Compound Yellow’s ‘Winter Sounds’ is a series of indoor events in the cozy upstairs gallery space that features 5 artists or groups from a variety of backgrounds and locations. The general motif of the evening is focused on shorter improvised sets in the electronic/electro-acoustic/ambient genres. The evening features artists from Chicago and Oak Park.

Levinson/Mahlmeister/Davison:

Comprised of Jamie Levinson & Donny Mahlmeister, the Chicago duo uses synthesizers in combination with tactile instruments (Levinson is a drummer/percussionist & Mahlmeister a guitarist) to create cinematic snapshots of sonance. While the duo absolutely gives glances toward artists like Eno, Lanois, Reich, Riley & the kosmische places and spaces of Deuter, they are absolutely of the NOW, in step with ambient explorers like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Panabrite, or locals Bitchin’ Bajas, TALsounds or Brett Naucke.

For this show the duo will be a trio; they be joined by Joshua Davison. As half of the experimental IDM act String Theory, Joshua recorded music for some wonderful independent electronic labels, including Manchester’s Skam, Chicago’s Consumers Research and Development, and Milwaukee’s Wobblyhead. He describes his industrial-kosmische tone poems as collaborations between the machine ensemble and its operator. The complexity and randomness of shift-registers, channeled by hand into drifting voltage landscapes.

Jeff Kimmel:

Jeff Kimmel is a Chicago-based clarinetist and educator. His work encompasses improvisation, new and experimental music, and interdisciplinary collaborations, often incorporating electronics. His discography includes releases on New Focus Recordings, Dinzu Artefacts, Amalgam, and Peira.

Norman Long:

Norman W. Long (b. 1973, Chicago, IL) is a sound artist/designer/composer based in Chicago, IL. His current work focuses on sound art production within the larger context of landscape. He has exhibited and/or performed in galleries in Chicago, Ithaca, New York, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The processes involved in his practice lie within the area of field recording, electro-acoustic composition and dub technique. His art/studio practice involves gardening, collecting, performing and recording to create, objects, environments, situations in which the artist and audience are engaged in a dialogue about memory, space, value, silence and the invisible. It is his desire that his practice offers us a space to consider our relationship to sound via social, ecological structures, our interiority and to affirm our existence.

Bob Konow:

Bob Konow loves tones, waveforms and all manner of noise makers. He is also mildly agoraphobic.

Hali Palombo:

Hali Palombo is a composer, visual artist and filmmaker from Chicago, Illinois. Born in Northfield, Minnesota, she has had a natural curiosity about the midwestern United States since a young age. Her work often weaves the absurdity and mundane beauty of Illinois into her records, short films, drawings and paintings.

Palombo is an avid practitioner of “plunderphonics”: sampling existing musical/aural works and intertwining them into something brand new, whether it’s shortwave radio and cb radio samples, wax cylinder audio, and field recordings taken from midwestern points of interest. She also draws great inspiration from endless adventures throughout the country – be them on google maps or in her car – often photographing, filming or drawing her findings.

Palombo began making work at age 26, and despite getting somewhat of a late start for an artist, she has amassed a lush body of varied and careful work. Her influences include Philip Glass, Flannery O’connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Il (she would like her ashes scattered there someday, hopefully not anytime soon).

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Tags: Compound Yellow, Donny Mahlmeister, Hali Palombo, Jamie Levinson, Jeff Kimmel, Levinson/Mahlmeister/Davison, Norman Long, Oak Park, Winter Sounds: Davidson/Levinson/Mahlmeister/Norman Long/Jeff Kimmel/ Bob Konow/Hali Palumbo