We are excited to announce the fifth installment of the @alwayscrashingmag Reading & Performance Series, which will be held from 7pm to 9pm at @comfort_station on 7/18/26!
Readers:
Andrew Farkas
Kristin Lueke @klooky
David Welch
Performers:
Jack Langdon @jack.e.langdon
Erica Miller @ericamillermusic
Janna Lee @dancejannadance
Free event/open to the public
well folks, on April 15 it’s the third Wednesday of the month in Bridgeport, which means it’s time for Tangible Music! get that tax extension and come down to hear two masters of abstraction and imagination performing in solo and duo configurations. highly rare and distinguished sounds will be created, snacks will be available, your ears will bloom with possibilities! see you at Tangible Books!
MONDAY FEB 16th
DOORS 7:30 SHOW 8:00PM $15
Leyya Mona Tawil & John King
Jack Langdon
Jennifer Gersten
DM for address, LIC near 39th Ave stop.
https://withfriends.events/event/alwNUdKR/john-king-leyya-mona-tawil-jack-langdon-jennifer-gersten/
King & Tawil have been in action as a duo since 2020.
John King is a composer, violist, guitarist, curator and labor activist. His musical output focuses on spatialized, chance-determined and spontaneously generated sonic structures, for chamber ensembles as well as for free-improvisational group formations. Leyya Mona Tawil is an artist and cultural activist operating internationally. She works in voice, electronics, and hybrid performance practices. She is Syrian and Palestinian, engaged in the world as such.
Jack Langdon is an Ojibwe composer of experimental music. His work investigates incompleteness, indifference, mimesis, stagnation, and material brevity. As a performer, his mediums are the pipe organ and the Ojibwe wooden flute, the bibigwan. Jack will be playing a solo bibigwan set which focuses on mimesis of natural sounds, disjunct phrasing, and silence.
Jennifer Gersten is a violinist and writer from New York City. Formerly a tenured violinist in Helsingborg Symfoniorkester (Sweden), she instigates avant-garde and improvised music projects in the US and Scandinavia. Her improvised work is motivated by the notion of what the violin could do if it only tried. She will play an acoustic solo set that does not unduly harm the violin. see you there.
An evening for the adventurous ear 🎶✨
Join us at IMSS for a night of experimental sound with Texas-based performer Kory Reeder, joined by Chicago musicians Nick Zoulek, Jeff Kimmel, Graham Stephenson, and Jack Langdon. Expect two distinct sets: an opening wave of intense drone, followed by sparse, lowercase-inspired music that invites deep listening.
📍 IMSS 🗓 February 1, 2026 ⏰ 7:00–9:00pm, Doors at 6:30pm
🎫 Tickets on sale now at the link in bio
#imssprograms #experimentalmusic #performance #livemusic
Greetings. I will no longer be active on here and will eventually delete my personal account after some time. If you want my phone #, DM me some time by the end of today or email me for it. I’ll still have the Empty Stage account, but I won’t be on there for anything beyond posting promo for releases and articles. I’ll still be on FB for the time being if you’d rather engage there. Follow my substack, soundcloud, and bandcamp pages where I will be more active in the future.
I have a performance this Sunday at @whistlerchicago on occasion of @infraordinaryarchive ’s new book release. @ishmaelalimusic ’s Akjai will be there and @lamb.like.the.animal will also be joining.
In November, I’ll be in Toronto for a workshop with @oliviash_rtt at the @indigenouscreationstudioutm and then the following week, we’ll be driving out to Minneapolis for the NE/X (North East Experimental): A Festival of Indigenous Performance, curated by @sarosfieldworks in the Northrup-King Building where I’ll premiere a new work of mine “Seven Spirals” for bibigwan and miniature pipe organ. Dates aren’t quite nailed down, but I’ll put them on my website when they’re solid.
Hope to talk to you in the real world, or at least over an email someday.
Peace.
A small, but vocal minority of my followers requested that I continue posting my thoughts on music after my account here goes dormant. So, to please my dear followers, I’ve started a Substack called “Challenging Music.”
For the people who have found my extended forays into instagram-story-posting about music, culture, politics, etc interesting—here’s a place where you can continue to get some version of that. This will feature writing from more of a personal viewpoint compared to the interviews and essays being published through Empty Stage Journal, which will continue to focus on the “workplace politics” of experimental, improvised, and contemporary concert musics. Challenging Music will focus more on music criticism, ideology, aesthetics, and contending with the nascent 21st century and what music might mean in it.
I don’t really know what form it will take and certainly I’m not trying to make this too much of a “thing,” but maybe it will become a space for more productive discourse than instagram has been able to facilitate. I might publish some conversations with some interlocutors on this substack, but maybe not. Who knows.
Anyway, I’ll post the link in my bio so that you can sign up with your email to receive my ideological products to your inbox. If you want to sign up for a paid subscription, you will receive nothing other than the satisfaction that you are subsidizing my rent to a small degree.
Last winter, I wrote a string quartet titled “Travels to the House of Invention” for .abeceda festival—where it was premiered this past June. The name of the work comes from a term used by Norval Morrisseau to describe the movement of mind and spirit towards a place of inspiration in his working life as a painter. The first version of this work was a study and was composed as a largely intuitive exercise—focusing on a few idiomatic “harmonic progressions” which, through various devices, lacked a sense of rhetorical momentum, but still “moved.”
More than I have ever felt as a composer, I immediately knew this work needed to be expanded and refined upon finishing it. The first version largely remained in a kind of classical form—with clear A and B sections and a kind of reconciliation and transformation of both in the ending. After many listens, I knew this was a cheap move and didn’t serve the kind of listening I was desiring to facilitate.
In this updated and elongated version, we only encounter the “A material” of the first version, but the logics of harmonic organization, variation, and formal development are greatly expanded within these bounds. It has been a kind of research question of mine to figure out how to think of harmony as something which isn’t constituted reductively by descriptive, “vertical” identities on one hand, nor by a kind of “functional” system of tonal divergences from a pitch “center” on another hand—but still “moves” and doesn’t over establish a kind of cheaply-pleasing stasis.
I have been reflecting on what we accept as “music theory” in the 21st century and how—for somewhat specious reasons—people foolishly assume we have “exhausted” new or different ways of thinking about music theory since we have “complex” versions of it that approach certain thinkable or perceivable thresholds. I think it should be obvious that, in the pursuit of this kind of progressivist avant-garde project, we miss a bunch of “minor” subjects of music theory that yet have to be developed on. For me, it is quarter-tone voice leading, “omnibus” progressions, and spiral forms that generated this piece.
Rec:
/peB562I0hqn58UJRPa
The final music from last Friday’s set at @marmaladepreserve
8.8.25
Last performance for a while. See you in the autumn.
Full set—https://youtu.be/RwO_dnB_wlM?si=g5vmAk9A88ot9lsZ
For the people out there who only know me as another social media entity, please consider encountering another contrived avatar of my being through my website, which I have recently updated to include texts discussing each of my works, free and downloadable scores of everything currently in my catalog, all of my films, and several works in progress.
Audio is from a second, elongated version of my string quartet “Travels to the House of Invention.” Don’t steal my chords, please.
