Marisa Anderson w/ Jack Bird & Kelby Clark

7:30 PM doors/8 PM show, June 20 @ The Creamery (216 W. Birch in Rogers) | We’re thrilled to present a night of incredible improvisation with three solo sets from guitarist Marisa Anderson, violinist Jack Bird and banjo player Kelby Clark. They’ll be creating deep resonance in this one-of-a-kind space that was a one-time factory for making cream that’s now home to venue host Ecological Design Group.

Marisa Anderson channels the history of the guitar and stretches the boundaries of tradition. Her deeply original work applies elements of minimalism, electronic music, drone and 20th century classical music to compositions based on blues, jazz, gospel and country music, re-imagining the landscape of American music. The New Yorker calls Anderson ‘one of the most distinctive guitar players of her generation’, while NPR refers to her as among ‘this era’s most powerful players’ . Her work has been featured in Billboard, Rolling Stone, NPR, SPIN, Pitchfork, the BBC and The Wire. Festival appearances include Big Ears, Pitchfork Midwinter, Le Guess Who and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

Jack Bird is a violinist, improviser, and sound artist originally from the greater New York area. He has studied and worked in a variety of musical worlds including Anglican choral music, Western classical orchestral, chamber, and solo repertoire, and American traditional forms such as jazz and old-time music. He currently focuses on delivering improvised performances on the violin informed by the traditions of free jazz, noise, 20th century classical, and ambient music. After spending 7 years as a working musician in Nashville, Tennessee, he relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he is currently based.

Kelby Clark is a composer, improviser, and banjo player from South Georgia. He is inspired
by the old-time music of his home state as well as drone, free improvisation and other
forms of both avant-garde and traditional music from around the world. Clark has released
on labels such as Vaagner, Working Man Lay Down, Garden Portal and Eastern Nurseries.
He has also scored several independent films such as She Drank Vinegar from the River
(2023) and Sometimes I Hear the Light Leak in Through the Corners of My Room (2023). He is currently based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Gallery Concert: Go Find Water

2 pm, Sunday, June 9 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art | We’re thrilled to host ambient duo Go Find Water in the modern wing of Crystal Bridges as part of this year’s gallery concerts! They’ll be joined by Karen Castleman of Flyover Contemporary Dance for a one-time performance featuring sound and movement. Go Find Water is a collaboration between musician Tom Schmidlin [Pagination; Home Learning] and musician/sound artist Craig Colorusso. Craig and Tom began their collaboration in 2021 in Northwest Arkansas, performing and recording extended improvised instrumental pieces, accompanying their playing with drones and other sounds created from loops of their performance as it occurs. As such, each piece is by design unique and unrepeatable. The band seeks to create specific shared moments in time, both with each other and, when playing live, with an audience. These concerts take place at 2 pm the 1st Sunday of each month now through October. {{ FREE + open to the public }}

Experimental Expansions

7:30 PM, May 30 @ The Creamery (216 W. Birch in Rogers) | We’re thrilled to present an album release show for Untight, an improvisation-driven sound art project by artist and musician Sam King, who performed at the James Turrell skyspace at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art for an unforgettable (and extremely hot) Trillium last summer! Fair is an experimental expansion of just-intonated electric guitar from a live performance at Gallery 211 South. Documenting a cathartic half hour, rich with sonic images of grief, dread, bliss and release, Fair is being released digitally and via cassette, limited to 100 copies, each with individually hand-drawn and editioned covers. As with all Trillium shows, this is an all ages event with a donations drinks/snacks table! Suggested donation of $10.

Incandescent Explorations

2 pm, Sunday, May 12 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art | We’re thrilled to host autoharp + angelic vocalist Stephanie Smittle to kick off this year’s series in the galleries of Crystal Bridges that will take place the 2nd Sunday of each month from May through October! Smittle’s self-titled debut solo album is a collection of ten songs for voice and electric autoharp, which the Arkansas Democrat Gazette called “stunning” and “incandescent … a skilled and observant lyricist unafraid to express vulnerability and wonder and rage.” A native of Cave Springs, Arkansas, Smittle's history of engagements includes howling in front of roaring amplifiers as a member of southern sludge rock group Iron Tongue, taking the stage as a guest vocalist with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, singing ancient chant as a cantor in a 200-year-old Episcopal church, and slinking around the set in an avant-garde Kurt Weill opera. {{ FREE + open to the public }}

Unconventional Articulations

7pm, April 14 @ The Creamery (216 W. Birch in Rogers) | We’re thrilled to present a night with Brooklyn-based guitarist, composer, and improvisor Drew Wesely. Focused on relationships between noise, timbre, and duration using various preparations and amplification systems to expand the sonic potential of the instrument, his practice draws from the fractal scales of form that emerge in improvisation as well as the spatial and physical aspects of sound perception.

Recent works include ‘blank body’ an intermedia solo work released via Infrequent Seams, and ‘hypersurface’ an improvising trio with Lester St. Louis and Carlo Costa.

Drew has performed at The Stone, Roulette Intermedium, Offene Ohren, Fire Museum, and many other venues nationally and internationally throughout Europe and Asia. Drew was recently a recipient of Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant in support of an extended tour in mainland Japan.

