thursday15
Thursday15
Best CoastWhite Hinterland
Friday16
Tomomi AdachiChicago Sound MapAmir ElSaffar & Hafez Modirzadeh Quartet FintrollThree 6 Mafia
Saturday17
Chicago Sound MapGraham Parker
Sunday18
Cheer-AccidentVernon Garrett
Monday19
Hot Chip
Tuesday20
Ambrose Field & John Potter Updated
Wednesday21
Charlotte Gainsbourg
WHITE HINTERLAND On the 2008 album Phylactery Factory, Portland’s Casey Dienel (aka White Hinterland) used quasi-orchestral arrangements to give her songs a veneer of florid psych folk, but on its follow-up, the new Kairos (Dead Oceans), she strips all that away. Instead she sets her voice against an austere backdrop of twitchy, restless programmed beats, wan synthesizers, and simple, driving bass, all coated in a milky wash of reverb. I’d applaud a bold reinvention like that in any case, and here I’ve got an extra reason to, since the change seems to have had a positive effect on Dienel’s singing. Her favorite affectation on past recordings was to unravel a note with fluttery vibrato, which tended to aggravate her problems with pitch control; now it’s gone, replaced by a quirky quasi-soul style that suggests a less eccentric Bjork tackling the Dirty Projectors songbook. That sounds like it’d be a total train wreck, I know, but Kairos is one of the freshest and most exhilarating albums I’ve heard this year. Dosh headlines. 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $10. —Peter Margasak
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TOMOMI ADACHI One of my old editors hated the term “sound artist” because she thought it screamed pretentiousness. Japan’s Tomomi Adachi calls himself a lot of things—”performer, composer, sound poet, installation artist, occasional theater director”—and he makes sound art that’s not the slightest bit pretentious. His aesthetic is wonderfully absurd, often goofy—he claims he’s the only Japanese artist to have performed the Kurt Schwitters Dada classic Ursonate—and his playful curiosity manifests itself not just in his novel, entertaining performances but also in the low-tech electronic instruments he builds. The recent Early Works & Live 1994-1996 (Omega Point) includes plenty of sound poetry, from zany originals to an obscure 1920s piece by futurist painter Hide Kinoshita, plus what Adachi calls “newspaper singing” and pieces for homemade electronics, piano, and violin; the 2003 album Yo (Tzadik) is a hilarious effort by his eight-member Royal Chorus, a “punk-style choir” that compensates for its amateurish singing with careful arrangements, energetic rhythms, and the liberal use of nonverbal animal sounds. For his Chicago debut, the first concert booked by local experimental-music presenter Lampo since it lost its Chicago Avenue space last summer, Adachi will perform sound poetry and show off some of his inventions, including a monophonic oscillator he calls the tomomim and a device that consists of amplified springs and wires meant to be struck, brushed, or rattled—both of which are built into Tupperware containers. He’ll also demonstrate his infrared sensor shirt, a gesture-driven device that controls a crazy variety of vocal effects by monitoring the positions of the ten sensors attached to it. You can see video of some of these contraptions at www.adachitomomi.com/a/video.html. 8 PM, Columbia College, 916 S. Wabash, room 214, 312-282-7676, $10, $5 students. —Peter Margasak
EVGENI BOZHANOV Starting with the low bench that he travels with—affording him the hand position he finds essential for his sound—26-year-old Bulgarian pianist Evgeni Bozhanov is anything but conventional. Yet even his most questionably idiosyncratic performances are delivered with such incredible quality of sound, gorgeous and wonderfully varied, that they are difficult to resist—like a disjointed film that compels with the power of its visuals. The program opens with the imposing Busoni transcription of Bach’s Organ Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564, followed by three works he performed at the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where he was a finalist. Schubert’s profoundly searching Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960, and Schumann’s ever shifting Davidsbundlertanze present tremendous artistic challenges: balancing the writing, making it coherent, and doing it justice are so difficult; at the Cliburn Competition Bozhanov was better with the Schumann. These 18 short character pieces, which veer from impetuous to sublime, lend themselves to his probing approach and wide range of color. Last is a waltz from Gounod’s opera Faust, as arranged and embellished by Franz Liszt into a finger-bending rollick. 8 PM, Bennett-Gordon Hall, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay and Lake Cook, Highland Park, 847-266-5100, $20. —Steve Langendorf
