Mike Reed’s the Separatist Party

Drummer Mike Reed joins forces with equally adventurous performers from Chicago: poet Marvin Tate, sonic adventurer Ben Lamar Gay and experimental trio Bitchin Bajas. Long before the pandemic, Reed had been thinking about isolation, haunted by a 2015 story in The New York Times about the death of a resident named George Bell, a hoarder who passed away at home, his body undiscovered for nearly a week. All feelings about isolated lives were channelled through poetry and music that touches on minimal music, krautrock and the liberating jazz of Don Cherry en Pharoah Sanders.

As a drummer, composer and founder of the Constellation club and the influential Pitchfork Music Festival, Mike Reed is a key figure in the Chicago music scene, where he engages in regular collaborations with a variety of young musicians as well as with veterans such as Roscoe Mitchell and Wadada Leo Smith. Spoken word artist Marvin Tate and cornet player Ben Lamar Gay were also part of Reed’s Flesh & Bone project, which has appeared on the Bimhuis stage. Bitchin’ Bajas played last year as part of the Minimal Music Festival.

The opener of the concert is multi-instrumentalist Jules Reidy. In lineage with John Fahey's American Primitivism tradition, they discover the outer limits of the guitar. Through microtonality, shimmering audio effects and auto-tuned vocals, Reidy reaches refreshing territory. Avant-garde folk and electroacoustic ambient, with a tinge of sci-fi. Reidy recently played at Rewire Festival (NL), Unsound Festival (PL) and Elbphilharmonie (DE) and released albums on Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle and Félicia Atkinson's Shelter Press.