An evening of psychedelic and contemplative music inspired by visionary women across centuries.
Wild Up presents The Interior Castle, an evening of ecstatic and contemplative music inspired by visionary women spanning centuries of artistic and spiritual inquiry. Centered on music by Ethiopian composer, pianist, and nun Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, the program also features new works by LA-based vocalist and composer Eliza Bagg, reimaginings of Hildegard von Bingen’s chants, and works by M.A. Tiesenga, inspired by St. Teresa of Ávila’s mystical text, The Interior Castle.
Structured in ritornello form, the program unfolds through cycles of return, stillness, and release, bringing devotional music into the present as a living practice of attention, transformation, and shared presence.
Anthologies of ecstatic music, in multiple configurations together and apart.
The music of legendary collaborators Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell is singular and boundless. Eastman’s post-gospel minimalism was influenced and changed by playing as a member of Arthur Russell’s downtown experimental disco band — they made sounds expansive, vulnerable, activist, and quintessentially queer. Their profound sounds demand that performers become unabashedly themselves, merging and getting lost in the notes and rhythms, finding themselves again and again, and emerging whole and newly committed to self. This intrapersonal endeavoring is matched externally with musical structures that create deep belonging within a group.
Live realizations of Yoshimura’s seminal environmental music for acoustic ensemble.
Wild Up brings Hiroshi Yoshimura’s landmark albums Flora and Green into live performance through new acoustic arrangements by Patrick Shiroishi and Christopher Rountree, accompanied by a new video work. A pioneer of Japanese ambient and environmental music, Yoshimura created works of extraordinary delicacy and clarity, shaped by timbral sensitivity, spaciousness, and a profound attentiveness to the natural world. In these performances, Wild Up translates that sonic world into an intimate live setting, honoring the architecture and spirit of the original recordings while deepening their resonance through breath, touch, and shared presence.
A new musical-theatrical-operatic adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal science fiction work by Ted Hearne (composer) and Chana Porter (librettist), with Saul Williams (soloist) and Anisia Uzeyman (soloist), and Christopher Rountree (conductor). In The Dispossessed, time is the wounds of the past, the entangled hopes and fears of possible futures, and the eternal everlasting present.
