Photo Credit: Erik Ljung
The adventurous programming of the long-running Alverno Presents performing arts series is truly something to admire, especially for what it offers local musicians, who are routinely given free rein to develop and mount high-concept productions that are too impractical or costly for your average rock club. However, while the results are invariably interesting, a rotating cast of curators inevitably means some events are more engaging than others. Usually, it’s the installments that start with a thought-provoking premise that prove the most successful, and when it comes to those kinds of meaty ideas, area percussionist Jon Mueller seems to have a surplus, so much so that his multimedia Death Blues project comes complete with a sprawling manifesto explaining it, making his turns in the Alverno spotlight exciting and unpredictable affairs, tonight being no exception.
Hardly a stranger to the stage of Alverno’s gorgeous Pitman Theatre, Mueller earned rave reviews for his previous work, 2012’s Death Blues: No Time Like the Present, which focused on one of his pet themes: the difficult-to-achieve bliss of being fully in the moment. This time around, the new Death Blues: Ensemble, a live extrapolation on his recent LP/book of the same name, zeroes in even further, striving to understand not only the fleeting temporal nature of the present, but how our senses, and the limits thereof, shape our experience of it. The first stimuli to greet attendees though, an audio-video installation by Chicago artist Kaveh Soofi, was a mixed bag, the intriguing mask-filled imagery marred by an irritating prerecorded voice endlessly intoning, “We are not our bodies, we are not any one thing”.
Photo Credit: Erik Ljung
The mantra provided the audience something to pay attention to until the main attraction, but also appeared to put many on edge, and there was a collective sigh of relief when Mueller emerged, giving an enigmatic introduction before the curtain rose to reveal the titular ensemble. The seven-person group includes some seriously talented players, including Death Blues regular Jim Warchol on hammered acoustic guitar, all of whom ably blended into Mueller’s meticulous, minimalist post-rock style as they hypnotically wound their way through the entire Ensemble album, or a version of it anyway, one filled with detours and variations. There was no overt explanation of the night’s themes, in fact there were no words at all, but the performance got the point across loud and clear, just like a good Alverno Presents show should.
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