Since 2012, Synth Nights is The Kitchen’s ongoing intergenerational concert series bringing together composers of different eras and genres within the form of electronic music. Past programs in the series featured legends such as David Behrman, Harold Budd, Musica Elettronica Viva, Morton Subotnick, as well as emerging talents—including Laurel Halo, James Hoff, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Ben Vida. This installment in the series on Wednesday, October 12, 2016 presents New York-based, experimental electronic musician Lesley Flanigan and a performance of her work for voice with speaker feedback instruments, paired with a new piece for two voices with two looping pedals.

Performing with instruments constructed from raw audio speakers and microphones, Flanigan shapes layers of electronic feedback into an almost tactile field of noise, embracing an expressive relationship between speakers, amplification and voice. Each of these instruments is a sculptural object capable of producing a wide variety of tones and rhythms, and is played by positioning a suspended piezo microphone in various relations to a speaker cone. Though the instruments are electronic, they are ‘played’ as acoustic instruments through hand gestures and microphone choreography. Like voices in a choir, the vast range of feedback sounds they produce are unique to each instrument: some speakers make low tones, others make high tones, and some are completely unpredictable. While the source of the sound is feedback, it is often indistinguishable from the sound of instruments such as cello, clarinet or organ. In her performances she treats this raw material as a sculptor might treat clay—shaping the noises from these sound sources into music.

In 2015, Flanigan began developing compositions for voice alone, as an extension of her work with speaker feedback. In this work she continues to think about amplification as a central process in electronic sound, but removing her feedback instruments to focus entirely on the voice. Through her work making music with feedback instruments and combining those sounds with voice, she has developed a “building/layering/sculptural” approach to composition that uses this live voice material captured by looping hardware as a primary tool. For The Kitchen, she plans to present a new composition for two voices that expands on this previous work, layering pitches and melodies sung by two vocalists (herself and one other singer) together into dense clouds of sound, which can be manipulated dramatically in real time by the performers.

Lesley Flanigan’s work has been presented at venues and festivals internationally, including Sonar (Barcelona and Chicago), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Roulette (Brooklyn), MATA Festival (New York City), TransitioMX (Mexico City), the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark) and .HBC in Berlin. She studied sculpture at the Ringling College of Art and Design, and received a masters in art technology from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University.