Still House Plants, Mark Lightcap, Judith Berkson

Still House Plants’ Finlay Clark, David Kennedy, and Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach began to write music together during their second year at the Glasgow School of Art, later joining the eclectic scene surrounding the city’s Green Door Studio and undertaking a six-month residency at London’s Cafe OTO. Factor in a semester spent living with an emo band in Chicago and the intimate aggregation of the trio’s sound heterodoxy—an astonishing cohabitation of fractured R&B, wistful sensitivity, and harmolodic guitar—begins to show its strands. With punk autonomy, Still House Plants cite the cut-up affect of UK garage as the impetus for their sparse treatment of chords and words as samples; stuttered, fragmented, and permuted by living drums, guitar, and Hickie-Kallenach’s unmistakable husky voice. On their last release, Fast Edit (Blank Forms Editions, 2020), things sit on top of each other, fall over one another, or click into place, with hearts on sleeves and spirits in motion. As part of their long-awaited first tour of the United States, Still House Plants will play for two nights at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles, with Mark Lightcap and Judith Berkson on the 30th, and David Rosenboom and Matana Roberts on the 31st.

Mark Lightcap is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Sierra Madre, California. Best known as a founding member of essential 90s Los Angeles slowcore trio Acetone, Lightcap’s other endeavors include the hypnotically circular, cover-inclined Dick Slessig Combo (alongside bassist Carl Bronson and drummer Steve Goodfriend of Radar Brothers), and more recently the instrumental, proggy living room recordists The Ecstacy of Gold (alongside Steve Hadley of Acetone, Jason Yates, and Senon Williams of Dengue Fever). He is also a frequent collaborator with producer/Dub Club founder Tom Chasteen, and has worked extensively with the electronic duo Matmos. He has performed and/or recorded with a diverse range of artists, not limited to Marshall Allen, Mike Kelley, Spiritualized, Hope Sandoval, Mamadou Kelly, Diana Thater, Soft Pink Truth, and The Kronos Quartet. He frequently utilizes instruments of his own design and construction, and is considered one of the foremost practitioners of simultaneous guitar/sousaphone playing.

Judith Berkson is a mezzo-soprano, pianist and composer living in Los Angeles, California. Citing influences ranging from Jewish cantorial music and Hebrew liturgy to jazz standards and lieder from composers such as Schubert and Schumann, her music offers a contemplative, spare space for the reworking of classical and traditional structures within contemporary sonic modes and techniques. Her Liederkreis project, begun in 2016 and unfolding across two records, brings an idiosyncratic, song-oriented approach to electronically-augmented vocal interpretations of classical lieder. As her voice’s haunting, romantic tonality is subsumed within the electronic automatism of the vocoder, drum machine, and synthesizer, the forlorn quality of the composition is brought to bear against the clean, hypermodern quality of the sound.