OPTION: Kaleigh Wilder & Ben Hall

Recorded in the ESS garden on July 9, 2023
Experimental Sound Studio presents duo Kaleigh Wilder and Ben Hall. Kaleigh Wilder and Ben Hall are engaged in a process of diasporic excavation. The central preoccupations of this process is understanding what languages have been lost/erased and how reconstituting pieces of these languages, collapsing them, in the present tense re-places ancestral understanding. For their performance as part of Option at Experimental Sound Studio wilder/hall will be using Arthur Jafa's concept of material expressivity and how there was an inability to bring over sculpture and painting and icons, "but we could carry songs. That's our nervous system."
Kaleigh Wilder is an improviser and sound sculptor. She’s studied classical saxophone, jazz, free improvisation, and even went to West Africa to study Ghanaian music and dance, all of which find their way into Kaleigh’s sound. Speaking through the baritone saxophone, her music is born of her embodied experiences-what her hands, ears, and inner child remember. Using timbral extremes that shift between raw and polished, abrasive and sensitive, discomfort and catharsis, Kaleigh channels her lived experiences into sound to communicate viscerally. She hopes to amplify in the listener their own understanding of music and Self.
Ben Hall is a composer, writer, and organizer. He was profiled by Fred Moten in the book Black and Blur and has written extensively about the visionary percussionist Milford Graves. He has participated in multiple museum exhibitions including Slow An Alarm Until It's A Tone, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He is currently working on a feature length documentary on the drummer Roy Brooks.
The OPTION series is curated by Ken Vandermark, Lily Finnegan, and Andrew Clinkman.

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YOOOO This is amazing

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beautiful

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I lord yeah Bam bam bam epic!

[@paulhermansen6196]

The War Pigs segment knocked me off my chair