This year’s Frequency Festival lineup is characteristically difficult to sum up. Generally speaking, curator and music journalist Peter Margasak says the festival’s programming continues to reflect his interest in thoughtfully structured, long-form work.
“I love to go to be transported and get lost in something, but not, like, meander,” Margasak says. “There’s a lot of people that can just hear a drone for an hour and sit in that sound world… I don’t need music that’s chill and long, unless there’s stuff going on under the hood.”
To wit, the festival kicks off with “Open Symmetry,” a 50-minute meditation for three vibraphones and 20 speakers by composer Tristan Perich (Feb. 24). It ends, in part, with a live duo version of Chicago clarinetist Zachary Good’s “Lake Heritage,” a profoundly affecting album from last year based on multiphonics, or the technique of playing more than one note on a wind instrument simultaneously (March 1).
That album was dedicated to Good’s grandfather, Francis “Paco” Gracia, who died in 2022. An Edgewater resident, Good wonders if he inherited his love of the lake from Paco. Lake Michigan has been part of Good’s daily ritual, creative or otherwise, since he moved to the city; Paco moved from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico — loosely translating to “Land of Clear Waters” — to the manmade Lake Heritage outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, becoming one of its first residents. The album cover uses a photo of Paco in raucous laughter on the shore.
“He would always describe himself as the little old man by the lake,” Good says, with a wistful laugh. “So yeah, and you know, my memory of him has always been near water.”
Another perk of an annual festival is its iterative quality — revisiting artists over the years as their aesthetics and careers transform. Chicago chamber ensemble Ensemble Dal Niente is a Frequency Festival regular, offering samplers of their most recent repertoire (Feb. 27). This year also sees the return of the whimsically named RAGE Thormbones, a trombone duo who, in their words, work “at the intersection of (expletive) around and find out” (Feb. 25). The duo last played the festival in 2019.
Trombonists Mattie Barbier and Weston Olencki — who will also have a work performed by the New York-based TAK Ensemble to close the festival (March 1) — say their work in RAGE is, in many ways, a reaction to their conservatory training, where they were taught that they should emulate the singing human voice with the instrument. Instead, RAGE embraces, in their words, “tube music” — music that leads from the trombone’s inherent acoustic qualities, rather than trying to wrest it in a different direction.
“Creatively, it gets really freeing when you’re taking the instrument away from this abstracted idea of what the voice should be,” Barbier says.
Margasak builds the Frequency Fest lineup from Berlin, where he moved from Chicago in 2019. He’s successfully included European experimentalists in programs at the University of Chicago every year, taking advantage of a loophole that allows for cheaper visas if the performance is free and educational. This year, that facilitates the U.S. debut of Fredrik Rasten, a Norwegian guitarist whose slow-developing music explores unconventional tunings. He also performs in a duo with Alasdair Roberts, a Scottish folk singer and guitarist who himself has not performed in the U.S. in more than a decade (Feb. 28).
Still, year by year, the prospect of booking international talent gets harder — not only from a public-perception standpoint, reflecting fears stoked by President Donald Trump’s draconian immigration policies, but also because of mounting visa costs and complications that predate Trump’s second term. Already the festival saw the late-stage cancellation of Ahmed, a quartet of European improvisers; they’ve been replaced by composer and guitarist David Grubbs, performing on the same bill as RAGE Thormbones (Feb. 25).
“A lot of people have just given up. Not even discussing this immigration crackdown, it’s so exorbitantly expensive and inefficient,” Margasak says of the overall touring climate for artists. “Unless you’re really getting paid, you’re going to spend thousands and thousands of dollars for the privilege of losing money in the United States.”
That’s a tough prospect for experimental music, which by nature is not market-aligned — it’s not trying to be — and courts a small audience. But Frequency Festival’s own audience is devoted, and it continues to receive the essential foundation support that has diminished elsewhere in the arts. (The Chicago-based Paul M. Angell Family Foundation is a major sponsor.)
It will also continue to be a platform for the inverse: internationally coveted local talent. Now Chicago-based, composers Kari Watson and Kelley Sheehan first met at Darmstadt, the prestigious new-music festival and intensive in Germany. At the time we spoke at Northwestern University, where Sheehan teaches, Watson had just returned from a European tour with Chicago Symphony cellist Katinka Kleijn.
Their Frequency Festival program spotlights their mutual collaborator, Oslo-based percussionist Jennifer Torrence, as well as their shared embrace of visual multimedia elements (Feb. 24). Watson’s work parallels the cameraless, analog work of filmmaker Lua Borges, whose work will be shown during the concert; like Borges’ long-exposure processes, Watson’s music gradually develops from something “masked” to “full brightness.”
Meanwhile, Sheehan’s “feed” confronts a front-of-mind issue for all of us: artificial intelligence. She’s created a program that responds in real time to Torrence’s performance. How it responds, however — and how “horrific” the resulting imagery is — is up to chance and outside of Sheehan’s control.
In sum, she says, it’s an artwork that uses AI to be “anti-AI.”
“The eventual idea will be to release the code for others to use the visual generation, but with this ethical caveat of, ‘This is how much energy it uses; this is how much destruction this piece has caused.’ And if you use this, you will be contributing to it,” she says.
Using the innovations of our age to turn a mirror on ourselves? There’s nothing more Frequency Festival than that.
Frequency Festival runs Feb. 24 to March 1. All shows at Constellation Chicago, 3111 N. Western Ave., with $20 admission, except for Ensemble Dal Niente ($25 admission) and Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten (at University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel, 1025 E. 58th Street; free). More information at frequencyfestival-chicago.com.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
