See Sunday. Gal joins local musicians Brian Labycz, Vadim Sprikut, and Jason Soliday for a set of live electronic improvisation. TV Pow headlines and the quartet of cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, trumpeter Axel Dorner, percussionist Michael Zerang, and bassist Jason Roebke plays second. Friday 1, 8:30 PM, Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee, second floor, 773-342-4597, $7. All ages.
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Local composer and bass clarinetist Gene Coleman has been organizing the Sound Field festival of new music every year since 2000, and one of the subtexts to emerge from the event is that the world is shrinking. Born in Taiwan but based in Cologne, Germany, composer Chao-Ming Tung plays a Chinese zither called the gu zheng, and his work blurs the lines between his native tradition, Western composition, and improvisation. In TunGal, his duo project with Viennese composer and sound artist Bernhard Gal, he enhances and twists his improvisations with electronics, but the gu zheng never loses its twangy, splintery character. Gal feeds samples of Tung’s output into his own computer, refracting and stretching the instrument’s halo of overtones into a spooky, hovering drone.
