Catherine Sikora & Brian Chase

The Sofa Sessions presents Catherine Sikora & Brian Chase The Hole in the Wall, Kilkenny presented in association with Note Productions

Thursday 4th April
9pm / No Cover Charge

Catherine Sikora - saxophone
Brian Chase - drums

The Sofa Sessions relocates for one night only to the Hole in the Wall for respected West Cork saxophonist Catherine Sikora and acclaimed US drummer Brian Chase, two urgent voices of contemporary experimental music bringing a sound brewed in the cauldron of New York’s ‘downtown’ scene.

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The duo of CATHERINE SIKORA (Eric Mingus, Elliott Sharp) and BRIAN CHASE (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, John Zorn) steps forth with music merging the lyrical and the abstract, the spontaneous and the composed, and the expressive with the restrained. For their debut album, untitled: after, Catherine and Brian turned to the epic poem Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation) for inspiration. The classic text’s themes of fearlessness, battle, and courage proved to be analogous to current life experience, and were channelled into compositions as a basis for improvisation. Think John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space meets epic poetry as depicted in an adaptation for film.

Saxophonist, improviser and composer Catherine Sikora was born and raised in West Cork, Ireland. Self-taught to begin with, she moved to New York City to study and play with great improvisers. Sikora works in a broad range of settings, from highly complex composed music, to folk songs, to free improvisation. Her regular collaborations include those with Eric Mingus, Enrique Haneine, Brian Chase, Han-earl Park, Stanley Zappa, Christopher Culpo and Ross Hammond, as well as actively pursuing solo performance. In the past few years, she has toured in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. As an international artist, Sikora was a featured soloist in Eric Mingus’ radical reimagining of Tommy by the Who presented at Australia's Adelaide Festival in 2015, and was artist-in-residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris for the fall of 2014 working on a project inspired by stories from her female ancestors. Catherine's first solo album 'Jersey' was released on Relative Pitch Records in July 2016

Brian Chase is a drummer and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. His diverse range of work includes that with Grammy nominated rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the community of the New York experimental music scene, and his solo project Drums & Drones. Performances have taken him across the world to the Sydney Opera House (with Karen O's Stop the Virgens and Nick Zinner's 41 Strings), UK’s Reading and Leeds Festivals (with Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Toronto’s X Avant Festival (with Drums and Drones), and throughout NYC to such notable venues as The Stone, Pioneer Works, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In June of 2018, Brian launched his own record label, Chaikin Records. The first release was a triple album and 144 page book celebrating the first ten years of Drums and Drones. Artist residencies have been held at John Zorn's venue The Stone in NYC and at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California. For the fall of 2017, Brian was a visiting professor at Bennington University. Visit www.chaikinrecords.com for more info.

Praise for Catherine Sikora and Brian Chase's untitled: after-

"These noble musicians have performed courageous deeds on this fantastic album. To them we should submit and yield tribute." DownBeat Magazine

Catherine Sikora & Brian Chase Irish Tour

April 3rd 2019 Dundalk / Spirit Store
April 4th 2019 Belfast / Queen's University (lunch time)
April 4th 2019 Kilkenny /The Hole In The Wall
April 5th 2019 Cobh / Sirius
April 6th 2019 Carlow / Visual
April 7th 2019 Dublin / Fumbally Stables

This tour is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Touring award.

Special thanks to Billy Byrnes, home of the Sofa Sessions, and to the Hole in the Wall for the generous hospitality.

Location of event - Get Directions

Venue Information - Hole In The Wall Kilkenny