8:30pm.

BCMC is the duo of multiinstrumentalist Cooper Crain (Bitchin Bajas) and guitarist Bill MacKay. On their ravishing 2023 debut album Foreign Smokes on Drag City they united to create a record that's equal parts deep space, rock’s dreamy lyrical interior, soloed multi-track, remix, raga, new age fugue state, field recording, blues and beyond — gossamer-light avant-garde noir flowing into fire-and-icy jams, collecting bright shades and warm stretches of infinity drawn through the buzzy overdrive of this side of life’s strange and sunny days. They will headline the opening night program of the 2024 Frequency Festival with a characteristically meditative journey that ignores the lines between disparate styles. Instead, the pair extends its reach to generate shifting, interactive textures, drifting melody, and dreamy clouds of harmony.

andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire by commissioning new works and actively collaborating with living artists. The New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo (Mivos Quartet), violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, has since commissioned over forty works.

andPlay’s “Translucent Harmonies” allows listeners to deeply immerse themselves in sound, silence, and resonance. This hour-long program includes Vid stenmuren blir tanken blomma by Kristofer Svensson (Sweden) and Prisma Interius VIII by Catherine Lamb (USA, Germany), both composed in Just Intonation. The rare experience to hear a full program in Just Intonation invites one to listen in a detailed way to the “sensation of tone.” This shifts the concept of intonation, which is often unnoticed by the listener, to the foreground, where it becomes a focal point to explore the most simple, yet nuanced, relationships in sound.

Though the evening is one curated experience, the two pieces complement each other in their form. Lamb, in her chant-like work, uses droned pitches to slowly build the relationships between notes and intervals, transforming them into longer phrases. Alternatively, Svensson creates their work out of silence, with brief melodic fragments appearing against a backdrop of silence and noise. Together, they pause time -- guiding the audience through an alternate reality where there is ample opportunity to sit and listen.