Roulette’s annual Mixology Festival highlights novel approaches to technology in music and media arts, since 1991, and is supported in-part by mediaThe Foundation.
Whitney Johnson: FIAT, featuring Greg Fox
FIAT is an opportunity to engage with skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds. Over the course of four hours with the sunset at the center, Whitney Johnson and Greg Fox perform in the midst of a multi-channel sine wave array. The theory of brainwave entrainment claims that clockwise movement through this installation can relax the listener, and counterclockwise movement can energize. With these possibilities in mind, FIAT is composed by the body of each listener through motion, attention, and intention—a coming into being by act of will.
Whitney Johnson (of MATCHESS) uses sound to explore relationships between bodies and minds. She composes, performs, records, and installs music and multi-channel sound from the viola, sine waves, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her latest recordings, Hav/Stena (2024, Drag City) adopt alter egos to approach sonic material from two sides, following the cult of Hermaphroditus through Cyprus and Greece and her own symbolic and biological ancestry in Sweden. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago and is now Assistant Professor of Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Greg Fox is a multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist, and teacher born and based in New York City. A versatile and prolific creative, he moves through musical stages as both listener and player, a transformative rather than performative force. As a drummer with hundreds of credits on obscure records, Fox is well-known in the lesser-known. He has toured, recorded, and released numerous records with Liturgy, Guardian Alien, ZS, Ex Eye, Skeletons, Teeth Mountain, Dan Deacon, Colin Stetson, Ben Frost, and many more. His reputation is that of the elevated beast, the one who plays fast and loud and expresses himself at the extremes and in the extremes. That’s not wrong. Yet Fox is also a slow theorist, a musician aware of those who came before him, and a teacher of drumming, with students all over the world.
