Haley Fohr: Wordless Music

Saturday, January 19th, ISSUE opens its 2019 season with an impressive gathering of ISSUE alumni from across the organization’s history. Featuring a roving program of deeply experimental artists, the evening welcomes back multidisciplinary sound conceptualist and 2009 Artist-In-Residence Matana Roberts, composer and vocalist Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux, and vocalist Suzanne Langille performing alongside Daniel Carter, Neel Murgai, and Loren Connors.

Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux presents “Wordless Music,” a recent work for solo voice that Fohr describes as “a simple concept -- one microphone, and one voice.” She continues, “I began incorporating solo vocal rehearsals as a way to keep in touch with myself and focus on finding new sounds buried deep down inside of me. ‘Wordless Music’ is improvisational in spirit and a meditation on nowness. When I began performing Wordless Music in public, my personal practice was transformed into a very powerful action in which I become nothing more than a body emitting energy into the world. I have been left inspired by the stripping of context and feel a new freedom in my literal form. I am able, I am conscious, I here in this moment, I am body shouting into the world, nothing more and nothing less.”

Haley Fohr is a vocalist, composer and singer-songwriter based in Chicago, IL. Her musical endeavors focus around our human condition, and her 10 year career as Circuit des Yeux has grown into one of America’s most successful efforts to connect the personal to the universal. She is most distinctly identified by her 4-octave voice and unique style of 12 string guitar. Her mysterious “Jackie Lynn” project landed her on the cover of Wire Magazine in August of 2016. Her recent works include an Original Soundtrack for Charles Bryant’s Salomé (1923), commissioned by Opera North, and critically acclaimed 2017 album “Reaching For Indigio”, released on Drag City Records.