TAK Ensemble will perform two works written for the ensemble by Weston Olencki and Michelle Lou, each integrating bespoke electronics to create soundscapes that span ecstatically shimmering to hauntingly subterranean. 

when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean by Weston Olencki is a performance project engaging with the legacies of early scientific modernity and their relationships to experimental sound practices and archival preservation. Borrowing its title from the psychogeographical excursions of W.G. Sebald, when the great fires… takes its own journey through real and imagined histories of electricity, using myriad perspectives and mythologies around electrical force to re-enchant its ubiquitous presence throughout American industrial, spiritual, and vernacular narratives. The work posits an “almost-could-have-happened” scenario set in North America around the turn of the 20th century: when electricity, the very force that undergirds our current digitized reality, remained mysteriously nascent in a space of imagination and experimentation as a new unwieldy, yet magical phenomenon.

IN A FOREST is a rare vocal work by Rome Prize winner, Michelle Lou. The immersive, slow-moving, 40-minute composition creates an 8-channel spatialized forest, spinning an ecology of synthetic and organic sound.  Lou’s original text for the work crafts a deep sense of mourning and less with a moment of lightness and hope as the work concludes. The ensemble, treated with live processing, weaves thickly pulled harmonic textures into an almost-drone space, with shifting rhythms that sculpt at once a sense of geological time, and a haunting grunge song.