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Comfort Music: nunn & Rin Peisert/Jason Stein

nunn is the harsh ambient project of Liv Mershon and R. who began collaborating in 2014 in Bloomington, IN, releasing music as Double Mastectomy, Nyx'd, and Lech. nunn exists between dissociation and meditation, drawing inspiration from masochistic cycles and the divine found in catharsis. They deliver an embodied & chaotic improvisational performance over a dynamic bed of highly effected synth drones, contact mic vocals, frenzied beats, and sampled sound.

Rin Peisert is an interdisciplinary artist who works with bodies, sounds, found objects, and live actions to explore conditions for interdependence and sincerity. Her site-responsive actions use intervention and interaction as tools to reorganize behavior and to exaggerate the quotidian. Peisert’s performance work has been seen at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Power Station of Art Shanghai, The Momentary Museum, and Defibrillator Art Gallery, and as well as street corners, rooftops, a bank vault, a bomb shelter, and a market for arranged marriages. Peisert has an MFA in Art Practice from School of Visual Arts, NYC. She also co-produces and conducts the graphic score series, Image of Thought and is the Performing Arts Curatorial Artist in Residence at Elastic Arts, organizing the quarterly series, Relative Intensity Noise.

Jason Stein is among the mere handful of improvisers who play the bass clarinet exclusively. Stein leads the acclaimed trio Locksmith Isidore as well as his own quartet. He contributes to several of the leading bands on Chicago’s new-music scene and has brought a vital voice to the freest of free-jazz jams. Stein’s playing showcases an extraordinary expertise on the bass clarinet, which ranges from powerful post-bop lines to ear-grabbing wails in the altissimo range. Chicago writer Neil Tesser notes that “Stein’s playing has a rawboned swagger particular to Chicago jazz in all its manifestations – from the trad playing of Bud Freeman and Jimmy McPartland in the 20s, through the tenor titans of the 50s, through the adventurers who formed the AACM in the 60s, and right up to the city’s renowned modern cadre of new-music improvisers.” Stein moved to Chicago in 2005 and has since recorded for such labels as Leo, Delmark, Not Two, Atavistic, 482 Music, Clean Feed, Astral Spirits, and Northern Spy. Stein has performed throughout the US and Europe as both a bandleader and sideman and has amassed a discography of over 40 albums.