pianos, clarinets, and synths. He lives in a small village, between two lakes, in the middle of the forest.

Markus Reineke has made music using electronics since 1996. He has been freely improvising since 2014. He uses recorders and electronics.

On their new album for pan y rosas Jukka and Markus created five improvised songs that they created using recorders, objects, an electric guitar, and electronics.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release este instante by Omar Grandoso!

Omar Grandoso was born in Buenos Aires. He plays piano and trombone among other instruments. He has participated in many projects with different ensembles and plays regularly with many musicians in improvisation contexts. In addition to playing with free music groups, he also works within experimental films and contemporary dance; making compositions for theater, visual arts and multimedia. He is an activist in the musicians’ organization, MO – Músicos Organizados, that tries to both improve the work conditions of musicians and to strengthen their ties with the community.

To avoid the fear brought on by the Covid pandemic and Omar concentrated on playing the electric piano in his room. After restrictions were lifted in Buenos Aires he scheduled two record sessions at a studio and tried to recreate what he had been doing in his room. He improvised and let other musics (and musics of others) simply appear in the improvisation. After letting the work sit for a time, he began working to condense the recording experience into an instant of the present. Este instante is an effort to converge memories from the past with visions of the future in a small particle of time called music.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release automatic fruit by robert stokowy!

Robert Stokowy is an artist and composer from Cologne, Germany who currently lives and works in Chicago. His work consists of experimental compositions, text-based interventions, performances and installations. More conceptual works utilize artistic practices such as photography, writing, printmaking and drawing. All projects are framed and connected by an overarching artistic research process, focusing on inner structural characteristics of found or created sonic environments.

The starting point to Automatic Fruit was a collection of sound recordings that Robert made between 2019 and 2021. Robert stripped the recorded sounds down to the bare bones of their brittle core. Shaving frequencies from the material until the sound itself became fragile. That point of fragility provided the framework for the arrangement and mixing of the sounds.

Get the album here!

pan y rosas release ravel by jenn kirby!

Jenn Kirby is a composer, performer and music technologist from Ireland and currently based in Scotland. She has a diverse creative output, including instrumental composition, electroacoustic music and avant-pop. Her music has been described as having a “sense of adventure and experimentalism.” Jenn’s performance work is centered around hybrid instrument design, building software, re-purposing hardware, and processing improvised vocalisations. She is a lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland.

On her new album, Ravel, Jenn explores different aspects of the manipulation of time. She asks how the digital results of manipulating time relate to her perception of time in the physical world. Having become comfortable watching videos at 2x speed, she recently found herself wanting to 2x a video call. In that moment, getting the information in real-time seemed inefficient. She wondered if she saw efficiency as simply squashing as much as possible into as little time as possible, and what that means for making and experiencing music.

The artifacts produced from extended time-stretching are further processed to create textures and glitches. The resulting fragments suggest things lost or things found. Through a collapsing, expanding and ravelling of information, something new is created. It is not simply the same thing played fast or slow, but a new ‘thing’ that is very different to the original source, though still connected to it. The foundations of the songs are improvisations and there were no restrictions on the processing and production except that nothing was redone. Though the material was shaped and transformed in many ways, it has an origin that is connected to a time, place and emotion.

Get the album here!

Jefferson Park EXP with tay_ploops and Jenna Junk – December 12, 2pm

In lieu of free live shows at the neighborhood library, we’re doing free live shows via twitch! The next show is on Sunday December 12 at 2pm (CST/UTC-06), join us!

https://www.twitch.tv/jeffersonparkexp

Jessica Gabriel is a multidisciplinary artist, puppeteer, life model, permaculturalist, poet, clown, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Her project tay_ploops is based on tape loops and other textures.

https://jessicagabriel.ca/

***

Jenna Boyles aka Jenna Junk is an interdisciplinary artist and magnet for things no one else wants. Joyfully defying landfills, she gleans sound from objects labeled “trash” and “obsolete.” Rewiring old electronics and embedding conductive textiles into trash instruments, she articulates the ubiquity and resonance of unwanted things. Touching upon the resilience and power of memory held within material, her performances play between the sensitivity and unpredictability of squishy-bodies and hard-wired machines. She received her MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 and BFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. Her costumes and illuminated objects have appeared in parades and forests, on rivers and beaches. Jenna has performed at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago IL and was a recent New Media Artist in residence at Mana Contemporary Chicago.

https://jennaboyles.com/

IG: @jennajunk

pan y rosas release ribcage/davidsongs by cut a lonely figure!

