Sound & Gravity: A Celebration of EXPERIMENTAl sound
Article by Grace Hudson-Mairet / Photos by Charlie Stapleton
Day three of the Sound & Gravity festival presented an extensive celebration of experimental music, featuring an impressive range of diverse instrumentations. The festival brought together eccentric personalities from across the country to experience sets at venues throughout Chicago’s Bricktown neighborhood.
The evening began at Guild Row, a coworking space by day and event venue by night, where Advance Base, Chicago local Owen Ashworth’s recording project, launched a peaceful start. Filling the resonant space with reverberating synths, Ashworth enchanted audiences with descriptive storytelling bathed in a whirlpool of sound. Ashworth performed songs such as “The Year I Lived in Richmond,” “The Tooth Fairy,” and “Big Chris Electric” off his 2024 album Horrible Occurrences, a collection of self-proclaimed “sad songs about people I made up.” Charming interludes of deadpan humor complemented his melancholic lyrics.
Following this calm vibe, the Eli Winter Ensemble brought the energy up at Beat Kitchen with a genre-bending fusion of instrumental jazz, rock, and folk. Headed by Chicago resident Eli Winter on guitar, the ensemble included Sam Wagster of Fruit Bats on pedal steel, Chicago’s Tyler Damon on drums, Andrew Scott Young on upright and electric bass, David Sexton on fiddle, and Gerrit Hatcher on saxophone. The band performed songs from Winter’s newest album, A Trick of the Light, with the grooving rhythm section and snappy Mario Kart-esque melodies interspersed with intense moments of distortion or a chilling pedal steel solo. The band faced technical difficulties, suffering from unintended crackles and a brief pause; still, they finished the set strong. Throughout their performance, each musician pushed the boundaries of their instrument. They experimented with overblowing techniques to reach high registers of the saxophone, percussive knocking on upright bass, and speaker manipulation to create pulsing waves of sound.
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Over at Hungry Brain, guitarist Mary Halvorson and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier continued the experimentation. Producing a vast range of sounds from both instruments, the duo combined an impressive pedal board with physical manipulations, inserting and rearranging objects in the acoustic piano to create an array of contrasting percussive and melodic sonorities. The duo’s fearless synergy portrayed a captivating representation of contemporary avant-garde jazz, flowing freely between sporadic bursts of improvisation and surprising moments of clarity. Later in the evening, the venue hosted a jazz trio of drummer Chris Corsano, saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark, and electronic noise improviser Bonnie Han Jones, standing in for jazz legend Joe McPhee, who was unable to perform due to unexpected health complications. In his absence, the trio dedicated their set to McPhee, incorporating multi-media clips from his life and work into their improvisation.
Back at Beat Kitchen, Tyondai Braxton epitomized the festival’s name of Sound & Gravity. In almost complete darkness, Braxton’s figure, lit from below by a solitary laptop and hunched over a mass of wires, evoked a mad scientist of sonority. In one unified set, Braxton led audience members through ever-changing soundscapes, layering everyday sounds into almost extraterrestrial electronic world-building. Through his use of subwoofers, sound became a great equalizer, forming a bridge between cinematic surges of vibrations and pounding club-like rhythms, unifying the sonic with the embodied experience.
Finally, Joan Shelley completed the night with a pleasant folk set, hosted by the festival’s organizing venue Constellation. An indie folk musician from Louisville, KY, Shelley performed songs from her newest album Real Warmth, including “Here in the High and Low,” a song that explores the passing of time in a refreshing message of resistance, and the haunting “Who Do You Want Checking in on You,” which represents the pain of caring for aging parents. The band, featuring Will Thomas on drums, Philip Parker on cello, and James Elkington on pedal steel, supported one another with great sensitivity in a comfortable cohesion. Shelley’s calm charisma radiated throughout the set, from her playful audience interactions to her clear, melodic delivery.
Started last year by Chicago’s own Mike Reed, founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival and current programming chair of the Chicago Jazz Festival, Sound & Gravity offers free-thinking Chicagoans an exciting array of fresh, new music, featuring some of the best artists from the cutting edge of experimental genres. For those willing to brave the unknown, the third annual festival is an event to look out for next September.
Photo Pass: Sound & Gravity Festival
