October 27, 2024
Jessica Ackerley Trio + Cloud Circuit + Devetzis Plays Hennies
Co-Presented with Bug Incision
HIGHLINE BREWING
New Works Calgary and Bug Incision are pleased to team up once again to present a thrilling and diverse night of music at High Line Brewing.
Since the last time Jessica Ackerley touched down in Calgary for an intimate set at Weeds Cafe, the musician, composer, and visual artist has seen an absolute flurry of activity coming their way, racking up diverse collaborations, festival appearances, tours, and a pile of albums in the meantime. New Works Calgary and Bug Incision are pleased to welcome back the Jessica Ackerley Trio as part of a West Coast tour in support of All Of the Colours Are Singing, the new album on AKP Recordings.
The Wire magazine has called Ackerley “one of the most exciting guitarists to have emerged from the US free music scene in recent years,” and the sheer breadth and mass of work accompanying this emergence is not only impressive in its own right but also an easy validation of this admittedly lofty claim. From collaborations with legends like multi-wind master Daniel Carter and epically prolific double bassist Damon Smith, to a series of duo and group investigations alongside Californian sax/multi-instrumentalist Patrick Shiroishi, Ackerley is effectively covering a huge amount of ground within the realm of improvised music, and that’s before we even get into their visual art or compositions. With All Of the Colours Are Singing, Ackerley presents the latest chapter in their evolution as a composer, aided and abetted by double bassist Walter Stinson and Aaron Edgcomb at the drums, and according to Foxy Digitalis, the album “weaves entire lives into each note from their guitar, stitching together a stream of reflections to make whole worlds of sound.”
As an added bonus the Jessica Ackerley Trio will be joined by a guest appearance from Mustafa Rafiq and Jairus Sharif.
NIA DEVETZIS PERFORMS SARAH HENNIES’ Sisters
Sarah Hennies is a terrific example of the kind of composer whose music works as a Venn Diagram of the guiding aesthetics of both New Works Calgary and Bug Incision. Hennies’ compositional output over the past decade-plus is one of the more readily identifiable, but also often wondrously head-scratching, and is often built of highly tactile, physical sounds, blurring the line between incidental sound, precise notations, and gestural, performance-oriented bodily movements. This penchant for such a singular (and sometimes quite rowdy) approach to instrumentation and direction, paired with Hennies’ background in improvisation, make her a natural fit for such a co-presentation. Nia Devetzis, one of our city’s preeminent percussionists and a recent addition to the Bug Incision players’ list, has been tapped as an ideal performer of Hennies’ composition Sisters, a beguiling piece for solo vibraphone, for its debut in Calgary.
CLOUD CIRCUIT
Self-proclaimed “Poetrysound” group Cloud Circuit are based in Montréal and composed of the duo of Deanna Radford, who “channels her poetry as deconstructed word events” and Jeremy Young manipulating “sine tones in flux and amplified surfaces”. Their music is fueled by the complications of communication and the failures within the systems we use to try and achieve it. Their music, often a collaborative affair utilizing guests (such as Alexandre St. Onge of Shalabi Effect), is a deeply engrossing, detailed melange of hard to identify, glitchy sounds amid fractured and processed spoken word passages. Their latest release, Live In Concrete 2020, sees the duo adding even more layers to their arsenals, and New Works Calgary and Bug Incision are excited to present them for their first time in Calgary.
- Chris Dadge
Jessica Ackerley Trio
Jessica Ackerley is a Canadian guitarist, improviser and composer currently on tour promoting their latest release, “All Of the Colors Are Singing,” out on AKP Recordings. Their music is a hybrid musical language drawing on the influences of Black American Music and avant-garde improvisers, as well as the culture of the thriving New York City rock and noise scenes.
Since 2017, Ackerley has released 19 albums to much critical acclaim with features in Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, BBC Radio, and BandCamp. As an active performer, Ackerley has toured extensively throughout North America, performing at noteworthy venues like The Met Breuer, The Stone, Something Else! Festival, Coastal Jazz Festival, and countless underground venues ranging from the basements of houses to record shops.
The Jessica Ackerley Trio
Jessica Ackerley - electric guitar
Walter Stinson - upright bass
Aaron Edgcomb - drums
photo of Jessica Ackerley by Michael Kochman
Cloud Circuit
Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) based poetry_sound ensemble Cloud Circuit finds inspiration in communication gli//tc;hh()h, brok()n spee?()-eech, and contact lost. Its motors are the grey areas of connection, those lost threads, dropped signals, failures of technology, and outages at the edge of night. Poet Deanna Radford channels her iterative text reams as deconstructed words of mouth, and sound artist Jeremy Young plays sine waves in flux, 1/4" magnetic tape and captured radio airs. In performance, Cloud Circuit’s approach is collaborative and improvisational; its sound composed, dissected, and refracted. They have shared the stage with Sam Prekop, Lea Bertucci, David Grubbs, Vito Ricci, Ora Clementi (crys cole & James Rushford), Jessica Pavone, skintone, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Paul Dutton, Sarah Pagé, Greg Davis, and many others. Their début EP, Bur sting brea k'r, was issued by Archive Officielle in the thawing months of 2020 on clear vinyl. Cordially, The Cloud Eternal Network.
Nia Devetzis
Nia Devetzis is a percussionist driven by the vivid and vast world of contemporary music, whether as a soloist or chamber musician. As a teaching artist, she is dedicated to education through performance and instruction, leading by example and questioning audience expectations by asking, what exactly is percussion?
Notable performances include solo engagements with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Calgary Wind Symphony, and Calgary’s contemporary music and sonic arts festival, Forms of Sound and the Stratford Summer Music Festival. As a chamber musician, she is dedicated to the support of new music in Calgary as a core member of Timepoint Ensemble and has made appearances with The Rubbing Stone Ensemble and Land’s End Chamber Ensemble. She is a founding member of SLiP (the Secret Lady Project), an anti-hierarchical free improv ensemble.
Nia’s creative work expands across disciplines. She has been a frequent collaborator for devised theatre works at the University of Calgary, including Conduct, Pierrot’s Gender Reveal Party and Just like the Moon performing as a musician/actor. This work continues with Mudfoot Theater on Yabber, where she has built instruments and musical puppets alongside story and music development. Her foley design for Murder in the Studio won a Betty Mitchell Award in 2022.
Nia is an instructor at the Mount Royal Conservatory where she guides a large private studio, coordinates percussion with the Academy program, and runs the Summer Percussion Institute. She completed a Master of Music in Percussion Performance with Rod Squance at the University of Calgary.
Sarah Hennies
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.
As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
photo of Sarah Hennies by Rob Davidson.
