Ghost Ensemble - Winding Wind
Saturday January 10th
doors at 7:30pm | performance at 8:00pm
$20 general tickets | $10 student tickets with ID
tickets sold at the door
This performance is part of BROILER, an Oracle Egg Residency series providing 3 to 7 day residencies to incubate ambitious new work in sound and performance. Learn more here.
Ghost Ensemble presents an evening of recent commissions incorporating just intonation, elemental forces, and Renaissance/Baroque practices, featuring the world premiere of the ensemble’s newest commission from KCM Walker and the Los Angeles premieres of Sarah Davachi’s Ghost Ensemble commission and the latest percussion work from Akari Komura. Developed through close collaboration with the ensemble, Sarah Davachi’s Basso Continuo stretches the Baroque practice of harmonic accompaniment to an extreme duration in a glacial just-intonation counterpoint. Like much of Davachi’s music, the real action happens in the phenomenological experience beyond the notation; her work invites a harmonic listening in between stasis and motion, where the physical bodies of the instruments and resonance of the room are constantly in play with one another. K.C.M. Walker’s Low Dance and Winding Wind, inspired by the Basse Danse and Tourdion dance forms popular at the turn of the sixteenth century, is composed around a just intonation scale that moves from a focus on harmonic consonance to the polyphonic texture of overlapping melodic contours. Drawing on the translation of Tourdion in reference to a twisting or winding motion, Winding Wind is a prolation canon featuring the harp which maintains an ostinato while simultaneously doubling the bass flute, accordion, and contrabass as they play versions of the same melody at different rates. Akari Komura’s voices on the surface invites the performer and listeners into dialogue with the voicelessness of natural elements, imagining sonic landscapes on the surfaces of trees, fire, earth, ore, and water.
Ghost Ensemble
Ghost Ensemble creates experimental music that expands our perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Established in 2012, the ensemble conducts long-term exploratory workshops with a broad range of composers and creators to nurture adventurous new music over multiple seasons, blurring borders of genre, style, and scene to explore the most innovative and exciting music of our time. Performances and workshops also often incorporate Deep Listening, a practice pioneered by ensemble mentor Pauline Oliveros that encourages a heightened awareness of sound, space, and community. The ensemble’s collaborators have included Elizabeth Adams, Marguerite Brown, Laura Cetilia, Sarah Davachi, Kyle Gann, Liisa Hirsch, James Ilgenfritz, Catherine Lamb, Sky Macklay, Miya Masaoka, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Ben Richter, Teodora Stepančić, Lester St. Louis, Cassia Streb, Yasunao Tone, Chaz Underriner, Lucie Vítková, KCM Walker, and Kristina Wolfe. Ghost Ensemble has released four albums: We Who Walk Again (2018, Indexical), with music by Macklay, Oliveros, and Richter; Mountain Air (2021, Indexical), with music by Oliveros, Brown, and Stepančić; Ben Richter's Rewild (2024, New World Records); and Catherine Lamb's interius/exterius (2025, greyfade). Ghost Ensemble also appears on James Ilgenfritz's Stay Logged In On This Trusted Device (2024) and Indexical's Ghost Ensemble and Lightbulb Ensemble Live at Pioneer Works (2015).
Sarah Davachi
Sarah Davachi’s work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. Similarly informed by minimalist and longform tenets, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that reconsiders perceptions of the familiar and the distant. Davachi has collaborated with artists such as Ellen Arkbro, Oren Ambarchi, Grouper, William Basinski, Catherine Lamb, Michael Pisaro, Loren Connors, Tashi Wada, David Rosenboom, and Charlemagne Palestine; commissions include large-scale works for Quatuor Bozzini, London Contemporary Orchestra, Yarn/Wire, Apartment House, Wild Up, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
KCM Walker
Born and based in the Carolinas, KCM Walker is a composer, musician, and woodworker exploring connections between music, magic, and mathematics. His work is informed by studies in instrument design, just intonation and tuning theory, ceremonial magic, and classical metaphysics. In addition to composing music, he also builds wooden stringed instruments and performs music for hurdy gurdy or percussion. He holds graduate degrees from Wesleyan University, where he worked with Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier, and The University of California Santa Cruz, where he worked with David Dunn, Michelle Lou, and Larry Polansky.
Akari Komura
Akari Komura is a composer-intermedia artist from Tokyo, Japan. Her works center around contemplative mode of listening and soundmaking. She is interested in calling attention to the everyday space and blurring the boundaries of individual/collective, life/art, and performer/audience relationships. Her works have been presented at the American Composers Orchestra EarShot Reading, Composers Conference, HEAR NOW Music Festival, and MATA Festival. She holds an MM in Composition from the University of Michigan and a BA in Vocal Arts from the University of California, Irvine. Akari is currently a PhD composition student at the University of California San Diego.