Jack Langon - Organ
Hunter Brown - Electronics
Adam Shead - Percussion
Jack Langdon (b.1994) is a musician, filmmaker, and writer. He creates work that heightens our attention towards commonplace sounds, images, and narratives—reassembling things taken for granted into strange, elusive constructions. His works are stark and expansive, drawing inspiration from the landscape and folk modernisms of the American Midwest. As a musician, Jack performs on a variety of keyboard and string instruments as well as composes concert music. His films focus on landscape, the built environment, and people, and he writes on the political economy of cultural production. His concert music has been presented and supported by Klangspuren Schwaz, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Composers Conference, the Fromm Foundation, Northwestern University, New Music Mosaic, Williams College, Microfest Prague, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, reMusik, and MISE-EN_PLACE, and has been performed by Yarn/Wire, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, Miroslav Beinhauer, Current Resonance, Talea Ensemble, Jack Yarbrough, Ensemble Dal Niente, Trio SÆITENWIND, Yoshi Weinberg, Southland Ensemble, Graeme Shields, Sara Constant, RenegadeEnsemble, Minnesota Sinfonia, The St. Olaf Band, and The St. Olaf Lyric Theater. He has recorded alongside Anthony Vine, Weston Olencki, Kelley Sheehan, Webb Crawford, Jeff Kimmel, and Taylor Ho Bynum. His recordings have been released by Important Records, Sawyer Editions, and Lobby Art Records. His written work has been published by Sound American, Cacophony, and Shred Magazine. Jack is an editor for Culture as Care Journal. He runs Empty Stage Journal & Records. Jack was raised in Keyeser, Wisconsin and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. He belongs to the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and is of German, English, French, Ojibwe, and Irish descent.
Hunter Brown is a composer, improviser, and electronic musician based in Chicago, Illinois. His practice is focused on creating unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and unruly interactions with digital technology. In particular, he is interested in exploring the unstable material properties of digital systems through technological mediated listening and by pushing the physical mechanisms of digital technology to the threshold of failure.
Hunter’s work has been presented internationally at festivals, conferences, and universities such as: Big Ears Festival, Ear Taxi Festival, High Desert Soundings, Conference on AI Music Creativity, Line Upon Line Composer Festival, University of Huddersfield’s FluCoMa Plenary, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, International Workshop on Multilayer Music Representation and Processing, International Computer Music Conference, Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States National Conference, IRCAM Manifeste, and more.
In Chicago, Hunter is a freelance audio engineer who focuses primarily on recording and mixing contemporary classical music, jazz, improvised music, and electroacoustic music. He also serves as the technical director for Ensemble Dal Niente and runs the computer music focused record label Party Perfect!!! alongside collaborator Dominic Coles. He also curates and organizes Bloc Sound, a series for music and sound art from the aesthetic fringes of experimental music.
Adam Shead is an American multi-disciplinary artist of Armenian descent living in Chicago, IL whose practice spans the realms of music, painting, photography, poetry, and community engagement. Throughout his work Shead hopes to create a space for introspective presence in which the codification of experience is dismantled through the search for personal truth. Through this pursuit of truth Adam hopes to provide a reprieve while simultaneously challenging himself and his audience through active participation in invention, compassion, trust, and grace. Shead’s work is rooted in the exploration of themes such as class, nature, nurture, hierarchical structure, egalitarianism, and absurdism.
Shead can be heard performing regularly throughout the United States and Europe at venues such as Constellation, City of Asylum, Trinosophes, De Ruimte, PACA, and Zaal 100. Shead has performed with the likes of Roscoe Mitchell, Marilyn Crispell, Jason Stein, Damon Smith, John Dikeman, Angel Bat Dawid, Mary Oliver, and Ben Zucker; amongst others. Adam has released music with Amalgam, Ears & Eyes Records, Scripts Records, Balance Point Acoustics, Shifting Paradigm Records, Irritable Mystic Records, and Impermanent Records. Since early 2022 Shead has been a permanent member of the iconic NYC no-wave tinged band Cellular Chaos. Shead is the founder and composer of the Adiaphora Orchestra, Adam Shead Quintet, and microplastique.
In 2016 Shead was selected as artist in residence for the Birdsell Project’s summer season in South Bend, IN, converting the cities decommissioned hydro-electric plant into a site specific interactive sound installation. In March of 2018 Shead premiered an audio-visual performance / installation utilizing climate change data, footage of oil fracking and melting glaciers, and original music entitled ‘The Presence of Stillness’ at Slate Arts and Performance. In August of 2021 Shead presented his first solo exhibition of visual art at Birdhouse 606 in Chicago, IL. The exhibition, titled ‘In Limbo’, consisted of Shead’s painting, photography, and collage; coupled with a performance of his musical compositions.
Shead holds a Bachelors of Music in Percussion Performance from Columbia College Chicago as well as Masters of Music in Contemporary Improvisation and a Graduate Certificate in World Performance Studies from the University of Michigan.
Drummer Jeremy Cunningham and saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi have been near-inseparable collaborators for years, working in countless groups together across Chicago’s vibrant jazz community. The duo share a common fascination with melody, sound and rhythm that has brought them together in countless configurations since their first meeting in 2012; however, the transparency of the duo setting allows these two like-minded musicians’ voices to shine even more directly. Their album "A Better Ghost" (in collaboration with LA-based bassist Paul Bryan) is out now on Northern Spy Records.