Kathleen Yearwood: Yes, You Were Born to Die

Michael Pisaro-Liu’s ‘Tombstones’

Hermitess

 

November 8th 2025

7PM | Doors 6:30PM

 

Lantern Church

1401 10th Ave SE

 

Tickets: $45 | $30 | $20

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At the knife edge of winter we offer three creators, each reflecting on a different dimension of life’s end through experimental sound and song.  

Calgary’s own ‘reclusive witch’, the critically acclaimed songstress, harpist, and composer Hermitess will open the evening with songs from her 2025 record ‘Death and the Fool’. Following this, an ad-hoc ensemble of Calgary classical and experimental musicians will perform Wandelweiser composer Michael Pisaro-Liu’s ‘Tombstones’. This collection of miniature, indeterminate compositions, loosely characterized as experimental pop, features fragments of ‘old and not-so-old songs [put into an] experimental music situation, introducing them to a kind of chaos’.  Headlining the evening visionary Northern Alberta vocalist, guitarist, and composer Kathleen Yearwood will give a world-premiere performance of her 2025 opus ‘Yes, You Were Born to Die’.  Through this uncompromising, noise-inflected sonic reverie Kathleen’s penetrating soprano voice responds to the ancient Sacred Harp question, ‘And am I born to die?’. 

 

Kathleen Yearwood is a guitar player and singer known for her wide range of extended vocal techniques. For over fifty years she has composed pieces using structured improvisation, based on folk traditions. Yearwood has performed live extensively in places such as Slovenia and Iceland, including with her metal band ‘Cheval de Guerre’ which she assembled in the late 1980s.  In a 1993 interview with the Calgary newspaper VOX, Yearwood notes that "what I have for sale are songs about spirit in a culture that denies anything spiritual." For a brief time in Bergen, Norway, she was called "The voice from Canada."

For her concert on November 8th, Kathleen will be joined by double-bassist Andrei Rublyev. Andrei Rublyev has been supporting and playing music for 40 years. He hopes some day to get good at it.

 

Michael Pisaro-Liu (born 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer and a long-time member of the Wandelweiser collective. While, like other members of Wandelweiser, Pisaro-Liu is known for pieces of long duration with periods of silence, over the past two decades his work has branched out in many directions, including work with field recording, electronics, improvisation and large ensembles of very different kinds of instrumental constitution.

Pisaro-Liu has a long-standing collaboration with Greg Stuart, and has played in duos with Christian Wolff, Keith Rowe, Taku Sugimoto, Antoine Beuger, Toshiya Tsunoda, Reinier van Houdt, and filmmaker Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu. 

Recordings of his music can be found on Edition Wandelweiser, erstwhile records, elsewhere music, Potlatch, another timbre, ftarri, winds measure and other labels, including his own imprint, Gravity Wave.  

Pisaro-Liu wrote an article on notation for the Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (2011) and has written books chapters for Writing the Field Recording (University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), Perspectives for Contemporary Music in the 21st Century, (Wolke Verlag, 2016), Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (Bloomsbury, 2012), Best Music Writing 2009(Greil Marcus, editor, DaCapo Press); and for the journals Revue TACET (Paris), Revue et Corrigeé (France), Positionen (Berlin) and others. He has written on filmmaker James Benning (in James Benning, Österrreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna, Austria, 2008) and translated a book of poetry by Oswald Egger (Room of Rumor: Tunings, Green Integer, 2004).

Pisaro-Liu is the Director of Composition and Experimental Music the California Institute of the Arts. He was Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor of Music Composition at in the Department of Music at Harvard in the Fall of 2014. 

 

Hermitess is the music & art project of harpist Jennifer Crighton.  Cinematic in scope, her projects are often informed by her background in curatorial work and film. The Hermitess world is brought to life through a collection of collaborators, stories and set pieces that accompany the musical work. Sonically, layered orchestral textures, choral voices, and pedal driven magic conjuring a fever dream.