7pm Doors

Em Spel is the solo project of Chicago-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emma Hospelhorn. With one foot in pop music and the other in avant-garde classical music, her music is a subtle take on chamber folk: the lush instrumentation is layered into these compositions in such a natural way that listeners aren't totally confronted by it until a flute or violin line or a delicate electronic texture cuts through and the track is suddenly presented in a new light. Her debut album, The Carillon Towers, folds myriad textures into songs that feel alternately lush, spiky, delicate, abstract, and grounded, yet simultaneously unified and cohesive.

"A scintillating solo debut....[Em Spel's] pop-adjacent experimental folk features her lovely, elastic vocals, her flute, and her intricately programmed electronics."—Chicago Reader

"A marvel of restraint, precision and quiet....like a folktale turned oddly, surreally modern, a magical realist scenario set in the right now." —Dusted Magazine

Craig Davis Pinson is a composer, improviser, and producer from Mexico City, Mexico. His projects range from contemporary classical pieces, to improvised music, to studio collaborations with singer-songwriters. As a guitarist, he’s inspired by rock subgenres of the mathy, shoegazey, and heavy variety, as well as by avant-garde bowed instrument techniques in the context of his experimental music trio Fat Pigeon. As a writer and teacher, his research has focused on the audiovisual elements of contemporary Mexican political cinema and on the social histories of popular music at large. 

Pinson String Band is an extension of Craig Davis Pinson’s series of hybrid collaborative works that skirt the line between composition and improvisation. In the current iteration, bowed guitar (Craig), cello (Wilson Tanner Smith), and violin (Noah Jenkins & Sophie Gordon) are intertwined as one giant instrument to create textures that move between the visceral and the ethereal.