Update on Thursday, December 6, at 5:30 PM: Windy & Carl will not perform at Ambient Church Chicago due to a family emergency. Matt Jencik has been added to the beginning of the bill. Ticket holders who would prefer a refund may e-mail support@withfriends.co.
Ambient Church Chicago with Steve Hauschildt, Pan•American, Justin Walter, and Matt Jencik Part of a 25th-anniversary tour celebrating the Kranky label. Sat 12/8, 7 PM, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn, $25-$30, all ages
“Churches are the ultimate acoustic architectural entity,” says Ambient Church founder Brian Sweeny. “They’re built for acoustics, beauty, and transcendence for the listener.” In 2016, when Sweeny lived in New York, he visited Brooklyn’s progressive Park Church Co-op for a concert of ambient music presented by a friend, with a backdrop of dancing projected visuals. “The environment could not have been better,” he says.
Leoschke takes a no-nonsense approach to Kranky—the label once ran an ad saying “heads down, blinders on”—and this practice of stripping away superfluities dovetails with his devotion to active listening. It’s been important to his life and work, he says, and it can unlock new details even on a recording he’s listened to casually ten times. He had his first active-listening experiences when he engaged with records on headphones because his roommates or his parents needed quiet, or when he went to shows where audiences were expected to be respectfully attentive. “I think active listening is best when you empty your mind,” he says, “and it can actually help encourage that.”
“It’s not unusual for artists on our roster to say they’d rather not play a rock club,” Foote says, “but Ambient Church drives at transcendence—to evoke something beyond. The architecture. The acoustics. The scale of it. The reverence of being in it and being quiet. Then you add the music and visuals of the series, and you can see that everything is moving towards that.”
Hauschildt is used to people calling his music “transcendent,” but he’d prefer they find other words. “I don’t have any intention to relay transcendence,” he says. “I think that’s partially because I see it as a manifestation from the new age music tradition, which I’ve tried to divorce myself from—but that’s a personal stance. It’s easy for me to be frustrated by music being understood in a one-dimensional way. If you listen to the music of Arvo Pärt, it’s clearly transcendent, but there are still avenues to appreciate it outside of that one notion. Music that operates that way has other qualities that would make it beautiful anyway.”
