*** This performance will be held outside, space is limited so please come early to reserve your seat! In case of inclement weather we will use the studio space at 244 Lake Street above the garage.

Zelienople is Matt Christensen, Brian Harding, Mike Weis, and P.M. Tummala. Most of the material performed will be from their 2004 album, Sleeper Coach, which they rarely play!

The members of Zelienople met in an old, haunted building in Chicago, above an antique shop, where former doctors' offices had been converted into music rehearsal spaces. The loud drones of Matt Christensen and Brian Harding drew the ire of the building owners, as items were being knocked off the shelves below, but they caught the interest of percussionist Mike Weis who was renting space down the hall. The three started playing together as Zelienople in the late 90s. Early shows were alongside performance artists in loft spaces and later at the legendary Lounge Ax and Empty Bottle clubs. The trio wrote new music for each live set and then subsequently scrapped those tunes. This carried on for five years before they finally settled on an album’s worth of material to record their debut. Pajama Avenue was released in 2002 on Chicago’s Loosethread Recordings, run by musician/producer P.M. Tummala. Loosethread released the follow-ups, Sleeper Coach and Ink before Zelienople moved on to other labels - San Francisco’s Root Strata for Stone Academy; Manchester’s Type for His/Hers, Give It Up and The World is a House on Fire; and 2020’s Hold You Up on Miasmah from Berlin. Four years later, Zelienople, now expanded to a quartet with P.M. Tummala on keyboards, synths and vibraphone, released Everything is Simple on France’s Shelter Press last summer. Zelienople is a band started in Chicago ages ago. Their new album “Everything is Simple” is out now on Shelter Press.

Norman W. Long’s multi-disciplinary practice involves walking, listening, teaching, improvising, performing, recording, and composing to create environments and situations in which he and the audience are engaged in dialogues about memory, place, ecology, race, culture, value, silence, and the invisible. Norman’s practice has been influenced by the emerging practices and thinking of 1970s artists, musicians, critics, and designers regarding landscape and sound- specifically Rosalind Krauss’ article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” and the development of the acoustic ecology by R. Murray Schafer. The sounds found in his work has its inspirational roots in the Black music of house and techno, ‘free jazz,’ Great Black Music, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Pauline Oliveros, King Tubby, Dub, and the sounds of artists outside and in-between genres. Long’s improvisational and compositional strategies are inspired by Samuel R. Delany’s palimpsest text  “Plague Journal '' chapter of Dhalgren (Science Fiction) and Atlantis: Three tales (Fiction) and Mark Bradford’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art: Chicago in 2011 featuring Bradford’s process of collecting and collaging, scraping and pasting materials sourced from his community in Los Angeles. 

Holding a Master’s Degree in "New Genres" from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master’s of Landscape Architecture degree from Cornell University (2008), Norman relocated to Chicago in 2008. His artistic endeavors have been showcased at diverse venues, including Experimental Sound Studio, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Renaissance Society, Yale University, Illinois State Univerity Galleries, SAIC Sullivan Galleries, Chicago Artists Coalition Gallery, Links Hall, Elastic Arts, Constellation, and the Arts Club as part of the 2015 Chicago Humanities Festival. Norman is artist in residence at the Hyde Park Art Center for 2025.