Cut A Lonely Figure (formerly known as Thank You, Merciless Onlookers) is the musical alias of Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records founder David McNamee.

His new album for pan y rosas consists of two pices. ribcage is a longform brutalist piano composition figuratively depicting two pianos being slowly pulled apart and then pushed back together over the course of its pounding 23-minute runtime. The second piece, davidsongs, is a medley of semi-improvised pieces for chamber organ and piano that functions as a sort of comedown or balm from the intensity of the a-side.

Get the album here!

Jefferson Park EXP with Visda Goudarzi/Anna Xambó and Gerard Roma – November 21, 2pm

In lieu of free live shows at the neighborhood library, we’re doing free live shows via twitch! The next show is on Sunday November 21 at 2pm (CST/UTC-06), join us!

https://www.twitch.tv/jeffersonparkexp

‘immerse in the lake’ is a remote live coding performance for two laptop performers distributed on two different continents. The performance is based on processing sound generated by crowdsourced and personal site-specific field recordings from Chicago throughout the year. The piece is a real-time improvisation and a free interpretation of John Cage’s ‘A Dip in the Lake’.

Visda Goudarzi and Anna Xambó started this collaboration in summer 2021 for the performance “Livesourcing: Audience Participation in a Live Coding Performance” premiered at Ear Taxi Festival, Chicago, IL, USA. https://youtu.be/FQXAOBvSZBk

Visda Goudarzi is a computer musician working at the intersection of audio and human-computer interaction. Her research interests include sound and music computing, live coding, and data sonification, sound synthesis, and the application of new media in art. She designs and performs using interactive and participatory sonic interfaces. Her sonic works include live electronic performances, live coding and data driven sound. She is an Assistant Professor of Audio Arts and Acoustics at Columbia College Chicago.

https://www.colum.edu/academics/faculty/detail/visda-goudarzi.html

Anna Xambó is an experimental electronic music producer and researcher. Her research and practice focus on sound and music computing systems looking at novel approaches to collaborative, participatory, and live coding experiences. To date, she has released three solo recordings: “init” (2010, Carpal Tunnel), “On the Go” (2013, Carpal Tunnel) and “H2RI” (2018, pan y rosas). Her solo and group performances have been presented internationally in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, UK and USA. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in music and audio technology at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and a member of the Music, Technology and Innovation – Institute of Sonic Creativity (MTI^2).

http://annaxambo.me

***

Gerard Roma investigates the inner life of sounds by poking at computers and other electronic circuits. His work often involves digital transformation of recorded sound textures coerced into algorithmic forms via live coding and self-made audio-visual instruments.

https://g-roma.github.io

Jefferson Park EXP with Becky Grajeda/Beth McDonald and Oblivious Newton Jon – November 13, 2pm

In lieu of free live shows at the neighborhood library, we’re doing free live shows via twitch! The next show is on Saturday November 13 at 2pm (CST/UTC-06), join us!

https://www.twitch.tv/jeffersonparkexp

Becky Grajeda and Beth McDonald first started collaborating in the mid-2010’s, performing several pieces with a variety of musicians, speakers, and actors. After the social and artistic isolation of 2020, they were eager to collaborate on a new project, but didn’t feel safe to resume in-person performance in front of audiences. This facilitated a rare opportunity to explore sound worlds both new and old, without the deadline of a particular performance date or artistic goal. This recording is one waypoint on this exploration, and is the result of several months of improvisation, research, and drinking seltzer.

http://www.beckygrajeda.com/
https://bethtuba.com/

***

Jon Strasheim’s project Oblivious Newton Jon began in 2018 as an outlet for Jon to explore the relationships between sound, noise, and music through a set of lenses different than he had previously used in his music career. Using electrical power noise as the source sound, Jon processes this noise through multiple series of effects pedals that operate as a sort of makeshift synthesizer. Accompany Jon as he attempts to navigate his way home from his explorations of noises interacting with each other in their overlapping circles of harmony and chaos.

https://obliviousnewtonjon.bandcamp.com/