Olivia Block

by Ryan Lowry

Olivia Block creates original sound compositions for concerts, site-specific multi-speaker installations, live cinema, and performance. Her compositions often include field recordings, chamber instruments, and electronic textures. Her solo performances include partially improvised pieces for electronics and amplified objects, presented in a slow and deliberate gestural style that Steve Smith of the New York Times described recently as having  “palpable sensations of volition and emotional involvement.” Block also performs original pieces for inside piano.

Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals including  Incubate (Tilburg),  Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, The Kitchen (NYC), ISSUE Project Room and Experimental Intermedia  (Brooklyn).

Olivia Block has a background in anthropology, music and sound. She has completed residencies and premiered works at Mills College of Music, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Berklee College of Music. Block has presented talks at additional universities in film, music, media arts, and anthropology departments, including Yale University, University of Chicago, and  Indiana University. Her current interests include listening practices, ethnographic practices and sound for cinema, among many others.

Block has created sound installations for public sites and exhibition spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the library at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the Lincoln Conservatory Fern Room in Chicago, and at the “Echoes Through the Mountains” exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.

Block Her latest LP/download release, Karren (Sedimental, 2013), an electroacoustic and orchestral piece performed by Chicago Composer’s Orchestra, has been chosen as “Best of 2014″ by The Wire, Pitchfork, and Artforum, among other publications. She was selected as a featured subject in the Chicago Reader’s 2014 People Issue. 

Under Your Breath / Angry When You Sleep.

Using both of Diapason’s exhibition spaces, Block explores the nature of location and movement through the use of sound in Under Your Breath, and Angry When You Sleep. In the main space, fragments of incidental atmospheric sounds collected from field recordings, at times barely audible, serve to create an ambiguous and shifting aural location. These sounds emerge and recede from veils of white noise, as if from the speakers’ hiss, or the listener’s breath. In Diapason’s smaller enclosed room, sound layers created from recordings of dried leaves, beans and other objects in a metal pan fall and swirl centripetally, locating the listener at the center of a visceral maelstrom of sound.