Salon Series: Marielle Allschwang

Suggested donation: $10 General Admission, $5 Students. All proceeds go to the presenting artist. RSVP using the ticket link.

There is “no one we know of making music this otherworldly, this strange but familiar” (Milwaukee Record). Songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Marielle Allschwang sits at the center of the band she has called The Visitations. Her ability to craft otherworldly, strange but familiar music has made Allschwang a singular and sought-after voice: she’s also a member of Collections of Colonies of Bees and Hello Death. Allschwang has appeared in two of Jon Mueller’s Death Blues iterations, and two full-length records and a live soundtrack to Aleksandr Dovzhenko's silent classic Earth (Zemlya) with Group of the Altos. Her sophomore effort with The Visitations, VISITATIONS IV, has been described as “incredible” and “extremely focused” (Matt Wild), making the “last 20+ years of Milwaukee post-rock thunder and glisten” (Evan Rytlewski).

Allschwang graduated from Wellesley College with a BFA in art and art history. Allschwang continues to experiment with art forms, performing contemporary dance to thousands during the Collections of Colonies of Bees tour, creating linocuts for record covers and t-shirt designs, and producing video. "Aquarium," directed by Heather Hass and co-produced by Hass & Allschwang, screened at international film festivals, received RadioMilwaukee’s “Music Video of the Year” Award in 2017, and was recently tagged by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as “the most artful and mesmerizing Milwaukee music video ever made.”

Allschwang’s newest project will incorporate film, music, and years of research exploring legendary Milwaukee artist Mary Nohl (1914-2001), who spent the greater part of her life radically rooted in and constantly creating an artist-built-environment inside and outside her home in Fox Point, Wisconsin. Her community responded with occasionally violent acts of vandalism, and nicknamed her home "The Witch's House." Nohl responded with humor, defiance (as evidenced in many of her mimegraphed letters to friends which began with, “Greetings & Salutations & Boo.”), and a limitless love for, and lifelong commitment to, her work.

Performed by Marielle Allschwang & The Visitations in front of footage from Nohl’s home (shot by Allschwang, Hass, and Visitation Adam Michael Krause, who also edited and co-directed the film), Precession of a Day: The World of Mary Nohl, which premieres at the John Michael Kohler Art Center on June 22, will take a deep dive into a little-known and astoundingly prolific, complicated artist deserving much more renown. In addition to the performance, Allschwang and her band have created a double-LP--expertly engineered and mixed by Lawton Hall--of Precession of a Day that will be available summer 2019.

For her talk at No Studios, Allschwang will discuss Precession of a Day: The World of Mary Nohl and some of the process behind its creation. She’ll share some songs and images from the project, and present with a sharper focus the sources that have influenced and informed Precession over the past five years of its conception, citing marginalized female poets from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Social Ecology, the archetype of the witch, and of course, Mary Nohl and her incredibly vast body of work.