The Music of Jennifer Walshe featuring the Mivos Quartet, M.C. Schmidt, and Wobbly

With imagination, wit, and more than a hint of the surreal, Walshe’s music playfully but pointedly explores the complications and complexities of the 21st century and the increasingly difficult task of separating fact from fiction.

At the ICA, Walshe presents two recent compositions performed by the acclaimed Mivos Quartet and improvisational musicians M.C. Schmidt, of the electronic duo Matmos, and Wobbly, an experimental electronic musician from San Francisco.

Program

EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT
“The piece is concerned with the texture of life in 2016 – technology, incipient disastrous climate change, vast financial inequality, the “dark euphoria” of Bruce Sterling, the Anthropocene. What’s it like to live in a time when the internet is embedded in our lives at an infrastructural level in the same way that electricity or the postal system or the NHS is, but the same time we’re not quite sure what to do with it or how it works, and the way that it works is changing continually.” —Jennifer Walshe

In EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT​, Walshe considers our relationship with technology and the encroachment of the Internet on every face of life. The work is scored for voice, string quartet, and film; Walshe performs with the Mivos Quartet. Everything is Important articulates a world of rapidly accumulating information that arrives at a frenetic, nearly punishing speed.

AN GLÉACHT
AN GLÉACHT is based on an unfinished film by reclusive artist Caoimhin Breathnach. Throughout his life, Breathnach created “subliminal” tapes and films on astronomy, folkore, crystallography, and found video footage that he believed had the power to heal and shift consciousness. The artist spent the last years of his life planning a film called An Gléach, which he left unfinished at his death. Several years later, Walshe, Breathnach’s great-niece, completed the film, which will screen at the ICA with a live score performance by Walshe, M.C. Schmidt, and Wobbly.