Jodie Landau / Meara O'Reilly / William Brittelle

Dec 9th at 8pm

2220 Arts + Archives

Program

  • Meara O’Reilly Hockets
  • Meara O’Reilly Glass Bell Pieces
  • Meara O’Reilly Change Ringing for Piano
  • Meara O’Reilly Romance World Premiere
  • Intermission
  • Jodie Landau / William Brittelle as yet untitled project

About

Jodie Landau is a serial collaborator. His expansive work— with Wild Up, Roomful of Teeth, as a bandleader and composer—  seems to live in the context of art-pop heroes like Björk, composer-performer bards like Dave Longstreth, ritual conjurers of community like Shara Nova, and theatrical performance artists invested in personal presence and agency like Taylor Mac. More than anything, Jodie is guided by the single act of sharing music with other people.  With Landau as curator, this program features two of his most important collaborations with composers Meara O’Reilly and William Brittelle.  O’Reilly’s portrait presents the entirety of her breakthrough 2019 minimalist EP Hockets, a duet with Landau for glass bells and voices, a premiere for Landau and three other voices, and the clamorous tintinnabulation of a change ringing piece for piano. The second half of the program is a sprawling ensemble set, this as yet untitled project focused on the intersection of hyperpop, experimentalism, and performance art. It is the manifestation of a symbiotic partnership founded on deep mutual admiration between Jodie Landau (vocals, co-lyrics, producer/art direction, harpejji/keys/percussion) and William Brittelle (composition, co-lyrics). The project's first slate of material explores the concept of "California", both literally and figuratively, presenting it as both a physical reality of layered, complex beauty and a metaphorical space of blind aspiration and unquenchable yearning. The project's unique ensemble features vintage synthesizers, mallets, percussion, harp, guzheng, fretless electric bass, and vocals. Jodie remarks, “this band doesn’t even have a name yet, come to the show and name our band?!”

Artists

  • Jodie Landau

    Jodie Landau is a vocalist, composer, and percussionist. He is a member of the renowned Icelandic record label Bedroom Community, and of the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. His music combines elements of contemporary classical, rock, and jazz for live performance, film, theater, opera, and dance. On stage, Jodie can be found singing amidst a sea of dancers, conducting audience members as he teaches them to sing a song on the spot, portraying a disembodied heart donor in Valgeir Sigurðsson’s opera “We Are In Time”, or singing original music and covers while playing vibraphone, marimba, keyboards, and harpejji on his own or surrounded by an ensemble and often choir. His debut album with Wild Up, “you of all things” featured the Icelandic female choir Graduale Nobili. Jodie has performed with the NY Phil, The Scottish Ensemble, Los Angeles Master Chorale, ICKAmsterdam / Ballet National de Marseille, Ate9 dANCE cOMPANY, The Industry, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Jherek Bischoff, Miya Folick, Emily Hall, Ellen Reid, Alev Lenz, Jacob Cooper, Nadia Sirota, Nico Muhly, Daniel Bjarnason, and Valgeir Sigurðsson, among others.

  • Meara O’Reilly

    Meara O’Reilly is a composer and artist focusing on perception and new musical interfaces.

    Her Hockets for Two Voices EP was released on Cantaloupe in 2019. It was named in several year-end Best Of lists, including Art Forum, Bandcamp, and Second Inversion. Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo reviewed the EP for Talkhouse, saying it “sends you, moves you, destroys you with beauty“.

    Her work has been presented at SFMOMA, Bang on a Can, National Sawdust, Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Hall, SF Davies Symphony Hall, The Bauhaus Dessau, and as part of Björk’s world Biophilia tour. She is co-creator of the Rhythm Necklace app, a musical sequencer that uses two-dimensional geometry to create rhythm.

    In 2020 she wrote, performed, and recorded vocal arrangements for several tracks on the grammy nominated Fleet Foxes album, Shore. Most recently, she sound designed and composed a musical language sequence for the upcoming A24 film, The Legend of Ochi.

  • William Brittelle

    William Brittelle is a Brooklyn-based genre-fluid composer, producer and creator of hyper-text and multimedia. An avid collaborator, Brittelle has worked with a number of artists across multiple disciplines, including Roomful of Teeth, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Bryce Dessner, Son Lux, Oneohtrix Point Never, A Far Cry, Lower Dens, Duran Duran, Wye Oak, La Force, Gail Ann Dorsey, and the Seattle, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Alabama, Grand Rapids and North Carolina Symphony Orchestras, the Basel Sinfonietta, the Nu Deco Ensemble, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His latest full-length LP entitled Spiritual America featuring Wye Oak, the Metropolis Ensemble, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, was released by Nonesuch/New Amsterdam in 2019. His previous release, Loving the Chambered Nautilus featuring ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble) was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Prior releases were profiled in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MUSO, and The New Yorker. Increasingly active as a producer, upcoming and recent projects include albums with Alex Temple/Julia Holter/Spektral Quartet, vocalist/percussionist Jodie Landau, the string ensemble Owls, singer/composer Aditya Prakash, vocalist Holland Andrews, violinist Michi Wiancko, keyboardist Erika Dohi, and Roomful of Teeth. Along with composers Judd Greenstein and Sarah Kirkland Snider, Brittelle is the co-founder and co-artistic director of New Amsterdam Records, a Grammy-winning non-profit pro-artist record label and artist service organization with a catalog of over 120 releases. He also serves as production manager for Figureight Recordings’ Open Residency program. Recently, his work has focused increasingly on complex collaborative networks and interlinked text and multi-media, a trend culminating in the launch of Eternal September, a vast digital alternate reality artistic platform developed in partnership with the Brown Arts Institute and the Metropolis Ensemble. Additional partners include the Cincinnati Symphony, the Walker Art Center, Liquid Music, and the Great Northern Festival.

About Endless Season

Art in LA has been about freedom and an abundant eschewing of history. With intersecting methods and intentions, humble, aspiring, a city appealing to the aesthete and the mystic in all of her citizens. Here, famous artists are also street-side sign painters, our best restaurants drive or live in strip malls, and our landmarks are geographical before architectural or fleetingly experiential instead of permanent monuments to their own lineages. Here, our religious and secular musics sound the same.

Endless Season gathers around these uniquely West Coast traits. We ask lead artists to question, reinterpret, and challenge the past, modality, and genre. We hold a space of intersectionality and dialogue surrounding every aspect of our work. Together, we will explore the breadth of work and practices, discovering the many shapes of music and ideas in LA today.

Endless 2023 – 2024

This season puts Wild Up members at the center more than ever, showcasing the creative energy of this community of artists. There will be a dozen concerts featuring members not only as brilliant performers but also as composers and creators. The nexus is ENCLAVE, a weekend festival of Wild Up Composers and Creators in December, featuring Andrew Tholl, Shelley Washington, Jodie Landau, Sidney Hopson. Like most of the season, this weekend highlights the many shapes of music and ideas in Los Angeles today and starts codifying an LA school of composition.

Milestones run through the season, including revivals and seminal works from Julius Eastman and Gérard Grisey and more than a dozen World and West Coast Premieres, including workshops of three new large-scale works-in-progress: a new multi-disciplinary work by Sarah Hennies, with visual artist Susan Silton and L.A. Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson, portraits of genius emerging artists Leiliehua Lanzilotti, inti figgis-vizueta, and claire rousay, a new opera by David Longstreth, and the very beginnings of a deep dive into Arthur Russell.

In 2024, we welcome the return of Darkness Sounding, a festival that explores how listening, sound, and music shape our understanding of the world.