BRIAN harnetty: shawnee, Ohio

Part of the SPCO's No Fiction Festival

Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 7:30pm (purchase tickets)
Mairs Concert Hall at Macalester College, Saint Paul

“Working like a novelist, [Harnetty] has immersed himself in an archive of field recordings – slices of past lives – and now emerges to create a new text, breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualising them.” —The Wire

Performed with sampled archives, field recordings and live musicians, Brian Harnetty’s Shawnee, Ohio critically engages ecology, energy, place and personal history. Known for his ability to “bring gem recordings up out of the basement and into the light” (New Music Box), Harnetty derives his compositional material from the sounds of production and Appalachian town life, reflecting the experience of a town fighting to survive after a century of economic decline and environmental degradation. The town’s downturn and partial restoration act as an ethos of the struggles and hopes of the larger region, now immersed in a controversial fracking boom. Shawnee, Ohio considers these histories, evokes place through sound, and listens to the present alongside traces of the past. 

Tickets: $20 ($16 for SPCO/Liquid Music subscribers)
Post-show conversation led by Macalester College Professor of Music Mark Mazullo

Shawnee, Ohio Related Event:  
Shawnee, Ohio Gallery Installation
Saturday, February 24 through Friday, March 23
Visual and sound art by Brian Harnetty
Weitz Center for Creativity, Carleton College