2024
November 16
Walt Disney Concert Hall – Noon to Midnight Festival in Los Angeles, CA
An installation of site specific chimes and scents. More information TBA
November 2, Opening 3-6pm
Blunk Space x Commune Design, Point Reyes, CA
An installation of new designs and sounding home goods for the California design studio, Commune. Curated by Roman Alonso and Mariah Nielson.
September 26
Texas A&M University, CATTLELAND
A lecture on the role of art in working lands, kicking off a year long collaboration between art and agriculture at Texas A&M.
September 4 – 12
Pilchuck Glass School, Artist in Residence
Pilchuck Glass School is an international center for glass art education. The school was founded in 1971 by Dale Chihuly, Ruth Tamura, Anne Gould Hauberg, and John H. Hauberg. The campus is located on a former tree farm in Stanwood, Washington.
April & May
Stanford University – ITALIC Program
Artist lecture and workshop in ideation.
March 11
University of California Santa Barbara
Artist Lecture and opening of Song Cycle, installed in the Media Art and Technology Department.
2023
June 9-24
Askeaton Contemporary Arts – Co. Limerick, Ireland
I’m excited to share that I’m working with this exciting rural art space on a new work for sound and landscape. Holy wells, ancient language, a misplaced bell, communal memory, lost time, common land, maybe a sheep.
January – May
Song Cycle at University of California Santa Barbara
Song Cycle is a kinetic sign, describing a world of music through ever-evolving poetry. The piece will be installed at the California NanoSystems Institute in partnership with University of California Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology Department.
2022
August 14 at 6pm
Wild Up: Feels Like Floating
In the courtyard of the Audubon Society at Debs Park for sun drenched meditations on guitar & works by California minimalists performed by Kallmyer and Wild Up: birdsong // whispers // cymbals // crickets on vinyl // old synths // new friends.
April 9, 2022 at 7pm
Wild Up: Buddha at 2220 Arts and Archives
Record Release for Wild Up’s new LP dedicated to the music of Julius Eastman, and a 12-hour performance of Eastman’s Buddha.
April 9, 2022 at 7pm
Song Cycle: LIVE BY SPECIAL REQUEST at the Los Angeles Philharmonic – BP Hall
Created in partnership with Zoe Aja Moore. A performance and reading of Song Cycle, a work of process poetry that describes an immersive emergent world of music. The reading will be set within a texture of mystic drones, the sound of the rain pressed into vinyl, unstable drum machines, and generous harmonies accompanied by fresh flowers. Featuring Sarah Davachi, Korede Oladimeji, Alexandra Rose Franco, Matt Kivel, Clinton Patterson, and superteam.
2021
October 2021 – June 2022
Song Cycle at Walt Disney Concert Hall
Song Cycle is a kinetic sign describing a world of music through ever-evolving poetry. The piece re-proposes Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall as a transit hub, pointing to the ways that music transports us as listeners. Part imagined, part remembered, and part observed, Song Cycle’s text is continually inscribed and reinscribed by a 256-character split-flap sign reminiscent of the arrival and departure boards found at airports and train stations in the 20th century.
September 17
SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Singapore
Video Stream: Opera Four Hands with Zoe Aja Moore
Inspired by Nam June Paik’s transnational art practice and experimentations in global satellite broadcast — as well as the present impact of the pandemic on remote communication — Afterlude/Prelude: Artists Respond to Nam June Paik brings together contemporary artists from around the world via webcast. Hosted by artist Julia Scher and SFMOMA Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling, the multiple-hour presentation will feature over twenty artists responding to Paik’s thinking and writing through readings, performances, music, video, and more. Participating artists include Aki Onda, Christian Marclay, Candice Breitz, among others.
February 3 -4
Open Studios: STUDIO teatrgaleria
Open Studios was a platform for developing international collaboration during and after the pandemic. A space for shared reflection, experimentation and free-flowing explorations of as yet-unknown forms of the theatre of the near future. At Open Studios, Kallmyer’s work was featured alongside projects by Rimini Protokoll, Toshiki Okada, Edit Kaldor, and others.
2020
March 13
Workshop Residence 5 – 7 pm // Bell Party
After working with bells in projects for more than a decade, I’ve begun making my own in a daily ceramics practice. I go to a studio near my home, throw clay, and glaze these bells in small runs as an unlimited edition. These are bells for the home – for friends – for visitors – as gifts – to mark occasions – for joyful comings and solemn goings. The bell can welcome guests to your home, call kids to dinner, or look smart sitting on a shelf waiting to ring. Prompted by Ann Hatch at Workshop Residence, I was invited to produce a line of bells that will be available at the shop alongside works by Ann Hamilton, Max Lamb, and Hannah B Quinn’s amazing brooms. I hope you’ll consider joining us in San Francisco for a party on March 13! Ding Ding.
2019
December 21
Solstice Sounding at Human Resources dusk to dawn
From 10pm to midnight, I’m playing a set of drones and tones and solo guitar with Andrew Tholl at wild Up’s Solstice Sounding: What is it about the end of the year? It’s dark already, our clocks have jumped. And even in LA nights seem to overtake the days. Pagan and sacred holidays abound: rituals collecting themselves around the darkness. We’re hungry for something new, for something wrapped and warm, yet we search for a newness unbounded by the trappings of the past. In the winter months Wild Up embarks on a new venture, a series set against the darkest days of the year. We make mindful, joyful and maybe melancholic music, endeavoring to drone sounds of the earth. The sounds of community being drawn together in contemplation.
December 15
Studio Sale at Chris’ Workshop 11am – 3pm
Swing by the studio for an end-of-year hang and sale for a chance to snag a ceramic bell, pair of listening glasses, new book, and various drawings and posters from the last 5 years of work. Email me for an address.
December 7
Faded Love and All Possible Music at the Grand Central Arts Center – Santa Ana, CA 7pm – 10pm
Faded Love is a new installation performance featuring country western musicians playing sad songs all together. The immersive performance features the pedal steel guitar, known for its similarity to the human voice. Visitors to the performance are free to move around the installation while sound echoes through the spaces of Grand Central Art Center. All Possible Music is a new film that envisions all music that could ever happen in casual handwritten descriptions: Blissful symphony for an audience of careful listeners, bangin’ dance hits in a cabin set deep in the woods, a solo contrabass alone on a mountaintop, or Avant-garde drum machines that heal the earth and its people. These new works have come about while Chris Kallmyer is Artist-in-Residence at Grand Central Art Center. His residency serves as a time through which he explores his fascination with music, meaning, the idea of the west, and aesthetics of echo in American ballads. The evolving year-long installation of performance actions and new video works are a process of research and community building toward a large-scale culminating project.
October 18 – 25
Witkacy – Two Headed Calf at REDCAT
WITKACY / Two-Headed Calf emerged from an ongoing multi-year collaboration between CalArts Center for New Performance and Studio Teatrgaleria in Warsaw, Poland. A company of Polish and CalArts artists explores Witkacy’s work, set against the backdrop of California’s endless and wild nature. I created the soundtrack to the show, featuring altered classics, metaphysical drones, and recordings of the wind itself.
October 10 – 13
All Possible Music at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra – Music Hall
A exhibition of real and imagined sounds, Kallmyer’s collaboration with the Cincinnati Symphony will feature an installation of amplified crickets and a new commissioned film containing all music that could ever exist. Kallmyer takes an expansive definition of music, including formal performances, imagined sonic situations, and reconfigured concerts described in handwritten scores that move across the screen and depict a world that is made largely of speculative music: Blissful symphony for an audience of careful listeners, bangin’ dance hits in a cabin set deep in the woods, a solo contrabass alone on a mountaintop, or Avant-garde drum machines that heal the earth and its people.
October 5 at 7pm
Artist in Residence at the Grand Central Arts Center – Santa Ana. CA
A new performance installation developed while in residence fall 2019 into spring 2020 featuring, sound, multi-channel projections, and site-based experiments for people and animals.
September 14 – December 14, 2019
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
In a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert, a classified military site called Dugway Proving Ground remains largely hidden from public view, closed to civilians and rarely seen in the media. Since its founding during World War II, Dugway Proving Ground has been a test site for chemical and biological weapons. In 2014, after a decade of inquiry to the Pentagon, David Maisel was granted access to Dugway. Through large-scaled photographs and video projection, Proving Ground immerses the viewer in this surreal and alien realm. The show also features an installation of our immersive video and sound work, Kydoimos.
September 13, 2019 – February 2, 2020
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
David Maisel’s video work Kydoimos, of which I composed the score, is included in Civilization: The Way We Live Now, a group exhibition examining collective human life in 21st century society. The score features modular synthesizers, scrap metal, temple gongs, and violin.
July 28
Artist Lecture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art at 2:30pm
Learn about the artist’s distinctive and participatory approach to making music and art as he discusses past projects and the development of his current installation at SBMA. Rethinking the traditional audience/performer relationship, Kallmyer’s workshops, installations, and site-based explorations of sound and listening have been presented in museums, concert halls, and other unexpected spaces. Following the lecture, Chris Kallmyer will sign copies of his book All Possible Music.
May 18 – Sept 15
Ensemble at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Ensemble is the new multimedia installation by Los Angeles-based sound and performance artist, Chris Kallmyer. The exhibition centers around a sculptural instrument comprised of raw timber and handmade chimes that functions as a communal bell-ringing instrument, or carillon. The instrument, activated by a group of individuals, employs a method of making music by non-musicians that blends collective listening with lively communal rituals and meditation practice. Presented in SBMA’s Preston Morton Gallery and including a selection of musical scores developed by the artist, related drawings, and a video projection documenting the inaugural staging of the instrument, Ensemble serves as an oasis for contemplation and exploration. Accompanied by a series of sound and meditation workshops, the exhibition functions as a production and rehearsal space—part laboratory and part sanctuary—made active by various participants throughout the exhibition’s duration. The exhibition serves as an active studio for Kallmyer to further explore the post-Fluxus poetics of everyday objects, what happens when audience-turns-performer, and what we collectively seek from the experience of listening.
March 22
Sonorous Print Edition at the Walt Disney Concert Hall – Los Angeles, CA
The second edition of JELLY (Journal of Ecstatic LListening Y’All) will drop at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of a concert featuring music by Yoko On. This issue features contributions from Ragnar Kjartansson, Jessica Koslow, Dimitr Chamblas, Christopher Rountree, and others!
Feb 27 to March 3
New Work at LA County Arboretum and Botanic Garden
A new work for birdsong and heavy metal guitarists.
2018
Nov 17, 5 – 10pm
Sonorous Print Edition at the Walt Disney Concert Hall – Los Angeles, CA
JELLY (Journal of Ecstatic LListening Y’All) is semi-annual guide to joyful embodied listening in the new era – a newspaper that examines the role of Fluxus within the expanded field of music through writings, recipes, and interviews with artists like David Lang, Carmina Escobar, Ryoji Ikeda and more! Copies can be found in the lobby of Walt Disney Concert Hall starting on November 17, or shoot me a note and I’ll slip one in the mail for you. JELLY is a collaboration between artist Chris Kallmyer and designer Dante Carlos.
Nov 8 – 17
Walt Disney Concert Hall – Los Angeles, CA
Sonatas and Interludes is a new silent film by that follows the deconstruction of a piano and its renewal into a casual tea house. The work rearranges a classical instrument through a rough and unusual process that explores the Fluxus Movement in light of their historic destruction of pianos. Go check it out at Disney Hall, before any concert between Nov 8 – 17
Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for their Fluxus Festival.
Nov 8, 9, 10 at 7pm
Drip Music at Walt Disney Concert Hall – Los Angeles, CA
A new rendition of George Brecht’s Drip Music at Disney Hall as a part of their 18-19 Fluxus Festival. The performance will be free and open to the public: 45 minutes of amplified aqueous experiments, ambient flowing music, and pouring water from great heights. I’ll be at the corner of 1st and Grand in front of the Hall as a sonic aperitif for Susanna Mälkki’s rendition of the Tempest.
October 13 at 8pm
Cassette Release Party with SolArc Brewing – Los Angeles, CA
Juniper is a meditation on the ghostly, vast landscape of the American West. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Ennio Morricone — working with the composer’s same Italian-made echo machines — Juniper evokes the spaciousness of this landscape. For the release, Chris and Archie Carey from SolArc brewing created a series of juniper meads to partner with the new recordings.
September 6 at 8pm
Film Showing at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater – Los Angeles, CA
Counterfeit Modernism is an evening of film and images that explore the life of a replica of Sol LeWitt’s 1971 sculpture, Modular. The work travels to places and contexts that the original work cannot, lounging poolside in Venice, going deep into the Mojave Desert, or by a campfire. The film features interviews with a physicist, architect, folklorist, toddlers, and puppeteers talking about their own lives as it crosses paths with the LeWitt.
July 6 – 7
Eaux Claires IV – Eau Claire,Wisconsin
Two new collaborative installations with Andy DuCett for Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires Festival.
The Trees is an installation with architecture and sound situated in the Eaux Claires woods. Come listen to an immersive sonic environment with speakers dispersed throughout the trees, and unannounced concerts from members of Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, Volcano Choir, Field Report, Poliça, and readings by poets curated by Michael Perry.
Janette is a sculptural structure set deep in the Eaux Claires woods and containing “The Janette,” a modified piano created by jointly Vernon and Francis Farewell Starlite. Festival goers listen to intimate concerts and sonic dreamscapes by S Carey, Julien Baker, Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, Francis and the Lights, and others.
June 22- 24
CalArts Festival at Teatr Studio – Warsaw, Poland
In June 2018, CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP) and Teatr Studio launch an interdisciplinary project combining theater, visual arts and contemporary music, implemented in collaboration by CalArts and STUDIO artists. Under the curation of CNP Artistic Director Travis Preston, this developmental residency is a creative response to the tradition and space of STUDIO. The project and festival was organized in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
May 19
San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall
What happens when composers think outside the box to create music with completely new and surprising sounds? The history of classical music is full of adventurous artists who did exactly that, from Haydn to Stravinsky to John Cage! This concert explores how these brave thinkers paved the way for future musical innovators, and even invites the audience to help the orchestra create a brand-new musical spectacle together!
May 6
Cal State Fullerton: InterArts Artist Lecture
I’m joining Kim Stringfellow, Sean Griffin, and Julie Weitz to share work and ideas with students in the InterArts program. The goal of the InterArts Collaborative Project is to acquaint students with diverse methodologies in making artwork in music composition, performance, video and visual arts with the issues surrounding the collaborative process, then to produce a collaborative, video-performance projects.
March 10
The Getty Center
The Getty Center is built upon two naturally-occurring ridges in a mildly mountainous terrain. The alphorn is a long, wooden instrument used in mountain regions in Switzerland for means of communication. Musicians try to reach across the Getty’s grounds playing songs from one ridge to another – negotiating the distance between with sound and music.
February 1 – 23
wild Up Tour 2018
Modern music collective, wild Up, is on tour this February traveling from Denver to Montana to Indiana to Maryland to Virginia. If you live in any of these states I hope you’ll consider coming out to check out the band, who is performing concerts on Art + Activism that feature communal robes that I designed and painted for the group.
January 26
Voices In Contemporary Art: Summit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
New commissioned performance by mystic lounge musicians and a new film that features a well traveled replica of Sol Lewitt’s 1971 Modular and features interviews with Kulapat Yantrasast of wHY Architecture, Shannon Scrofano of CalArts, toddlers, as well as many other great minds in LA.
January 4 – February 24
David Maisel’s Proving Ground at Hanes Gallery
New collaboration with David Maisel in the form of an aggressive droning score for his new film KYDOIMOS: The Din of Battle. From SF WEEKLY: “On opening night, an art-goer who’d served in the Israeli army told Maisel that Kallmyer’s music from KYDOIMOS: The Din of Battle resembled what she heard in her head while on military duty. There is a dread — a dronish dread — in Kallmyer’s sounds, and it sustains Maisel’s film from start to finish.” I hope you’ll consider visiting the piece.
2017
November 18 (5 – 8pm)
Noon to Midnight at Walt Disney Concert Hall
Newly Commissioned work by the Los Angeles Philharmonic: I’ve created Soft Structures, three speculative concert halls on the domestic scale made from fabric and steel. The spaces act as containers for brief musical experiences that delight and confound. Each of the three spaces operate differently – one with an audience facing one another on communal benches, another which blurs the inside and outside of the hall, and a third that immerses the listener with an intimate cohort of fellow listeners. Performances will feature Lewis Pesacov, Odeya Nini, Meara O’Reilly, Carmina Escobar, The Readers Chorus, Scott Cazan, Celia Hollander, and Stephanie Cheng Smith for audiences of 6 to 60.
October 13 – November 18
All Possible Spaces at the Sam Francis Gallery
Working with Crossroads students as an audience as well as collaborators, Kallmyer will envision new speculative architecture for spaces that don’t yet exist. Students will explore ideas of ownership, communalism, agency, autonomy, and public space. With his installation Kallmyer will create a Soft Structure in the Sam Francis Gallery that embodies part sculpture and part improvised fort. The project taps into ideas from utopian architecture, to tree houses, to refugees shelters. In addition to the structure Kallmyer has created 20 flat-pack kits to be distributed to various classes. Students will use the kits to prototype a new architecture to fulfill some specific use of their choosing. As they are completed, the 20 different speculative structures will be displayed in the gallery next to Kallmyer’s real-life realization.
July 15, 2017 – January 15, 2018
Soundtracks at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Soundtracks is SFMOMA’s first large-scale group exhibition centered on the role of sound in contemporary art. Focusing on the perceptual experience of space, the exhibition offers opportunities for discovering public architectural features and galleries throughout the newly expanded building. Spanning sculpture, audio and video installation, and performance pieces made since 2000, the show takes its point of departure from key works in the media arts collection. Select pieces address the association of “soundtracks” with film scores in unexpected ways, while others take various approaches to visualizing the relationship between sound and space. Moving beyond medium-specific histories of sound art and electronic music, this cross-generational presentation highlights past SFMOMA commissions by Brian Eno and Bill Fontana, as well as new and diverse work from over twenty contemporary artists, including Ragnar Kjartansson, Christina Kubisch, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, O Grivo, and Susan Philipsz.
June 16 – 17
Eaux Claires Festival
Two installations in the woods accompanying a music festival curated by Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner. 1000 amplified crickets set in the deep woods and a 1970’s era living room designed in collaboration with Minnesota-based artist Andy DuCett.
May 19 – June 16
FraenkelLAB / San Francisco
I am very glad to share that i’ll be creating a show with FraenkelLAB this coming May. The new exhibit, titled Listening is a Luxury explores the nature of listening through a book, an installation, and a performance that features a sleeping puppy + close friends.
April 22
Philbrook Museum / Tulsa, Oklahoma
Dome raising and performance in the Philbrook’s new river-side vegetable garden.
April 2
Machine Project / Music for Coyotes
I’m joining Nat Evans on Sunday, April 2nd at 8pm at Machine Project (LA) for Coyoteways, a performative lecture on the trickster history of coyotes. Merging his own run-ins with coyotes and indigenous trickster mythology, Evans has created a new set of trickster coyote tales, as well as a new album of music. Evans will be presenting this contrasting set of ideas – myth and science, concrete and abstract – through a performative lecture. BYO BLANKET*
March 30
Epic Book Launch Spectacular / Machine Project at the Vista
Machine Project is pleased, elated, overjoyed, proud, to invite you to the book launch of Machine Project: The Platinum Collection. Published by The Tang Museum and designed in collaboration with Kimberly Varella of Content Object, this book holds the entire history of Machine. On this divine celebratory night, we will be graced with live performances by Chris Kallmyer, Cliff Hengst, the Reader’s Chorus, and not to be missed screenings of works from the Machine archive and highlights of upcoming projects.
March 24
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion // 11pm – 3am
A new film live score about date farms in Thermal, California.
2016
Nov 17
Commend NYC / RHYOLITE East Coast Release
Improvisations, Conversation, Careful Listening to a new LP with Julia Holter, Lucky Dragons, and Chris Kallmyer.
October 1
LA Phil / Walt Disney Concert Hall / Crickets
The first in a series of new works that explore ubiquitous sound through landscape and memory. One thousand live crickets are amplified in an interior space calling to remembered landscapes that evoke the poetics and politics of place.
July 31 – August 15
CURRENT LA // Art Biennial
New Weather Station
Working with sound, site, and communities, Chris Kallmyer examines the complex history of weather modification in Southern California in terms of weather, water infrastructure, and the changing arid city. For CURRENT, the artist has created New Weather Station, a 20-foot open-air geodesic dome to host a series of concerts and events featuring LA-based artists, designers, historians, urbanists, chefs, and thinkers and explore the intersection of water and weather modification.
Rain Ragas // Sunday 7/31 at 7pm
In North India, music regularly ushers in the monsoon season. Come to the New Weather Station for a concert of traditional and experimental ragas on sitar and tabla. Sitar player Rajib Karmakar and tabla player Robin Sukhadia encourage precipitation with rain-inspiring ragas.
New Weather // Thursday 8/11 at 8pm
Chris Kallmyer presents a new short film, produced in collaboration with LA-based videographer and artist Ian Byers-Gamber, that explores the relationship between weather modification and water in LA, and features interviews with weather-modification experts and ambient documentation of clouds.
Fog Meditations // Saturday 8/13 at 7pm
Join a 45-minute group meditation and live concert of fog-inspired music by LA-based experimental vocalist and contemporary composer Odeya Nini and CURRENT artist Chris Kallmyer. Bring a blanket, but fog is provided.
American Rainmaker: Weather Opera // Sunday 8/14 at 7pm
Kallmyer examines the human dimension to weather modification through an experimental opera for chamber ensemble, weather reports, and autotuned renditions of Motown hits. Preceded and interrupted by the artist’s casual discussions on weather modification, the opera features performances by modern-music collective wild Up in collaboration with the Oracle of Water. Starting at 5:00 p.m., enjoy sun tea from Solarc Brewing and a weekly publication by LA-based artist Gray Wielebinski.
July 1 – 24
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
A PARADISE CHOIR
As 2017 Performing Fellow, Chris Kallmyer creates A Paradise Choir: a set of 200 robes, workshops, concerts, sonic scenarios, and group experiences. The project explores the idea of temporary communities, self-built cities, and common and uncommon experiences with sound and group activities through the analog of a choir. A Paradise Choir utilizes and populates the museum with real Bay Area Choirs, instrumentalists, museum visitors, professional listeners, artists, and designers all clad in white robes and canvas stoles designed by the artist. The omnipresence of people doing things together is what the project will become: I aim to create scenarios where the choir acts as a metaphor for community through a series of serendipitous experiences throughout SF MOMA’s new spaces.
May 20, 2016 at 6pm
Beauty Pill at the Smithsonian
Luce Unplugged is a monthly concert series that brings DC’s best bands to play in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery. Our Spring Showcase, presented with Washington City Paper, will feature beloved D.C. band Beauty Pill.
May 13 and 14, 2016
LACMA / Bing Theater
Asher Harman’s The Silver, The Black, The Wicked Dance
A nearly silent score created for the premier of Asher Hartman and Gawdafful National Theater’s dark comedic play about predation in American life. The tar pits, the Great Plains, and an imagined outer space are cold and silent landscapes upon which the euphoric drive to create others as foreign—and to become foreign to oneself—circulates in abstract vaudevilles of organ regeneration, alien acceptance, and depersonalization.
May 5 // 8pm – 10pm
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive
2245 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90021
A pre-release listening party for new desert music by Chris Kallmyer, Julia Holter, and Lucky Dragons on Populist Records. Come buy an advance copy, have a beer, and check out a performance by Kallmyer featuring images of his time living in the ghost town, Rhyolite.
April 22 and 23, 2016 at 8pm
SF SOUNDBOX w/ San Francisco Symphony
Though homeless, you make a shrine where you are
The above inscription hung in Harry Partch’s Sausalito studio and characterized Partch’s background as self-described hobo, visionary composer, instrument builder, and Bay Area outsider. This installation is inspired by Partch’s likes and dislikes, as embodied by his distaste for the music of J.S. Bach, and his (completely understandable) love of rose petal jam, which he made each spring while living in Petaluma. Tonight we expose an quiet moment in Harry Partch’s life and try to explore inside the outsider’s mind through amplified jam, tea, and Bach partitas.
April 7, 2016 at 8pm
SolArc Pilot Series
Circles Circling
Chris Kallmyer ~ performing with amplified crickets attuned to the movement of the spheres. Crickets invoke the cosmos accompanied by circular sounds created on the guitar by a mere human.
2015
November 7, 2015 at 2pm
Tang Teaching Museum with Machine Project
Music for Mineral Springs
Come join us for a tasting of local spring waters with musical accompaniment. Students from Skidmore College will work with Chris Kallmyer to create a multi-movement work that examines regional springs through music, light, and water. It will be casual, richly sonic, and a bit wet.
October 29, 2015 at 6pm
Colgate University, with Machine Project (AIR 2015)
Archive of Regional Raking
Experimental music meets puritanical tidiness in the aerial documentation of regional raking practices endemic to Hamilton, NY. The project culminates in a 30-minute musical work on October 29 for maintenance workers, amplified rakes, next-level-raking, and sonic lawn care.
October 20 at 8pm
wild Up at Roulette
A concert inspired by the west, featuring my piece for field recordings and orchestra this nest, swift passerine. Come check it out – the concert will also feature music by Andrew Tholl, Julia Holter, the Misfits, Andrew McIntosh, Nick Deyoe, and FEAR. This is wild Up’s NY debut on the sonic festival.
September 19 from 2 – 5pm
Indianapolis Museum of Art
From the Land of Little Rain
Chris makes music with desert plants in Andrea Zittel’s Indy Island, a floating domesticity in the center of a lake. Come listen to a brief concert of music inspired by the Mojave Desert where Zittel lives, accompanied by arid plantings borrowed on loan from the IMA’s very own nursery.
September 2 – 5, 2015
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, with Andrew Tholl
Artist in Residence, Press Play Festival
Kallmyer will participate in a two-week residency at the Pulitzer in the fall, where he will collect and refine clay from the banks of the Mississippi River to make earthenware musical instruments. These earthenware chimes will be used in a musical performance on Sept 5, in collaboration with LA-based violinist Andrew Tholl and a group of local artist/activists to understand the unique social and natural landscapes of St. Louis through sound and space.
The Commonfield Clay residency and performance are part of Press Play, a five-month program series that invigorates the experience of Tadao Ando’s architecture and the works of Alexander Calder, Richard Tuttle, and Fred Sandback through sound, activating every nook, corner, and expanse of space.
May 21, 2015 – 7pm
Fondation Ricard – Paris
A concert with music and cheese, as part of Nicolas Boulard’s Cheese Theories: The cycle meetings titled “Cheese Theories” proposes taking a look at cheese from different theoretical angles. Production processes, conservation methods, technical limitations of an unstable product, study of the influence of forms on the perception of taste, analysis of the bacteriological environment in production methods, and etymology and place names of products. Historians, artists, scientists, writers and researchers will all come and introduce their works and research to do with cheese and its many different forms as part of this first cycle of meetings, brainchild of Nicolas Boulard.
April 26, 2015
wild Up at UCLA
In conjunction with the first UCLA Hugo Davise Composition Competition, wild Up creates a concert that stems from the roots of complexity. Through Ockeghem, through Muhly and Ferneyhough, to music that’s being writing as we speak. Also, my sound installation using only the vocal ornaments by pop superstar and D-I-V-A, Whitney Houston.
March 26, 2015
Indianapolis Museum of Art, FATE Conference
Artist Talk + an intimate performance. More coming soon on this
January 29 – February 14, 2015
A Nation of Joiners, Weather Modification and YOU!
The Los Angeles Department of Weather Modification, Northern Bureau
at Southern Exposure in San Francisco
Sound artist Chris Kallmyer and the Los Angeles Department of Weather Modification establish an office space and Northern Bureau headquarters at Southern Exposure. With five live programs and a gallery installation, the LADWM continue their sonic explorations into our experience of weather and cultural history of weather modification practices. Kallmyer and other musicians from the LADWM use immersive sound, ritual and radical environmental experiments to end the California drought and create weather.
LADWMNB ENDS THE DROUGHT
Thursday, January 28, 2015, 7:30 – 9:00 pm
The drought comes to an end as we dance it out and perform long-trusted drought-ending rituals, such as an ancient Roman stone dragging ceremony, the tossing of water from a high place by a village elder, and a gathering of twins.
FOG MEDITATION
Saturday, January 31, 2015, 2:00—4:00 pm
Join Kallmyer and his guests for an afternoon performance of fog-inspired music, with distant horns, slow moving sounds, and white-out-conditions taking us back to a pre-global warming San Francisco summer.
RAIN RAGAS
Thursday, February 5, 2015, 7:30 – 9:00 pm
In North India, music regularly ushers in the monsoon season. Join the LADWM for a concert of traditional and experimental ragas on sarode and tabla. Sarode player and son of Ali Akbar Khan, encourages precipitation with these rain-inspiring ragas.
AMERICAN RAINMAKER: A WEATHER OPERA
Thursday, February 12, 2015, 7:30—9:00 pm
A weather expert visits to talk about weather modification in the west, and the LADWM weather consultants tell the tale of Charles Hatfield, an early experimental rainmaker.
LOVE, THUNDER
Saturday, February 14, 2015, 2:00-4:00 pm
The LADWM’s annual Valentines Day celebration articulates a love letter from precipitation to the people of San Francisco. Thunder needs you, and is wants you back. Bring an umbrella and a friend.
2014
December 21, 2014 11 – 5pm (I perform around 2pm)
Berkeley Art Museum Closing
Invocations, meditations, and glorious yelling into the cavernous acoustics of the Berkeley Art Museum. A new work for yelling choir, bass drum, and trumpet.
December 5, 2014 // 6pm – 8pm
Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Desert Location)
What is weather? How do we take it into our lives, or attempt to keep it out? Can we modify the weather to make a new California? These are the questions asked at the Los Angeles Department of Weather Modification (LADWM). Sound artist Chris Kallmyer and the LADWM investigate the weather and history of modification in the arid west through sound, spirit, and folklore. The performance is accompanied by custom neon art from the desert’s own RioFine Neon.
November 8, 2014 – 7:00pm
Santa Barbara Arts and Lectures: wild Up
Pulp: Satie, Shostakovich, Sun Ra, Esquivel, Jarvenin, Zorn, Badalamenti and Julia Holter // visceral, surreal, the dichotomy between topical and guttural. I am making amplified orange juice with a string trio + fresh Valencia oranges.
Nov 30, 2014 – 7 to midnight
Myopia Opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
Collaborating with Adam Lerner and Mark Mothersbaugh on music for the opening of Mark’s career retrospective. The evening will feature Denver-based musicians performing Mothersbaugh’s scores and selected early DEVO tracks. Expect to find a pedal steel guitarists in the museum entrance, a wandering violinist, private headphone concerts, and ambient D-Evolutioun.
September 23, 2014
Headlands Center for the Arts // Private Event
Sonic Aperitif for a small group, with relaxing tones and terroir gin from St. George Distillery.
September 21, 2014 – noon
San Francisco Conservatory – SF Music Day
I’m performing a new version of my work for video and resonating instrument, Spirits featuring televangelist ministers, Andrew Tholl, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Mobius Trio. Come check it out in the Osher Salon, along with other artists from the Center for New Music here in SF.
September 13, 2014
Los Angeles: wild Up at the Ford Amphitheater with Danny Ezralow Dance Company
wild Up will be performing “Bach is a Lens” – my work of architectural analysis via Bach’s cello suites. From the Ford’s site: Following his success choreographing for the 2014 Sochi Olympics opening ceremonies, Daniel Ezralow brings his LA based Ezralow Dance to the Ford, featuring a commissioned premiere with live music by contemporary music collective wild Up.
July 10 – 17 2014
Walker Art Center // Open Field Artist in Residence
Baseball Day to Day
Chris Kallmyer is inspired by the rhythm of baseball, the mindful practice of playing catch, and the sounds of field maintenance. For his 2014 Open Field residency, he explores baseball on the domestic level—the way it ties generations, its unchanging presence in the American household for more than a century, and the way the game invites play on a warm summer night. Over a period of two weeks, Kallmyer will create a series of baseball-inspired scores that include mobile organ performances, daily groundskeeping of a baseline, and playing catch as a musical pursuit. Join the artist on Open Field for a week of sonic events that tie together baseball and sound.
July 17, 2014 at 7pm
Walker Art Center
Play Catch, All Together
Grab your glove and join artist Chris Kallmyer and Twins organist Sue Nelson for a work focused on the sound of people playing catch alongside a baseball stadium organ. Participants are invited to oil their gloves, do some light stretching, and throw around a lemon as warm-up—an homage to Fluxus artist Ken Friedman. Afterwards, have freshly-squeezed lemonade, meet Sue, and take home a well-oiled glove and a copy of Chris’ score for Play Catch, All Together.
*BYO Glove, Balls Provided
June 10 to 13 2014 // 10am to 2pm each day
Grand Park, Los Angeles
Los Angeles Department of Weather Modification
The Department of Weather Modification is dedicated to investigating the changing the weather for a greater California through sonic, spiritual, and scientific means. We explore what the weather can be for Los Angeles through immersive tactile experiences in rain, fog, winds, and thunderstorms. We invite the public to experience weather through sensory experiments in sound, touch, smell, and sight.
California has a long history of modifying the weather to encourage rain through cloud seeding and make improvements to our lot in life. Equally, our Californian businesses eagerly embrace weather modification through carbon emissions and resource harvesting. Our public roads create thermals, and our planes create contrails that smooth out the heating and cooling of our environment.The Department of Weather Modification extends weather modification into the emotional, the spiritual, to examine the way we understand weather through our bodies and their relationship to the outside world. What is Weather? When does it stop or end? How do we take it into our lives, or attempt to keep it out? How can we modify our experience of the weather to make a new Los Angeles?
May 18, 2014
Headlands Center for the Arts
Consider the Oyster: Cross-Sensory Pairings in Oysters and Sound
Sound artist Chris Kallmyer (AIR ’12) collaborates with oystermen to create an immersive environment that explores the sounds, sights, and tastes of oyster production in West Marin. Partake in an immersive environment of edible experiences including a sonic investigation into the process of oyster cultivation, synchronized group shucking, and considered consumption of our favored bivalve. Consider the Oyster is a document of place, culture, and a window into oyster farming in West Marin. Participants should come with hungry minds and bellies and can expect to be wholly satiated.
April 11, 2014
Marina Del Rey Garden Center – 1pm to 5pm
Sound Plant Advice: Guidance in Acoustical Gardening // with Gnarwhallaby
Support for this program was provided through the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, and is produced by Community Arts Resources (CARS).
April 7, 2014
Disney Hall
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minimalist Jukebox with wild Up and ICE
I’m collaborating with Christopher Rountree to create an performance of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It, a work of american-caribbean-experimental-pop-minimalism. Julius Eastman was a gay african american composer who was largely marginalized during his life. To this day, his works aren’t often performed and it is a privilege to bring a performance of Stay On It to a venue like Disney Hall.
February 22, 2014
wild Up at Santa Ana Sites
Modern Music Collective, wild Up is presenting Spirits, my sound installation featuring televangelist preachers. On the 22nd, wild Up will take over the Santora Arts Building in Santa Ana, performing two hours of dozens of micro concerts in 15 different spaces. It’s about architecture, revitalizing old structures, making new ones, collaborating, and people being with people.
2013
November 14, 2013 from 8:30 to 9:30
Pomona College’s Elemental Arts
In the courtyard adjacent to the Museum of Art: Free + open to the public
Weather Stations a sonic investigation of wind, rain, and the lore surrounding our relationship with the weather. Audience will experience a series of overlapping installations that feature autotuned weather reports, resounding wind vanes, weather folklore, attempted forecasting, a houseplant under duress, and live Doppler radar. Expect to find large wind vanes triggering sounds on computers, copies of the great works of weather forecasting, and performances by both Chris Kallmyer and Andrew McIntosh.
October 18, 2013
High Desert Test Sites, Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico
This distance makes us feel closer is an immersive, mountaintop sound work at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico. The work is performed by a set of custom-built, autonomous instruments that resound over vast stretches of land surrounding the ridge at 10,600 feet. A central group of listeners will gather at dusk, sip hot tea, and experience spacious and faraway tones resounding across the landscape; morse code derived from local oral histories and astrological data gathered by the observatory.
August 17, 2013
Be Our House Guests, an immersive meal with sound and food.
A private dinner in support of a collaborative project with Seattle-based composer Nat Evans, entitled House Guests. We are having a small private dinner and concert to help fund the project, and also to create a forum about sound, the city, and the arts in Seattle. This immersive meal is an exclusive event for only 10 people featuring home-grown vegetables, locally caught Salmon, ambient music derived from kitchen prep chaos, generative melodies created from dishwashing, and an after dinner sonic aperitif.
August 16, 2013
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle: Rubber and Tin
Rubber & Tin is a bicycle ride through the city of Seattle that combines homemade musical-bicycle instruments, site-specific listening, smoothies and cartography. Join composers and sound artists Nat Evans and Chris Kallmyer in a workshop to build bike-bound-instruments and other ramshackle devices designed to create sound from your pedaling. The group will then depart for the Burke-Gilman trail making a clangorous drone as they move. Along the way the mobile ensemble will be directed to stop, circle up, and simply listen – our attentions, hearing and observations shaped by this new lens of an instant and temporary community. After exploring the trail and it sounds, the ride will end at Gas Works Park where participants can enjoy snacks, converse, and ponder sounds of the urban fauna. As folks depart, their sonic bicycles slowly dissipate into the broad landscape of the city.
July 19, 2013
Biennial of the Americas: A Concert with Music and Animals
A Concert with Music and Animals is a unique evening of music and art in Denver’s Civic Center Park, including eclectic concert of folk, classical, jazz, rock and avant-garde music in additional video art, sculpture, and dance. The live program kicks off with artist Nick Cave’s dance spectacle performed in horse costumes and includes an all-dog opera accompanied by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. The event begins at 7pm with the opening of an interactive art by Colorado artists. This events was created by Adam Lerner and Chris Kallmyer. A special thank you to the Biennial of the Americas for hosting such an event.
April 21, 2013
Los Angeles Composers Salon – by RSVP only.
A casual, intimate quarterly event for professional music creators in the LA area to meet and “talk shop”. Launched in 2001 under the umbrella of ACF/LA, the Salons became an independent event series in 2007. Past presenters include Randy Newman, Mort Subotnick, William Kraft, Steven Stucky, Don Davis, Billy Childs, Anne LeBaron, Javier Navarrete, Stephen Paulus, Chris Young, Abe Laboriel, Bill Holman, Jeff Beal, David Newman, etc. etc. Over 150 so far, and counting. Salons a meeting place for professionals from the entire bandwidth of LA’s musical styles at their highest level of excellence – from concert music to film scoring, from experimental electronics to world music, from songwriting to jazz, from noise art to free improvisation.
April 17, 2013
LA Phil Brooklyn Festival: wild Up at REDCAT
We’re looking at the music being made by our friends in Brooklyn. The group is interested in where this eclectic style of music making fits in the canon, and where it mixes with work made on the West Coast. From hocket roots in Bach and Varese, through the influence of Sondheim and the pop idiom, to experimentalism, noise, and multi-media – We’ll will be exploring these composers’ complex simplicity.
March 9, 2013
TEDxCalarts at REDCAT
Through short talks and performances, TEDxCalArts explores new understandings of performance and liveness, and examines how these are radically changing the experience of art, architecture, technology, design, culture, politics and beyond.
February, 23 2013
BORN TO CURATE: CURATORIAL BATTLE
Iván Argote & Pauline Bastard present Born to Curate, a live curatorial battle that pits four teams of Los Angeles-based curators head to head in a fast-paced game of wit and knowledge. Structured like a game show, teams have two minutes to conceptualize a curatorial project or exhibition in response to a theme picked at random. Inverting the largely private curatorial process into a public event, ideas behind the construction of meaning are infused with open response and humor. Winners are determined by an applause meter and receive the coveted Born to Curate trophy.
February, 16 2013
Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT
Machine Project is putting on a series of workshops that we call Mind-reading for the Left and Right Brain. Learn to read minds (kind of) in this two part workshop. First, Chris Kallmyer will lead participants in a hands on electronics workshop where you will built a primitive lie detector in the form of galvanic skin response meter. Then we take a cookie break. THEN two of our favorite psychic friends (Asher Hartman and Haruko Tanaka) will lead participants in developing their psychic abilities. This project is put on as part of the Intimate Science Exhibit, currently touring.
January 21, 2013
Echoplex with Lucky Dragons and Victoire
wild Up is playing a show with the LA-based Lucky Dragons and NY-based Victoire. Super psyched for this show: a nexus of good people and bleepy bloopy aesthetics. wild Up is playing my arrangement of Harold Budd’s music and I’ll be hauling guitar, bass guitar, and pocket trumpet to the show. Yesum.
January 14, 2013
Monday Evening Concerts
Local new music group wild Up, known for intense concert experiences, mix crazy-delicate string sounds by Xenakis, and the bright clamor of Messiaen’s mini-concerto for piano, winds, and percussion, with windows into the astonishing world of music in the Philippines. Being on the edges of continents, not Asian, not American, may have helped José Maceda and Jonas Baes find their own routes. Unorthodox instruments and combinations uncover the strange familiarity of nature, and the familiar strangeness. – as happens, too, in Messiaen’s birdsong transformations and the music of English nomad Frank Denyer, whose work was a revelation of the 2009-10 season.
2012
December 6 + 7 2012
Visiting Artist at Columbia College
Chris will be a visiting artist at Columbia College’s School of Media Arts. I’ll be talking about my hybrid practice, and work with students over two days to develop projects in response to site and context.
Lecture: Sheep, Failure, and the Emerging Potential of Site
Workshop: NyanCat is a Lens: Tactile Sound Workshop
November 10, 2012
Hammer Spatial Series #3 – all day
wild Up composers and performers create site-specific works for the intimate nooks and crannies of the Hammer’s courtyard and lobby. Enjoy intimate performances, sonic experiments, and social investigations that are based on new compositions and improvisations. Perhaps there will be a bassoon.
Headlands Center for the Arts – Residency
October 20 – November 20
While at Headlands I will create and document a series of site-specific sound installations surrounding the center for the arts with car horns, trumpet, and found objects. I will hike the land, make field recordings, sketch compositions, and play trumpet in the gun batteries that dot the coast of the headlands. These casual projects will serve as studies for the creation of a work that will incorporate the attitudes and sensibilities of incidental outdoor pieces, but fit the context of an indoor space. Because I consider the composer to be a designer, I believe that experimentation and failure are part of the design process.
October 13, 2012
Hammer Spatial Series #2: Familiar Architectures
1-3pm
Five cellists attempt to play the six Bach Cello Suites simultaneously in a variety of spatial and sonic arrangements. This site-specific work by Chris Kallmyer uses familiar materials to create something new in the unique spaces of the Hammer Museum. I’ll be working with an architect on this project in the hopes to more directly engage with the spaces at the museum. I’m particularly excited about this project because of the collaboration.
September 16, 2012
Hall and Oates Optimal Listening Environment at someone’s house in Houston.
Chris Kallmyer and Casey Anderson will create a set of experimental music based off of the work of the rock and soul duo, Hall and Oates. Songs will be inverted, stretched, deconstructed, and put back together in an effort to create the optimal listening environment for hot Houston days. Note: Chris and Casey bear a mild resemblance to Daryl Hall and John Oates.
September 15, 2012
FERMENT[cheese] at the Young CEO’s conference in Houston, TX
FERMENT[cheese] is a musical piece about about milk’s journey into cheesehood. Participants will taste cheeses from the Cowgirl Creamery accompanied by field recordings of cows, curd, cowbell bells, and trumpet.
September 8, 2012 from 1-3pm
Hammer Spatial Series #1: Are we supposed to listen to our neighbors?
Incidental, ambulatory, and dispersed sound highlights the familiar architecture of the Hammer Courtyard. Independent duos perform across the courtyard spaces in an effort to communicate and listen to one another. Patrons can move through the 2 hour piece, or choose to sit and listen to a folk duo, saxophones, strings, tiny ceramic cups, and a lone percussionist.
September 8, 2012
Collaboration with Nat Evans in Seattle
Seattle based composer Nat Evans and I collaborated to make a music installation that will exist inside the Daejeon Park pagoda for the second annual NEPO House event: 5K Don’t Run. This event features dozens of art happenings, installations and performances along a 5K route in south Seattle that people will traverse. For our installation Chris and I traded field recordings (mine is of Santa Cruz Island – off the coast of LA, Nat’s is of a summer evening in the woods of central Wisconsin, and may or may not contain the sound of a toad). We then created a musical response to the recording, and lastly layered and looped things to spread the possible permutations around a bit. You can read all about the 5K Don’t Run event here. Nat did a ton of work on this and deserves mad props.
September 1, 2012
wild Up at the Hammer: Bach-B-Q
For our second large-scale concert as Orchestra in Residence, we’re tackling a Brandenburg Cycle. Making this old thing new again. There will be virtuosic strings and screaming piccolo trumpets, baritone saxophones and an electric bassoon. Join us for this end of summer concert in the courtyard of the Hammer. Bring your own blanket and picnic, we’ll provide plenty of sound.
August 11, 2012 – 8pm
wild Up at UCLA
In August we are Ensemble in Residence at UCLA for the American Composers Orchestra, Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute. We’ll be teaching classes on contemporary performance practice, writing for each instrument and extended technique. The week finishes with a concert that is going to be absolutely over the top. We’re playing: Ferneyhough, Jarvinen, Tholl, Derek Bermel, George Lewis, Anne LeBaron, Alvin Singleton, Nicole Mitchell and Tom Johnson.
July 14, 2012 – 3pm
wild Up at the Hammer Museum
In our first large-scale concert as Orchestra in Residence at the Hammer, we explore our roots and music on the West Coast. Ennio Morricone meets Schoenberg meets Ornette Coleman meets the Beach Boys. There will be tumbleweeds and butterflies, boots and ponchos.
June 6, 2012
Pitch Battles at Machine Project 8pm
In overlapping performances, Colin Dickey, Nicole Antebi and Chris Kallmyer will explore the difference between two rival pitches, 440 Hz and 432 Hz: Colin Dickey will trace the history of the war for correct musical tuning, a debate that’s raged for two centuries and has involved the Nazis, French government, BBC, Lydon Larouche, and new age practitioners. Responding to the phenomenon of radial pattern formation by sound frequencies or Cymatics, Nicole Antebi will accompany the talk and performance with a video tinkering with the shape of sound. Additionally, Chris Kallmyer will accompany the talk sonically, creating an multi-channel environment of competing tonal systems and real-time examples of pitch-altered recordings of Wagner, sine tones, and live instruments.
Come hang out, have a restructured beer, and listen to some pitch-altered Pink Floyd.
June 18, 2012
FERMENT[cheese] // Southern Exposure and Machine Project 8pm
Chris Kallmyer (LA) – FERMENT[cheese]
Information: FERMENT[cheese] is a musical piece about about milk’s journey into cheesehood. Chris Kallmyer will create sound works to accompany local cheeses by Cowgirl Creamery and others, utilizing field recordings of cows, curd, harmonium, and trumpet.
Nathaniel Parsons (SF) – As One We Are Onederfull, As More Morefull
Information: HA HA LA is an ALLOWance. For this upcoming performance HA HA LA will explore the realities of inclusion, honoring sources and acknowledging the process of building a moment in the moment.
June 15, 2012
Closet Concerts // Southern Exposure and Machine Project 7pm
Four concurrent sound performances in closets. Chris Kallmyer will make sounds with an extravagant ramshackle system of guitars, amplifiers, small speakers, laptop and old oral history recordings of Maryland Oystermen. All of these items will be connected with audio cable or tape in an effort to make beautiful and loud music.
May 12, 2012
wild Up 8pm.
April 30, 2012
FERMENT[cheese]
A rendition of my cheese tasting and spatialized sound installation will be staged somewhere in Los Angeles.
April 26, 2012
Brooklyn, NY
a new work for guitar and field recordings is being performed by John P Hastings somewhere in Brooklyn.
April 16, 2012
NESTS with Rebecca Davis
This event will happen somewhere in New York City as part of a 2-year long collaboration between myself and Rebecca Davis.
March 30, 2012
the wulf. 8pm
The Field is a Subject for Discussion // A presentation of manipulated field recordings both prepared and randomly exchanged. Featuring Casey Anderson, Scott Cazan, Chris Kallmyer, and Colin Wambsgans.
March 27, 2012
Getty Villa – Aphrodite Exhibition Opening
Matt Barbier and I have collaborated on the building of a Pythagorean Monochord for the performance of music in the 3-limit tuning system that Pythagorus developed. We are playing on this instrument as part of a private opening at the Getty Villa.
March 23 at 9pm + 24 at 3pm
wild Up at Beyond Baroque
Hipster Music. A compendium.
The music of right now, right this very moment, is being created in basements and recorded in living rooms in high definition. We are the generation of DIYers, of Urban Homesteaders, who plant vegetables in our backyards and knit each-other sweaters. Our music is raw, unabashed, and we made it ourselves. In March, we present a concert in conjunction with Beyond Baroque and Venice Arts, about the music we’re writing now, why we’re here and how we think things should go forward.
March 17, 2012
Venice Arts + wild Up Workshop
Teaching children about sound, gestalt, and composition on a gigantic piano thats been disassembled and turned into a table: or rather, interior piano music by children.
March 14, 2012 from 4 to 6 pm
Visiting Artist // Center For New Performance
at California Institute of the Arts.
February 22, 2012 at CAA Confrence
Artist Talk – New Media Caucus
I’ll be speaking in the New Media tent about amplified farm animals and acoustic qualities of succulents.
Jan 28 + Feb 4, 2012 at Art Center College
Visiting Artist
I’ll be collaborating with Kamau Patton, Brody Condon, and Nate Page as part of Machine Project‘s efforts to teach a whole class at Art Center College of Design in the style of telephone.
February 15 + 16, 2012 at CSUMB
Teledramatic Arts and Tech – Visiting Artist
I’ll be on tour as Machine Project in Mid February teaching soldering classes, giving an artist talk, and a collaboration and presentation on tuning systems, steam heat, the nazis, and genital stimulation with Colin Dickey and Nicole Antebi.
January 19, 2012 8pm – Betalevel
A B O D E // A B O A T
The meeting of European Improvisers and American Hardcore. A duo of improvisers from Europe have come to the west coast to do improv battle with local musicians. Be prepared for metallic sound sculptures, electronics, traditional scottish music, cassettes, feedback, and things we found on our way to the show. Field recordings will be played from watering cans, and may or may not involve baked goods and carhorns.
ABODE is a duo by Caroline Pugh and Paul Stapleton. (Europe)
A BOAT is a duo by Chris Kallmyer and Casey Anderson. (Los Angeles)
January 14, 2012 – Armory – Pasadena, CA.
wild Up
ORNITHOLOGY
this nest, swift passerine – my piece for field recordings and orchestra – is being performed on this program by wild Up. I’m very excited to also be playing guitar, trumpet, and harmonium on the concert.
from the band:
A study of fluttering winged life. For centuries artists have been obsessed with the study of birds, their sounds, and the freedom with which they move through the world. In Spring we follow a few visions of flight, through jazz, the avant-garde, and indie pop, with sounds that are old, new and in between.
2011
November 18 & 19 at Beyond Baroque
wild Up
CLARENCE BARLOW, PUNK ROCK & PLAYER PIANO
I’m performing trumpet, bass guitar and electric guitar. I have also arranged a tune by deerhoof for an ensemble of amplified bassoon, guitar, two drumsets and rebar.
Barlow’s music is inspired by the intricate man-made sounds of a piano playing itself. It’s inspired by the comedy of classical music, and by the Sex Pistols. We’ve put together a night of music that we love. Not only a program of things that have influenced Clarence, but truly a night of music that inspires us.
Clarence Barlow + George Antheil + Conlon Nancarrow + piano rags by Albright and Bolcom + the Misfits + x-ray specs + Fear + and an arrangement of an arrangement: Black Flag —> Dirty Projectors
October 22, 2011
The Getty Center + Machine Project
our shared terrain
for two alphorns
Alphorns, traditionally used for conveying sound across the vast distances of the Swiss Alps will be used to create a 22.5 minute sound piece for the slightly-less-vast distances of the Getty Center. The Center itself is built upon two naturally-occurring ridges that diverge at a 22.5 degree angle, creating two architectural planes that define the Getty’s public spaces.
Chris Kallmyer and Loren Marsteller, alphorns
Loren Marsteller is a performer specializing in trombone, euphonium, and other musical instruments. He has performed with the Los Angeles Philarmonic, freelances in Los Angeles, and teaches at Cal State Long Beach.
October 15, 2011
MCA Denver
everyone in a place is a day-long, public-activated sound installation by Chris Kallmyer. All visitors will be issued a small bell, which they can wear as they move through the galleries and public spaces at the MCA. The piece works as a design pattern that documents in real-time how architecture moves us through a space.
for vertical space
for fred sandback
created for MCA Denver
A balloon is a like a tiny room with nodes of resonance, and via a small internal speaker driver, the balloon is turned into a loudspeaker. Sine tones and field recordings of Denver can be sent to these floating, mobile speakers. The balloons are raised and lowered throughout the day by hand in an effort to better understand the unique acoustical properties of the MCA’s inner spaces.
possible constellations
for amy sandback
Roger Green and Chris Kallmyer
A 20 minute sound work for guitar, banjo and field recordings. The performance will take place amongst Fred Sandback’s work. All field recordings were made in Denver of local sounds that permeate and define the city’s sonic identity. Roger and Chris will collaborate in an effort to better understand the the city and its inhabitants as well as offer a setting for contemplation of Fred Sandback’s work within the MCA’s inner spaces.
October 1, 2011
DeVotchKa at the Greek Theater
July 2011
Walker Art Center + Machine Project
Music For Parking Garages
July 21, 2011 // 3-8pm
Los Angeles and Minneapolis musicians will partner to create site-specific sound works for the Walker Art Center’s parking garage. These pieces will create a warm ambient environment for visitors as they park their cars, stop in to listen, or even nap to the music. Come pull up a bean bag chair or backseat, and experience the acoustical charm of the parking structure.
Chris may or may not play trumpet at some time in some place possibly. . .
Chris Kallmyer, experimental musician, may or may not be playing a trumpet for some duration of time as an exploration of the spaces inside the Walker. Spaces could also be outside the Walker. Spaces may not be involved. (Trumpet optional.)
Who: Chris Kallmyer
What: maybe trumpet
When: unknown
Where: unknown
the american lawn, and ways to cut it
July 28, 2011 // 6 to 7:30pm
Join us for Machine Project’s grand finale event: a three-part exploration of the American lawn and ways to cut it, via sheep, choreographed gasoline-powered ride-on-mowers with mounted oscillators tuned to the drone of their engines, and push mowers. Come help us examine the sonic nature of the Walker’s Open Field, while giving the lawn a much-needed trim.
July 27, 2011
Dogstart Orchestra
Straights of Magellan by Morton Feldman
CalArts
July 16, 2011
Theater Communications Group Conference
Biltmore Hotel Tiffany Ballroom
I’m speaking on the Little William Theater, and my experiments with context.
July 11 // 6-7pm
Hammer Museum
Insect Meditations with Jessica Catron
May 6, 2011
Berkeley Art Museum
Triway Hyperlecture Cage Match (with musical accompaniment): Join Machine Project for an experimental three way lecture blowout with musical accompaniment. Jason Brown, Colin Dickey, and Jason Torchinsky will simultaneously deliver presentations covering some or all of the following topics – phrenological graverobbing, pre 1860 automobiles, the lizard people and their tunnels under Los Angeles, mechanical televisions, a paranoid history of San Francisco, ergotism, demonic possession, the scourge of masturbation and its relationship to capitalism, and Flaubert’s very complicated feelings about images, photographic and otherwise. These presentations will be accompanied by incidental musical performances, including j.frede and his wine-glass drone ensemble, and underwater recordings of the San Francisco Bay.
April 29, 2011
Berkeley Art Museum
FERMENT[cheese] is a multi-media concert/presentation/tasting exploring milk’s leap into immortality. The evening will feature a milk-to-cheese tasting accompanied by field recordings of cows eating grass, curd draining, cheese aging, and oral history with local dairyman, John Taverna. Within this environment, Chris Kallmyer will create site-specific and dispersed sound works with the experimental ensemble, TempWerks. At 7:30 Sue Conley will speak about the art of cheese making, and the sustainable qualities of artisan and farmstead agriculture. Through an immersive sound environment we invite visitors to more fully experience the fermented arts. FERMENT[cheese] is a collaboration between Sue Conley, co-founder of Cowgirl Creamery and Machine Project Sound Curator, Chris Kallmyer.
March 25, 2011
Machine Project
FEEDBACK AND SPACESHIPS AND CATS
I’m curating and performing at a concert of feedback music by Mark Trayle paired with a lecture on the use of feedback in landing systems for spacecraft. You can find more information on Machine Project’s website.
March 24, 2011
Pomona College
I’m guest teaching Mark Allen’s class in Sound Art for the day with my collaborator, Colin Woodford. I will be talking about the site specific work I’ve been doing this past year at the Hammer, LACMA, and the Glow Festival. Additionally, we’ve been commissioned to create a work for the Pomona campus.
March 19, 2011
— with Wild Up playing music of Jarvinen, Johnson, and Tholl
— at the Bootleg Theater
March 13, 2011
— Soldering: The Musical — a soldering workshop
— at Machine Project
March 12, 2011
— with DeVotchka at the Music Box
March 11, 2011
— with Touchy Feely — at Andrew Tholl’s DMA recital
— at CalArts
Berkeley Art Museum at UC Berkeley
Feb 25, 2011 // 8pm
Machine Project Workshop Confusatron: I’ll be producing the event for Machine, and helping out with the creation of amplified watermelons, cactus, and other objects. From UC Berkeley: In keeping with Machine Project’s practice of producing events that use hands-on engagement to make rarefied knowledge accessible, the evening will feature simultaneous drop-in sessions on making kimchi, converting melons into amplified drums, plant cloning, and the application (and styling) of tranimal drag makeup. Machine Project is a nonprofit performance and installation space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food in a disheveled storefront in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Walker Art Center
January 9-12, 2011 // in Minneapolis, MN
Machine Project on TOUR! – with Mark Allen, Emily Lacy, and Joshua Beckman. We will be performing in an igloo on the Walker’s front lawn. I will be embedding contact microphones in the structure, and using this as source material for performances.
2010
Music of Marc Sabat
at the Wulf // Dec 15, 2010 // 8pm
Music of James Klopfleisch
at the Wulf // Dec 8, 2010 // 8pm
a ‘beheaded sun’/326 Breaths/Possibly Bowed Milk Carton
with Matt Cook, Matt Barbier, Cat Lamb, April Guthrie, Josh Foy, Chris Kallmyer, Christine Tavolacci, and James Klopfleisch.
Ear Meal Webcast
www.laartstream.com
Wednesday // Dec 1, 2010 // 9pm PST
I’m presenting video documentation of my desert installation, Fence for the Amargosa Desert on Alan Nakagawa’s LA Experimental Music Webcast.
Sunday, October 24 at 5pm
Experimental Music Yearbook
at the wild beast // CalArts
winter strengthens (2010) chris kallmyer
lethologica (2010) vinny golia
for barnett newman (2010) john p. hastings
a book of orchestras (2004) greg davis
August – November
Little William Theater Festival of New Music
The Festival of New Music comprises four resident ensembles, 97 composers, 350+ new works, and over 400 concerts inside a coatroom, under the stairs in the lobby of the Hammer Museum. All works have been commissioned for this festival, and are under two minutes in length. Concerts are every Saturday from August through November from 1:00 to 4:00pm at the Hammer Museum starting on August 7.
September 25, 2010 // 8pm to 3am
Glow Festival at the Santa Monica Pier
Carousel Concerts: I’m curating 8 hours of concerts on a carousel for Machine Project’s role in this year’s Glow Festival. I am also creating an installation piece on the carousel involving 5 channel sound, and field recordings of the carousel, and sonic life of the pier.
September 5, 2010 // 5pm
@ Machine Project
Music for a Shipwreck: Sea Nymph
Colin Woodford and I will be performing on amplified instruments within Sea Nymph, the new installation at Machine Project.
July 17, 2010 all day [saturday]
Hammer Museum // everybody in a place,
On July 17, 2010, his installation piece, “everyone in a place” will be featured at the Hammer Museum, giving free admission to anyone who would like to visit the museum, wear a bell, and consider their surroundings. With bell performance by Elizabeth McMullin and her Bell Santa Gamelan, Colin Woodford and his amplified cymbal, and African Bell Quartets.
June 2010
Goldwell Open Air Museum // Residency with Matt Sargent
Living outside Death Valley, Matt and I are using the desert as source material and composing a work for field recordings, guitar, trumpet, and instruments created from mining camp trash. We are here on an artist residency at by the Goldwell Open Air Museum sponsored by the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Performances:
Saturday, July 26, 2010 //7pm // at the Goldwell Barn in Rhyolite, NV
Off Rte 374, follow signs to Rhyolite and look for the red barn on your left.
Thursday, July 1, 2010 // 7-9pm // at Place Gallery in Las Vegas, NV
1054 Main Street, in The Arts District of Las Vegas, NV
Saturday, July 3, 2010 // 8pm // at the Machine Project in Los Angeles, CA
1200 D North Alvarado St. Los Angeles, CA 90026
http://www.goldwellmuseum.org/
May 16, 2010 [sunday] // Machine Project
FERMENT[cheese] // with Sue Conley of the Cowgirl Creamery
Sue Conley, cheese-maker and founder of the Cowgirl Creamery and sound artist Chris Kallmyer have developed a multi-media collaboration based on their mutual love of cheese and the fermented arts.
At this event, Sue will speak on art of cheese making, the sustainable qualities of artisan and farmstead agriculture, and share tastes of fresh milk, young curd, and aged Mt Tam. During the lecture/tasting/concert, Chris will provide music to eat cheese by: Incorporating field recordings of John Taverna’s Dairy and the Cowgirl’s facilities with trumpet, harmonium, and cowbells.
Register Here: http://machineproject.com/events/2010/05/16/cheesefest-2010/
May 1, 2010 7:30pm [Saturday] // ASTO Museum // Highland Park
“Enjoy an evening of new, original works exploring the intersection of contemporary music and dance. Repeat collaborators Robert and Natalie have joined forces again to engulf you into a dark world where insanity entangles, sex detaches, and God judges.” Wow. I’ll be performing Bob’s piece for solo trumpet, as well as collaborating in a improvised piece with dancers and office chairs!
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=110911278948480&ref=ts
April 29, 2010 6-9pm [thursday] // Hammer Museum // Permanent Collection
I’ve been curating a project in which museum patrons receive a Live Museum Soundtrack from our resident guitarist. Now with two guitarists! Through a set of headphones, Eric Klerks and Dylan McKenzie will walk visitors through their time in the collection improvising music to the art they view. Soundtracks are live, improvised, and completely personal.
http://machineproject.com/projects/hammer/museum-soundtrack/
April 8, 2010 7-9pm [thursday] // Hammer Museum // Permanent Collection
I’ve been curating a project in which museum patrons receive a Live Museum Soundtrack from our resident guitarist. Through a set of headphones, our musician walks visitors through their time in the collection improvising music to the art they view. Soundtracks are live, improvised, and completely personal.
http://machineproject.com/projects/hammer/museum-soundtrack/
April 3, 2010 // 1-4pm [saturday]
two-minute concerts in Little William Theater // Hammer Museum
Chris presents his project FERMENT; a precursor to his collaboration with cheese-maker, Sue Conley of the Cowgirl Creamery. Incorporating field recordings of John Taverna’s Dairy and the Cowgirl’s facilities, Chris examines the process of cheese-making from agriculture to affinage. Spatialized sound in the Little William Theater with samples of artisanal cheese. [Mt. Tam to be featured.]