Saturday 20 April 2019, 7.30pm
Anna & Elizabeth & friends present an evening of repertoire inspired by tradition.
feat. the music of Laurie Spiegel, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Meredith Monk, Dolly Collins & more
+ the premiere of 'Wife Of Usher’s Well” - a short film by Anna & Elizabeth
“an audacious step forward ... subtly pushing at what folk music sounds like and what it can do” – Pitchfork
The duo of Virginian singer Elizabeth LaPrelle and Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Anna Roberts-Gevalt recently released The Invisible Comes to Us, their second LP on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings - a spellbinding reconfiguration of ancient folk ballads that sees the duo’s immersion in Appalachian music move to a place of boundless experimentation.
Live, Anna & Elizabeth seek to honestly channel the often cryptic and complex narratives of the songs they have collected. Resisting cosy 'show and tell' didacticism, they instead draw the audience into an impressionistic continuum of song, drone, sound collage and improvisation, often using hand-woven 'crankies' to visually illustrate these rich, foreboding and eternal tales. The pair have moved towards AV installation work as a means to further develop this lateral approach to performance, most recently crafting a multimedia piece exploring the legacy and music of Salem ballad singer Texas Gladden for Cube Fest in Blacksburg, VA.
The sound of warm-blooded wiring, turned on and tapped into, emotive and electric, storied machines speaking through all too human hands.
Saloli is Portland, Oregon resident Mary Sutton, a multi-instrumentalist who with The Deep End, her debut album for Kranky, has settled on the analog synthesizer as her medium for a series of pieces that thread complementary shades of soft-hued hypnosis, dazed modal introspection, icy amusement park reverie, and lunar lullaby into a suite of contemplative melody and synthetic communion.
Written specifically for live playing, Sutton’s songs are active rather than ambient yet their structure is more suggestive than scripted, full of lulls, asymmetries, and daydreams, and can sound as elemental as oceans over large soundsystems just as they radiate warmth in more intimate zones.
Beyond her own solo work, Sutton is deeply involved with the Emahoy Sheet Music Project, an initiative to transcribe and publish the complete works of the incredible Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, so that her music can be played, performed, studied, and enjoyed by people throughout the world.
