Listen and imagine, Tuesday 6-8 PM CST for the first live performance of Chicago Phonography since 2016!

Tune in Live on Lumpen Radio’s bel_air show, hosted by Todd Carter

Listen online or on your radio dial at 105.5 FM WLPN-LP located in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago.

Details: Chicago Phonography is an open collective of artists who perform with unprocessed field recordings made in and around Chicago’s urban soundscapes. The performances are unrehearsed real-time compositions, mixed improvisationally by the players in situ. This approach challenges each to listen while creating an electroacoustic experience for our audience, who are invited listen to the new and unusual sound narratives. Listening plays an essential role in this associative and relational process in the creation of artificial soundscapes. This combination of technological and ecological awareness foregrounds how something can be experienced in one place and yet offers a sense of the experience in another, opening awareness to the unlikely and perhaps some deeper sense of life’s interconnections. Performing tonight with Todd Carter and me (Eric Leonardson) is Gregory O’Drobinak.

Lumpen Radio is a nonprofit project of Public Media Institute, committed to the spread of knowledge and positive vibrations on the public airwaves.

Chicago Phonography convened its first public performance on June 16, 2008. Some members of the collective, including me, were involved in starting the World Listening Project and Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, two nonprofit organizations devoted to the culturally and ecologically complex roles of sound making and listening in our environment. Its performances were often combined and facilitated with public soundwalks in diverse locations including artists’ loft spaces, galleries, public parks, and museums. 

Access a collection of links to past Chicago Phonography performances and press with this QR code: