An evening of fire and fellowship. Norman W. Long & Sharkey Zalek w/ special guests TBA. There will be cake.

Tickets available here.

As an artist living on Chicago’s South Side, Norman Long works at the intersection of sound, ecology, and community, utilizing nature as both a material and conceptual foundation in his multidisciplinary practice. His work centers on local ecology and landscape—particularly the sonic ecologies of Black neighborhoods in southeast Chicago—as a space to explore and reimagine memory, identity, and futures.

Norman leads soundwalks, improvising in groups and duos with modular synths; conducts field recordings; composes; and creates sound installations. His practice foregrounds nature not as a neutral backdrop but as a dynamic and politicized terrain shaped by race, history, migration, and place.

His work engages discourses on landscape and sound, including Rosalind Krauss’s Sculpture in the Expanded Field and R. Murray Schafer’s development of acoustic ecology in the 1970s, while grounding his sonic, conceptual, and compositional vocabulary in contemporary Black diasporic sonic practices. These include artists such as KMRU, Rasheeda Phillips and Moor Mother (Black Quantum Futurism), Jayve Montgomery, Allen Moore, Angel Bat Dawid, Russel EL Butler, Robert A.A. Lowe, and Forest Management, as well as Black musical traditions such as house, techno, free jazz, and dub.

These influences shape sound installations and compositions that mix field recordings and modular synth sounds, such as Calumet n Dub and Re-membering/Re-Presencing, which center on field recordings and data sonification/data-bending from plant, soil, air, and water. Often using datasets from agencies like the EPA and USGS, as well as a device that converts bioelectric data to MIDI, his work reveals hidden networks of connection between the environment, technology, and Black life in Chicago’s South Deering neighborhoods. His latest releases—Lines of Flight, Strinning Long/Heinemann Trio, and his solo albums Un dialogue entre terre et mer and Scenes of Contestation—are available on Bandcamp.

Sharkey (Sara) Zalek is a transdisciplinary artist, international performer, independent producer, curator, and educator based in Chicago for over twenty years. Rooted in a performance practice through physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, and poetic. Drawing from a deep well of creative exploration, they teach, co-lead, and facilitate environments that encourage thoughtful interpersonal connection.

​Zalek performs often in both live and online situations; the City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022. They were a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist in 2015, 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee and a Ragdale Foundation Fellow in 2017. The Elastic Arts Foundation awarded them a 3-year Curatorial Grant in 2020 for Hot Mess! An episodic event featuring over seventy artists who engaged in interdisciplinary tactics using audio, video, and spatial mixing.

Currently they partner with the Japanese Cultural Center, the Roman Susan Gallery, and Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education as an artist researcher. Through Butoh Curious Chi, Zalek has connected hundreds of national and international teaching artists with Chicago art makers across genres in the independent and fringe arenas, including dance, butoh, physical theater, experimental and improvisational music.

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Tags: Norman W. Long, Oak Park, Sharkey Zalek, Side Yard Sounds. Scorpio Celebration