This weekend, tourists at Cloud Gate may find themselves drawn to the adjacent Jay Pritzker Pavilion, enticed by music booming from the lawn speakers.
But when they approach, they’ll find the Millennium Park stage perplexingly empty.
Without realizing it, they’ve stumbled into Sonic Pavilion. The brainchild of local sound-art booster Experimental Sound Studio, the festival fashions the Millennium Park lawn into a stage all its own, immersing passersby in sound installations bespoke to its criss-crossing, 24-channel audio system.
Experimental Sound Studio co-directors Adam Vida, Olivia Junell and Alex Inglizian delight in these accidental encounters. Talk about “sound art,” and the mind may drift to contemporary art museums, galleries and other rarefied settings. But for years, the group has brought the medium to free public spaces, from Millennium Park to the Lincoln Park Conservatory.
“I still keep in touch with people that have previously been tourists and just walked into these things,” Inglizian says.
The group’s support of the city’s sonic arts is similarly multichanneled. Besides these public installations, it hosts a prodigious sound archive that would be the envy of any university, including rare tapes of the Afrofuturist icon Sun Ra and various Chicago free jazz icons. It organizes site-specific live performances, such as a forthcoming, sold-out show at Wisconsin’s Yerkes Observatory featuring trumpeter Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra. It also offers myriad artist residencies for creatives looking to develop new work.
But, as the organization turns 40 this year, Experimental Sound Studio’s behind-the-scenes artist support has plainly become its most essential function. The group helped drive Golden Egg, an initiative which distributed $50,000 to musician retirement funds last year. (The program is on hiatus while it seeks funding for a second cycle.)
This year, ESS is piloting a new program providing free and discounted studio time at its Edgewater HQ to Chicago-based artists.
Those projects go a long way. Sifting through 253 applications to Golden Egg last year, Junell and her colleagues learned just how little musicians were actually making: The average reported salary was just under $26,000.
“Chicago musicians were living on much less than we expected, even,” she says. “Artists really need free sessions because they’re living on so little.”
When it was founded in 1986, in a Wicker Park loft, Experimental Sound Studio was one of the first nonprofits dedicated entirely to audio art. It remains the only organization of its kind in the Midwest and now operates under a co-directorship model since the retirement of its executive director, sound artist Lou Mallozzi.
“There were some presenters of experimental music, but nobody was both a hub for the artists to produce work and network, as well as doing presentations,” Mallozzi says.
The first Sonic Pavilion Festival was held in 2021, but Experimental Sound Studio had intermittently taken over the Millennium Park for years prior. Its first foray was “Train Time,” a 2008 collaboration between Mallozzi and three other composers that collaged train sounds from around the world. Acoustic technician Jonathan Laney, who designed the Millennium Park sound system, has worked with the group over the years to adapt the installations to the park.
Aided by an America250 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, this year’s Sonic Pavilion prompts artists to draw inspiration from an American community of their choosing. You’ll hear strains from the steel industry in Pittsburgh, an Appalachian fiddle convention in West Virginia, and massive freighters traversing the Great Lakes.
Lasting exactly 12 minutes each, all will play for a 90-minute stretch then start over, for a total of three hours each day.
Each cycle kicks off with “The Chicago Wind Map,” a piece by saxophonists Artie Black and Hunter Diamond that maps each of the park’s 24 audio channels to a neighborhood: South Side neighborhoods anchored on the lawn’s southern end, North Side neighborhoods closer to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, West Side neighborhoods closer to the Bean, and so on.
To create their sonic map, Black and Diamond plumbed their network to find 24 wind and brass players across the city — some who live in the neighborhood in question, others who grew up or work in them. Kenthaney Redmond, a flutist, represents the city’s western fringe, in Austin. Trumpeter Mario Abney, a bridge between Chicago and New Orleans’ jazz scenes, represents Washington Park. And Matt Ulery, most known as a bassist but increasingly dusting off his tuba chops, holds down the far northwest side in Norwood Park.
Each interpreted the same short melody following Black and Diamond’s directions. They were also asked to submit an additional field recording that, to them, summed up what their neighborhood sounds like. Those recordings are woven through the last two minutes of the piece so that it ends with the sounds of the city alone.
“We feel it’s impossible for any one person to be a representative of their neighborhood,” Diamond says. “But we find that living in a specific environment will undoubtedly have some kind of impact, whether conscious or not, on an artist’s process.”
The unique qualities of the Millennium Park sound system also drew in sound artist Kikù Hibino and Cornelius Ferguson, best known to footwork enthusiasts as the revered Corky “Traxman” Strong. Through an audio-processing program, Hibino remixed their collaborative studio session at ESS and spatialized it, sending each of the 24 sound layers ricocheting around the lawn.
The end result, he says, will sound like a “kaleidoscopic” canopy of fast-paced footwork rhythms and vocal samples. The artists have been so pleased with the project that they’re expanding it into an album, due out this December.
“I wanted something really pushing the envelope,” Hibino says, “and I know Traxman likes to push the envelope.”
After Sonic Pavilion wraps, ESS’s 40th anniversary celebrations continue with a free, daylong celebration at its Edgewater digs on Oct. 17. And if you miss the festival itself, never fear. Scheduled for December, ESS’s “Sonic Pavilion Redux” has become a tradition-within-a-tradition, adapting the festival commissions for its front gallery’s eight-channel system — no sunscreen required.