Our (fairly) regular roundup of Music & Arts related news from Chicago-based web media, featuring thoughts and insight from some of the city’s most dedicated writers.

• Lampo says, "Welcome to (Rene) Hell"

  
  Jeff Witscher (Rene Hell)

  This Saturday (October 11), experimental music organization Lampo begin their Fall 2014 season with the first of four free performances around Chicago. With the help of their long-running collaborators at the Graham Foundation, The Smart Museum of Art, and the Logan Center for the Arts, Chicagoans will have architecturally complimentary environments in which to experience a wide variety of unconventional, often abstract sounds and compositions.

  The fall schedule is as follows:
  October 11: Rene Hell
  November 8: Robert A. A. Lowe
  November 22: Lucky Dragons
  December 13: Tristan Perich

  Saturday’s performance (which is free with RSVP, and takes place at the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House, 4 W. Burton Pl.) will include a performance of a new composition by Jeff Witscher (aka Rene Hell), titled “Bifurcating a Resounding No!” The piece draws from years of recorded sounds (acoustic instruments, field recordings and voice), collected in cities across the U.S. and shaped with various digital techniques into a new long-form work.

  If you don’t know Jeff Witscher by name, you may know him by one of many others. From 2004 onward, Witscher has morphed into and between numerous guises and musical approaches, from harsh noise (Impregnable) to forlorn ambient soundscapes (Marble Sky) to anguished power electronics (Secret Abuse), releasing music through his Agents of Chaos label and many others channels. But most revered and, truthfully, the most mysterious of them all is his flagship project, Rene Hell.

  Even among the surfeit of pseudonyms, each one delineating a specific mood or approach to Witscher’s aesthetic, Rene Hell criss-crosses relentlessly between genres and styles, blending high-art and visceral impact, almost as if he doesn’t accept the usual critical circumscriptions around arbitrarily imposed genre names. (Imagine that.) Because he’s spent time in scenes where impact trumps all, even his most high-flung academically-flavored synth pieces are accompanied by strange chatterings, like strange insectoid armor dragging noisily along cobblestone pavements.

  Other pieces throb violently like old-school industrial, but with a gleaming, precise sonic palette, somehow emphasizing the good in both while diluting neither.

  Rene Hell’s best-known (and ostensibly best) works are 2011’s Terminal Symphony (Type) and 2013’s Vanilla Call Option (Pan). Along with the split LP with fellow traveler Oneohtrix Point Never (LP on NNA Tapes, 2012), these records display most, if not all, of the many faces of Rene Hell. As for Witscher’s other projects, that’s a post for another time. For now, say yes to “The Resounding No!”

  

• Music Video Of The Day: Rachael Yamagata ‘Starlight’
  Rachael Yamagata plays Lincoln Hall Friday. [ more › ]
• Fun Fun Fun Film: ‘The Hairy Who And The Chicago Imagists’
   

  You don’t want to miss this engrossing and informative documentary about this decidedly significant group of artists in the 60s and beyond. [ more › ]

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