We are so grateful to the generosity of Sam Prekop, Donny Mahlmeister, Kiku Hibino, Veronica Anne Salinas and Jordan Martins for offering their amazing talents to benefit and support Side Yard Sounds 2024 at Compound Yellow! We invite you to purchase your tickets, sit back and enjoy while knowing that you are actively paying it forward to sponsor the SYS 2024 lineup of some of the most creative musicians working today!
Buy your tickets here! https://compound-yellow.ticketleap.com/winter-sounds-benefit-concert/
Space is limited to 50 so get your tickets now to reserve your spot!
Compound Yellow’s ‘Winter Sounds’ is a series of indoor events in the cozy upstairs gallery space that features 5 artists or groups from a variety of backgrounds and locations. The general motif of the evening is focused on shorter improvised sets in the electronic/electro-acoustic/ambient genres. The evening of November 11th features artists from Chicago and Oak Park.

SAM PREKOP

SAM PREKOP’s boundless imagination is guided by his strong sense of melody. For more than 25 years, as a solo artist or as part of The Sea and Cake, PREKOP creates a singular sound inventive and warm. His distinctive vocals, guitar playing and work on modular analog synthesizers are inventive, delicate, and always bear his signature sense of melody. Comma finds SAM PREKOP for the first time working extensively with beat programming, focusing his enveloping synthesizer pieces around a newfound rhythmic pulse.
PREKOP's creative process is a combination of preparation and improvisation. Writing sessions for Comma began with an open-ended exploration of sounds and textures from which the first fragments of songs would reveal themselves. The introduction of drum machines and additional synthesizer units to his modular setup shifted things in surprising new directions as he worked to bend them into more traditional pop song structures. Drum tracks and emergent rhythms provided the frameworks and narrative sketches to be fleshed out with lustrous widescreen synth pads and ribboning melodies. In approaching his writing with a completely open mind and letting himself be guided by the music, PREKOP maintains a delicate balance between composition and chance, control and spontaneity. Comma embraces the analogue synthesizer’s often unpredictable nature, imbuing the record with a decidedly organic feel even while working within the relative rigidity of beat architectures.

DONNY MAHLMEISTER

Donny Mahlmeister is a Chicago/Oak Park based musician and designer with a focus on improvised music using modular synthesizers, guitar, lap steel and other electronic processing. His recent solo work encompasses elements of minimalist soundscapes intersected with abstract gestural movements. In addition to his solo work he currently collaborates with Jamie Levinson as Levinson/Mahlmeister (Trouble in Mind Records) and Theo Katsaounis (Joan Of Arc). Prior to moving to Oak Park, Donny had been a long-standing member of the Chicago and Midwest rock and improvised scenes, working with A Tundra, Early Day Miners, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Tobin Summerfield, Ryan Packard, Jamie Branch, Catherine Young and Bill McKay.

KIKÙ HIBINO

Japanese-born sound artist Kikù Hibino produces electronic music that focuses on unusual rhythmic structures and melodies inspired by nature, optical illusion and moiré patterns.

From chamber music for media productions to ambient noise for art installations, he has collaborated internationally with a wide variety of artists and scholars, including Baudouin Saintyves, Yuge Zhou, Mitsu Salmon, Kawaguchi Takao (Dumb Type), Theaster Gates, Mike Weis (Zelienople) and Norma Field.

Kikù is on the Italian record label Superpang. His work has been shown in Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago Cultural Center, Three Walls, Compound Yellow, Elastic Arts, Hairpin Arts Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. He’s a 2017 Individual Artist Grant recipient from Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 2021 Outer Ear Artist in Residency at Experimental Sound Studio. Kikù lives and works in Chicago.

VERONICA ANNE SALINAS

Veronica Anne Salinas (she/they) is a Tejana artist, educator, researcher, writer, and Deep Listener. Her creative research engages sound, landscape, geomancy, writing, anthropology, performance, the archive, and video. Her work in sound focuses on acoustic ecology, text scores, voice and language, listening practices, spatial audio, improvisation and performance, and sonic archiving. She holds an MFA in Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is currently studying Deep Listening at the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and serves on the board for the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Artist Statement: My creative experimentation draws primarily on sound, new media, ecology, performance, and literary practices. My work engages with ideas of orientation, becoming, of in-process and evolving work/selves/technologies, feral sensualities, acoustic territories, amplifying the body/marginality, visual and sonic landscapes, spatial cultures, digital storytelling, walking practices, materiality, universal cosmic energy, vibrational healing, and radical and empathetic ways of listening with/to human and non-human entities as social practice. I’m interested in interrogating the sonic perspective, listening approaches, attention spans/dispatches, and working with communities to further understand ways of being.

Veronica’s work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), Elastic Arts (Chicago, IL), Empty Bottle (Chicago, IL), Omaha Under the Radar (Omaha, NE), Urban Arts Space (Columbus, OH), 2nd International Conference on Sonorities Research (II CIPS Sonoridades Fronteriças), the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology (MSAE), Noise Pulp Radio, Quarantine Concerts, No Nation Art Lab (Chicago, IL), MANA Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Flatland Gallery (Chicago, IL), Farmhouse Art Collective, Open Sheds (Chicago, IL), The Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) Latino Arts Now! 2019 Conference, Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, IL), Chicago Design Museum (Chicago, IL), Sullivan Galleries (Chicago, IL), Mudlark Theatre (New Orleans, LA), Box 13 (Houston, TX), Megapolis Audio Festival (Philadelphia, PA), Midtown Arts & Theatre Center Houston (Houston, TX), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), Art League Houston (Houston, TX), Alabama Song (Houston, TX), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Clamp Light Artist Studios & Gallery (San Antonio, TX), Artpace (San Antonio, TX), Sala Diaz (San Antonio, TX), Highwire Arts (San Antonio, TX), and Cities and Memory (UK).

JORDAN MARTINS

Jordan Martins is a pedal steel player and visual artist based in Chicago, IL. His debut album Fogery Nagles (Astral Spirits Records) showcases his use of the pedal steel in hypnotic, minimalist arrangements with synths, guitars and percussion. He is one third of the pedal steel trio 60 Strings with Justin Brown and Sam Wagster and leader of the country/free jazz group Drawler (with Quin Kirchner and Matt Ulery). Martins has been a sideplayer in various bands in Chicago over the last 15 years, including Angela James and Quarter Mile Thunder, and has performed with Nick Butcher, Mike Reed, Macie Stewart, Charles Rumback, Hunter Diamond, Katie Ernst, Jeff Parker, Haley Fohr, Steve Marquette and more.