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Graveyard Shift: Circuit des Yeux
June 7, 2022 , 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Co-Presented with Pioneer Works
The Graveyard Shift series returns in 2022 with special outdoor performances by Chicago-based experimental songwriter Circuit des Yeux and Brooklyn-based composer and producer Faten Kanaan.
American cemeteries of the nineteenth century were akin to public parks and once saw visitors picnicking on the lawns, strolling down meandering paths, and socializing together as families. In the last century, however, these spaces have become more utilitarian in nature and lacking public engagement beyond funerals and grieving.
Graveyard Shift proposes a new way of interacting with the space of the Cemetery by activating it through sight, sound, and movement. This performance program features commissions that draw on Green-Wood’s storied landscape and monuments as reference points for producing site-specific works.
About Circuit des Yeux
Haley Fohr (b. Dec 16 1988) is a vocalist, composer and singer-songwriter based in Chicago, Illinois. 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 silent film Salomé (1923), commissioned by Opera North, and a critically acclaimed 2017 album Reaching For Indigo, released on Drag City Records.
Circuit des Yeux’s first studio album since 2017, -io, is her first for Matador Records. The sky over -io is Florida’s strange, radiant orange. It’s a built environment, unnatural, made from concrete and glass, with skyscrapers that stretch to the vanishing point as you gaze up at them.
It’s crumbling and suffocating, a city perpetually on the brink of collapse, where tension never topples over into catharsis, where the heat never breaks.
Inside this world and its closed loop of time, Fohr found herself able to begin moving again. “I was haunted by memories in the pandemic,” she says. “As someone with PTSD, memories are all twisted up inside of me in a way that doesn’t help my higher self. Making this album was once again an exercise of trying to relieve myself of some of that darkness in a way that music has always done for me.”
About Faten Kanaan
Brooklyn-based composer and producer Faten Kanaan layers cyclical patterns in her music, using harmony and counterpoint as narrative tools. Sound & silence become intuitive gestures that tell a wordless story and share metaphysical connections. Inspired by cinematic forms and literary story structures: from sweeping landscapes and quiet romances, to patterned tensions and dream sequences; she focuses on bringing an earthy, visceral touch to electronic music. In symbiosis with technology is an appreciation for the vulnerability of human limitations and nuances.
Recently signing to Fire Records, Faten’s follow up to 2018’s ‘Foxes’ is her fourth album ‘A Mythology of Circles’ (released Nov 2020) which explores the mythologies behind cyclical repetitions in nature and time.
About Pioneer Works
Pioneer Works is a cultural center based in Red Hook, Brooklyn that is devoted to building community through the arts and sciences. Through a broad range of educational programs, performances, residencies, and exhibitions, Pioneer Works transcends disciplinary boundaries to foster a community where alternative modes of thought are activated and supported. We strive to make culture accessible to all.