8:30pm.

Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney

Having each followed their own distinct trajectory of exploration for decades - interweaving rigorous experimentalism with transcultural conversations - and building upon roughly 20 years working as a duo, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang recently released Azure, their third full-length Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label. Among their most riveting outings to date, comprising five new compositions recorded in Seattle during the spring of 2022, this remarkable body of sonority culminates in a singular gesture of contemporary minimalism that slowly unfolds across the album’s length.

Emerging from the Pacific Northwest, Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang have retained a strong presence within the context of North American experimental music since the mid 1990s, each producing some of the most grippingly original music to have appeared over the subsequent years.

Zarabanda Variations 

(Keir GoGwilt, Wilfrido Terrazas, Kyle Motl, Alec Goldfarb)

Zarabanda Variations is a speculative sounding of music from 16th- and 17th-century New Spain/Mexico. Taking inspiration from both material histories of instruments and tunings, and musical histories of dances, rhythms, chants, and counterpoints, the quartet experiments in the archival gaps of early American music. The zarabanda—a dance with putative Spanish, American, and Arab origins, a plausible etymology from the Kikongo “nsala-banda” [Sublette, 1951], and which eventually transformed into a courtly dance of the European baroque—represents one such fragmentary, transatlantic musical-material genealogy. Zarabanda Variations references the generative role that the zarabanda—amongst other folk, baroque, and popular genres—plays in the formation of this project. The quartet was brought together by Keir GoGwilt (violin) in collaboration with Wilfrido Terrazas (flutes), Kyle Motl (bass), and Alec Goldfarb (guitars).

Special thanks to the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) for their support in developing this project.