Kreielsheimer Visiting Artist Spring Lecture Series: Music at the Border of Sound with Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney

About This Event

Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney are musicians who have released 5 albums as a duo, as well as co-creating and performing compositions for orchestras, voices, electronics, video, and non-traditional instrumentations. They describe their work as music on the border of sound, working with sensory substitution “through a poetic lens of sound and image.” Kang and Kenney will share their collaborative and solo works and discuss their process in the Summer Residency at Laboratory, Spokane. Their lecture will also include a presentation on the January 2022 exhibition at Gonzaga University Urban Arts Center, as part of Mill Canyon Sound Actions collective.

About the Artists: Eyvind Kang is a Faculty Professor, Co-Director of Composition and Experimental Sound Practices, Performer-Composer, and Experimental Pop at the California Institute of Art. As a violist he has been featured by a wide range of independent musicians including Bill Frisell, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, the Sun City Girls, and Secret Chiefs. His ongoing, genre defying collaboration with composer and singer Jessika Kenney has been described as "serious, refined music" (The New York Times), taking the form of sound actions and installations, choral and orchestral works, and minimalist vocal and string arrangement, with two releases on Ideologic Organ (2011, 2013) curated by Stephen O'Malley.

Jessika Kenney is an award-winning vocalist, composer, sound artist, producer, writer and teacher, working for the last 25 years in realms of the subtle melody, with attention to ways of listening, perceiving, and translating experience. Kenney's music can be heard on Ideologic Organ, Black Truffle, Weyrd Son, SIGE, and other labels. She has performed her own compositions and those of many colleagues, as well as music of Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Sarah Davachi, Hossein Omoumi, Morton Feldman, Giacinto Scelsi, Marina Rosenfeld, Jarrad Powell, Trimpin, Tadao Sawai, and many others, informed by the atmospheres and techniques absorbed through the practices and deep study of Javanese sindhenan and Persian radifs. Kenney's ongoing collaborations with Eyvind Kang have been described as "serious, refined music" by the New York Times. Her involvements in noise, metal, electronic music and minimalism arise out of her Spokane punk origins and her insights into trans-disciplinary ways of knowing music and performance. Her 2015 gamelan-based LP "ATRIA" was released by the avant-metal SIGE label, alongside a large-scale, site-specific and interactive sound, calligraphic score, sculpture, and video installation called "Anchor Zero", filling five rooms for a month at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.