Lampo Performance: David Behrman & Cleek Schrey, Nov 7

Behrman and Schrey present "Pushback against Tough Situations"

Electronic music pioneer David Behrman returns to Lampo after 14 years to perform with Cleek Schrey on hardanger d’amore. Together they present “Pushback against Tough Situations,” a program built around the interplay of acoustic performance with responsive computer-controlled music systems.

Behrman and Schrey perform Useful Information (2004), incorporating a lawyer's advice to protesters at the Republican National Convention; Beyond ViewFinder (2026), a new work for fiddle and interactive electronics; Recorders (2018), exploring electronic delay; and Runthrough (1967–2016), using flashlights to move computer-generated sound around the performance space.

Guest performers include Lula Asplund, Dan Baird, Iris Colburn, Tim Kinsella, Jenny Pulse, and Joshi Radin Flores.

David Behrman (b.1937, Salzburg, Austria) has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s and has created many works for performance as well as sound installations. Most of his music has involved homemade electronics and responsive systems that interact with collaborating performers.

In 1966, he founded the Sonic Arts Union with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. Working at Columbia Records in the late ’60s, he produced the Music of Our Timeseries of new music recordings, which presented works by Cage, Oliveros, Lucier, Reich, Riley, Pousseur, and other influential composers. He has had a long association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as composer and performer and has created music for several of the Company’s repertory pieces. He received a D.A.A.D. fellowship in 1988–89 and an Individuals Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 1994. Behrman lives in New York.

This is David Behrman’s fourth performance for Lampo: he performed in October 2012 with Okkyung Lee, in November 2006 with Mark Trayle, and in September 2003 with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. At the ’03 concert, which was his first Chicago performance since 1975, Behrman presented Homemade Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches and a new version of QS/RL made for Lonberg-Holm.

Cleek Schrey (b.1984, Bath Co., Va.) is a fiddler, composer, and improviser. He plays traditional music from Appalachia and Ireland as well as experimental music with a wide range of musicians. Schrey performs on the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. His practice is preoccupied with the physical phenomena of vibrating strings and the histories and aesthetics of recording technologies.

Collaborators include composer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and the late Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone. He has performed at the Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, Tenn.; Kilkenny Arts Festival, Kilkenny; SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic, Melbourne; Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; Roulette, Brooklyn (in a program curated by Meredith Monk); and the Beckett in London Festival with Gare St. Lazare, London, among others.

Recent releases include The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (Pagans, 2024), a recording of shape-note melodies transcribed for organs with Weston Olencki, and Beehive Cathedral (Dear Life Records, 2024), an album of traditional southern music with Joseph Decosimo and Luke Richardson.

Past residencies include Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Roulette, Brooklyn; Harvestworks, New York; and the Watermill Center, Water Mill, N.Y. Schrey holds an MFA in Music Composition from Princeton University and has lectured at the University of Pennsylvania and the Cooper Union. He lives in Brooklyn.

In October 2025, Cleek Schrey premiered Strange Creek Music, a new fiddle work on his hardanger d’amore, designed for and performed in the 10 x 20-foot Lampo office. Across eight 20-minute performances for audiences of four, Schrey reimagined Appalachian fiddle tunes, moving from their traditional forms into free improvisation.