Two pioneers of electro-acoustic music Ikue Mori and Zeena Perkins teamed up after 10 years apart to create Hit Parade Of Tears (Tzadik), an album based on the short stories of Japanese legend and icon of pop culture, writer Izumi Suzuki. 

Zeena Parkins El. Ac harp, objects, electronics
Ikue Mori electronics, visual

Lucia Martinez words (joining for one song)

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Watch below or on YouTube.

Phantom Orchard was formed early 2000s and released 4 albums: Phantom Orchard (Mego, 2004), Orra (Tzadik, 2008), Trouble in Paradise (Tzadik, 2012), and Through the Looking Glass with Phantom Orchard Ensemble (Tzadik, 2014).

Ikue Mori moved from Tokyo to New York in 1977. She started playing drums and soon formed the generative no-wave band DNA with Arto Lindsay. In the mid 1980s Mori started to employ drum machines in the context of improvised music. Since the 1990s, she has collaborated with musicians and artists throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, while continuing to produce and record her own music. Beginning in 2000, Mori started using a laptop computer to expand her vocabulary; not only playing sounds, but creating and controlling the visual work as well. Commissioners of Mori’s work include the Montalvo Arts Center, Südwestrundfunk German radio program, Relâche, the Mary Flagler Charitable Trust, and Sharjah Art Foundation in United Arab Emirates. Mori was a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and has received numerous other honors, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (2006), a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction (1999), a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2000), and she participated in the Ucross Foundation Residency Program (2005). Ikue has lead workshops and lectures at the University of Gothenburg, Dartmouth College, New England Conservatory, Mills Collage, Stanford University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

New York-based electro-acoustic composer/improviser/educator, Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practices. Through the use of expanded playing techniques, object preparations, and electronic processing she has helped to re-situate and re-define the instrument’s capacities. Concurrently, Parkins self-designed a series of one-of-a-kind electric instruments. She leans into the harp’s physical limitations pushing into its impossibilities. In her compositions, Parkins utilizes collections, lists, recombination, historic proximities, geography, tactility, and movement. Sonic presence, history, and personality is revealed in feedback, overtones, timbral shifts, gestural intervals, perception, and residues. Honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Composition, a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Fellowship to Artists, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and three New York Performance Awards for her work with dance (“The Bessie”). Parkins holds the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition, at Mills College.
zeenaparkins.com