Expressive Resonance

7pm, April 4 @ 21 C Museum Hotel in Bentonville // We can’t wait for a night of expressive resonance with guitarists Mak Grgic and Jake Hertzog in collaboration with the music department at the University of Arkansas and 21c Museum Hotel Bentonville. This special evening, which is free and open to the public, is part of the University of Arkansas Department of Music’s Bridging Differences series and is sponsored by the McIlroy Family Endowment in Visual and Performing Arts and the SEC Faculty Travel Program. If you’d like to donate to Trillium, a 501(c)3 nonprofit and reserve your spot, you can do so, but it’s not required!

Touted as a “gifted guitarist” by the New York Times, 2-time Grammy®-nominated artist Mak Grgic [GER-gich] is a star on the worldwide stage. An expansive and adventurous repertoire attests to his versatility and wide-ranging interests. From the ethnic music of his native Balkans to extreme avant-garde and microtonal music, his roles as soloist, collaborator, and Grammy-nominated recording artist are fueled by curiosity, imagination, and boundless energy. As a testament to his versatility and wide-ranging appeal, in 2018 Mak was invited by legendary singer-songwriter k.d. lang to perform as the opening act for the North American leg of her Ingénue Redux Tour.

Described as playing “an unapologetic brand of jazz-rock guitar that does not look back,” in All About Jazz, Jake Hertzog is a critically acclaimed guitarist, composer and educator whose career to-date has spanned eleven albums as bandleader across jazz, rock and classical new music styles. Most recently, Jake Hertzog is pushing the boundaries of improvisation, guitar, and technology with a turn of events, a release in collaboration media artist Adam Hogan. The pair blend free jazz, and ambisonic technology on a completely innovative new album released in 2023. A grand prize winner of the Montreux Jazz Guitar Competition, among many other accolades, Hertzog currently serves as Jazz Area Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Guitar at the University of Arkansas.

Timbral Intricacy

7pm, March 13 @ Likewise Community // Join us to celebrate our first Trillium of 2024 when we present Hour, an instrumental ensemble that demonstrates a compositional ethos grounded in rote arrangement and group improvisation while aiming for breathy timbral intricacy and carefully balanced melodicism. Formed in the flourishing underground of West Philadelphia in the latter half of the 2010s, Hour fluctuates in size and scope around composer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Cormier-O'Leary (Friendship, 2nd Grade, Dear Life Records) who provides a clear yet open-ended harmonic framework and an ambitious ear towards evoking atmosphere, both expansive and intimate. En route to perform at SXSW, this performance will feature a four-piece ensemble of clarinet, violin, electric percussion and guitar.

Their album forthcoming album Ease the Work shows us life on the boundary of composition and improvisation. It reaches for the sweeping gestures and inspired pacing of classic film scores, Frank Sinatra ballads, and Scott Walker’s pop orchestra. It also retains the arresting intimacy of the band’s early work. Strings swell and harmonize in counterpoint with electric guitar, clarinet, and piano, while drums, synth pads, and field recordings complete the aural world. RIYL: Bill Frisell, The Rachel’s, Eiko Ishibashi, ECM Records

Nakatani Gong Orchestra Live!

7 pm. Dec. 2 at Likewise Community :: We’re thrilled to host percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra this winter! In this large ensemble touring contemporary sound art project, Nakatani trains 16 local musicians his bowed gong technique culminating in a performance. In the last decade, the NGO has performed hundreds of concerts involving thousands of participants around the world in the creation of these transformative sound works.

For each unique performance, participating NGO players (musicians) are selected by a local presenter, meaning us! Is that you? Get in touch by emailing us! The specialized rehearsal begins at 2 p.m. that day. There is no expectation of previous experience playing a gong. Nakatani instructs the players in his unique techniques for bowing the gong and following his method of conducting. It is important to note that this project is not a traditional music program or traditional Japanese music, it is a contemporary sound art project.

Nakatani’s adaption of the Chinese wind gong to respond to his percussive bowing technique in his solo work (c. 1995) led to the inclusion of other players trained in his methods to realize his compositions. The Kobo bows, mallets, and surrounding instrumentation equipment have all been developed and are hand crafted by Tatsuya Nakatani. After ten years of planning and preparation, the NGO began touring in 2011 with four adapted gongs and has grown to 17 gongs today (January 2019). It is the only bowed gong orchestra in the world.

Likewise Community is a co-working and community space in downtown Fayetteville that we’re thrilled to partner with on this performance.

Live Scoring the Silents: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

We’re thrilled to bring back our Live Scoring the Silents series in a one-time screening of silent film horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari featuring a live improv performance from Thought Form Collective, whose expansive percussive palette & eerie synths score will bring this horror masterpiece to life at Likewise Community, a co-working and gathering space, in downtown Fayetteville. We’ve partnered with Pinpoint for this exclusive all-ages event, featuring dontations snacks & drinks! This all kicks off at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 30. Be sure and reserve your seat early to this one!

Intimate Shape-Shifting Sounds

6 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 5 — Our series in the galleries of Crystal Bridges culminates with Sarah Belle Reid, who will present a new work for trumpet, voice, live processing & interactive electronics. “Manifold” (2023) is an investigation into temporal perception and memory—tiny moments that seem to persist indefinitely; hazy, fragmented narratives that degrade and slip away; forgotten rituals and cherished traditions. This work explores the collection, manipulation and distortion of moments in time through the use of feedback, looping, chaotic circuits, and granular processing in combination with experimental trumpet and vocal techniques. The result is a constantly churning and shape-shifting sound world that is at once intimate, relentless, playful, and surreal—frenetic improvisation, melting melodies, & punctuated silence. This FREE performance takes place in the contemporary galleries of the museum.