Photo by Heike Liss

Presented in association with Nonsequitur.

For more than 20 years Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins have etched music with perhaps unlikely sound tools.

Parkins has long explored the expansive potential for improvised and innovative music of both acoustic and electronic harps. Mori, who in the 1980s was the drummer for the radical No Wave band DNA, captures, processes, and mutates live and stored sounds with a laptop computer and other electronics, including drum machines. She also contributes projected images to the duo’s stage presentations.

The result is some extremely captivating sculpted sound, rich in tectonics and shifting planes, and transporting in its lyricism, mystery, and surprise. Certainly, in their collaboration, Phantom Orchard, Parkins and Mori have produced some of the most startling freely improvised music of recent times.

Parkins has lately gained broad renown thanks to her performances with the Nordic pop diva Björk; but her accomplishments date from the 1980s, when she settled in the fertile New York experimental-music scene and began to perform and record with the likes of Fred Frith and Jim O’Rourke. She has, in fact, worked with just about every forward-thinking musician on the New York and European scenes, appearing on more than 70 albums with many of the big names in new music, including John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Elliott Sharp, and Tin Hat Trio. She has also worked with a host of dance and theater companies, chamber orchestras such as Bang on a Can, and film and video makers.

She has developed radical approaches to playing the harp, often treating it as an electrified sound source for the most arresting musical experiments. Her extended playing techniques include the analog and digital processing of her harps’ sounds, as well as the preparation of their strings with household and hardware-store objects.

In Ikue Mori, she finds the perfect partner and foil. The Tokyo native began playing drums when she arrived in New York in 1977. She soon after formed the lopsidedly rhythmical and dissonant cult band, DNA, with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. In the mid-1980s Mori began to improvise with drum machines, modifying their output to suit her purposes. About a decade ago, she branched into the use of computers in music. Along the way she, too, performed with a host of other artistic adventurers such as Fred Frith, Dave Douglas, Mike Patton, and Butch Morris, and won many grants, commissions, and awards for her musical innovation. Her current projects include Mephista with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and drummer Susie Ibarra and various collaborations with John Zorn including his Electric Masada.

Her collaborations with Zeena Parkins have been as outstanding as any of her work – strange, compelling, and unpredictable. Critic Stephen Gossett nicely summarized: “Phantom Orchard presents a reflection of modern life’s ugly beauty, delivered with exacting restlessness. The familiar analog tones lure you in; the otherworldly sound-swirls and digital disruptions create a subtle-to-harsh juxtaposition.”

Photo by Paul Jacquat

Photo by Laurence Svirchev

Opening for Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins, the extraordinary singer Saadet Türköz performs songs from her Khazak and Turkish backgrounds, transformed through her knowledge of Western music, particularly free jazz, and through the most unleashed of improvising.

After beginning her career with an impromptu performance at a friend’s wedding, she recorded her first CD Kara Toprak in 1994, and her second, Marmara Sea, in 1999, before traveling to her parents’ homeland to lay down her third release, 2006’s Urumchi. It comprises love songs, lullabies, dirges, and folk songs, extended through improvisation and accompanied by Kazakh musicians playing such instruments as the dombra lute and the kilkobuz, another stringed instrument.

Her stunning technique aside, the essence of her performances is the conjuring of the most mysterious and transporting of moods and hues. As Türköz has put it: “I seek to evoke pictures and atmospheres by means of voice and music which transcend cultural boundaries.”

Tonight Türköz performs with the cellist Peggy Lee, who has been a fixture since 1989 of the fertile music scene of Vancouver, British Columbia. A participant in many projects there, including the renowned NOW Orchestra, she also has been a frequent collaborator with Canadian, American, and European players. She is, for example, a first-call band member for visitors to the city’s famed annual jazz festival, including trumpeter Dave Douglas, guitarist Nels Cline, and Seattle-based keyboardist Wayne Horvitz. Her repertoire takes in improvising, new chamber works, and electro-acoustic ensembles, among them her Peggy Lee Band, formed in 1998 to perform and improvise around her own compositions. And it has won wide acclaim; Downbeat said it “exemplifies the strength and maturity of the Vancouver jazz and improvised music scene,”  while the New York Times praised its flowing, organic sound.

Raised in Toronto and trained in classical music at the University of Toronto, Lee has said that her evolution as a musician quickened when she arrived in the West and interacted with musicians like, her now husband, percussionist Dylan van der Schyff: “It wasn’t just a matter of the kinds of sounds; it was more breaking out of being a reader and trying to get the flow happening – of hearing and playing at the same time. Some of the techniques that I use in written music, and especially in new music, I’ll use as an improviser, but sometimes I also like to play with a nice tone. Or in tune. I’m not trying to discard my whole training, but just get the other part of my brain working as far as thinking creatively at that moment.”

Those are qualities that lend themselves ideally to her duo with Saadet Türköz. As Lee noted in a 2005 interview: “I don’t know that I even play experimental music. It’s just music that makes sense to me given who I am and where I come from.”

– Peter Monaghan