Doors 6:30 pm | Show 7:30 pm | ALL AGES
Words+Wizardry: You’ve Never Seen Poetry Like This
NCSA’s award-winning Advanced Visualization Lab team will once again work its wizardry sharing stunning images this year set to ambient music and spoken word between sets by PYGMALION artists, Six Organs of Admittance, Matt Talbott, and Mikel Rouse. Showcasing the dynamic interplay between science and art, visualizations will support readings by three local poets.
Michael VanCalbergh
Currently living in Bloomington, IL, his work has appeared in many spaces including Apex Magazine, Cherry Tree, The Chicago Reader, and autofocus. He edits poetry for SRPR and writes reviews for the Comics Beat. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart twice.
Ja Nelle Davenport-Pleasure
Residing in Champaign with her children, Davenport-Pleasure is a multifaceted creative force and dedicated community advocate. As an avid dancer and instructor, a clothing and jewelry designer, an artist, and a poet, she has captivated audiences both throughout the U.S. and internationally. She brings her vibrant energy to endeavors, whether she’s leading a dance class, crafting unique designs through recycled art or sharing her soulful poetry.
Amie Whittemore
Amie Whittemore (she/her) teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University. The author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press), she was the 2020–2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
More on the performers:
SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. As is always endeavored….
After 20 years of living on the road in different places, Six Organs of Admittance had returned home to Humboldt County — a far country, to some, but still part of the world through which creatures of all kinds are moving through and contributing to. And some of them are human. Alone together — forming connection and exchange out of thought and expression — no different from the people on the other side of the Redwood Curtain. It was there, where Six Organs had long ago emerged, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, the new music was conceived.
In moments, it was as if the future had some-how wrapped around 360 degrees; elsewhere, the systems and patterns inside the writing and recording only became evident later — like a recognition that cumulus and nimbus clouds which passed through the sky the day before contained familiar shapes. Informing the songs accordingly as he went, Ben picked up on modes both musical and lyrical, threading backward through the time of Six Organs of Admittance. Almost marinating in it as a way of life. Working on the music and the vocals, then spending some time with them while stepping away from them. Walking the dog and coming back to them. Time is Glass is made of that kind of time. Alone time.
Recorded in the visceral environs of home, Time is Glass is sharply focused, even as misty impressionist mountains float through the background. Sweet and spiny, “The Mission” sings its purpose, before turning abruptly to the orchestral rumble of “Hephaestus”: rural industrial psychedelia, ecosystem goth, synths arcing to lift a helplessly earthbound community into the firmament above. Winding almost imperceptibly back into song with “Slip Away”, the time of the record becomes clear, moves fluidly, relaxed but aware, from event to event. People and things coming around again. The intuit, passing through wormholes and time, sounding deep then dissolving into the universal. The acoustic sounds ringing, layered suddenly, then clear again. Explosions of a new kind of distortion. Ecstatic melodies. Communing. The space of a day. The space of a season. Time is Glass, and Six Organs of Admittance is here and will be here, again.
Matt Talbott is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and touring musician from Champaign, IL. Accompanied by analog and digital loops, Matt’s songs explore the loss of and search for self through earthly and stellar landscapes.
Mikel Rouse is a New York-based composer, director, performer and recording artist hailed as “a composer many believe to be the best of his generation.” (NY Times) His works include 37 records, 7 films, and a trilogy of media operas: Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and The End Of Cinematics. His work has frequently appeared on Top Ten lists around the country.
In 1995, he premiered and directed the first opera in his trilogy: Failing Kansas, inspired by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This led to an emerging art form he calls “counterpoetry,” which involves the use of multiple unpitched voices in counterpoint. In 1996 he premiered and directed the modern talk show opera Dennis Cleveland, hailed by The Village Voice as “the most exciting and innovative new opera since Einstein on the Beach”. The third opera in his trilogy, The End Of Cinematics, was presented at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2006.
An innovator in arts technology, he was the first Visiting Research Artist at the Center for Super Computing Applications in Urbana Il. Music for The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s eyeSpace premiered in NYC in October 2006. The piece was scored for multiple iPods set to “shuffle” so that each audience member had a different realization of the score. The music for the piece, International Cloud Atlas, was released on iTunes and was available for download prior to the premiere.
Recent premieres include the song cycle Gravity Radio at BAM’s next Wave Festival (2010) and The Demo, a techno opera based on Douglas Engelbart’s landmark 1968 computer demo, at Stanford Live, CA (2015). In 2016 he released Metronome-Take Down hailed by Pitchfork as “Slippery like Radiohead’s “Daydreaming”—and as chaotically clattering as work by Oneohtrix Point Never—it reestablishes Rouse’s brilliance.” He is currently working on the 13 hour music installation piece One Boy’s Day, based on a 1940’s behavioral study. In spring 2024, Rouse released the album Language Barrier. Also in spring 2024, University of Illinois Press published Rouse’s memoir: The World Got Away.
