Bklyn Sounds 7/11/2023 - 7/17/2023 + Chris Williams & Lester St. Louis are HxH

A short profile of the duo playing this Thursday's Dada Strain event + Shows: Irreversible Entanglements present "Speak Easy Vol.1" / Noname + MIKE + Georgia Anne Muldrow / Oumou Sangare / and more

At the moment, I think of HxH as one of the poster-groups for the rhythm-improvisation-community ideas behind Dada Strain. And not because this Thursday (7/13) the electronic duo is playing a Dada Strain show. When Chris Williams and Lester St. Louis began working together a couple of years ago, the New York improvised-music community they repped — Lester having come-of-age in it, Chris since moving from LA in 2020 — seemed light on immersive digital sound. Plenty of local musicians were using electronic gear, but few improvisers foregrounded it. This seems less true now.

By the time Chris and Lester brought their collaboration into the public eye, at a Black Science Fiction gig in October of 2021, they were proven talents on their instruments. Lester as the cello cornerstone in jaimie branch’s Fly Or Die, Chris as an oft-present trumpeter at various DIY pandemic jams (and on Pink Siifu’s epic Negro). Yet that prior work made me misconstrue what sort of playing I was walking into. For a variety of technical and philosophical reasons, the Black Science Fiction performance found both relying less on their acknowledged instruments, and leaning into their machines. And the post-techno experimentalism which emanated on that Sunday evening was otherworldly — somewhere between whale calls, and heroic drones — instantly forming what is, for me, a key beatless island in the archipelago of current Bklyn electronic improvised sounds. It’s a performance they’re still trying to top.  

Lester recently said that what brought him and Chris together was a set of shared beliefs. Both wanted to create a new music “deeply rooted in improvisation,” but also “deeply interested in electronic music, and into expanding time with your sound, expanding social space [with it].” HxH (pronounced “H by H”) became “a vehicle to merge all these things together, to be kind of messy with it, and try to swim through the mess of it.”

Their ensuing strokes seem increasingly focused, confident, and cognizant of the space they’re trying to define. A Summer 2022 show opening for Anteloper on the massive soundsystem at public records, found them digging further into the low-end and pulling out an approximation of beats. A Spring 2023 set at “Assembly,” the monthly series Lester co-curates with Luke Stewart at Sisters on Fulton Street, saw them again go almost austere and engage with micro-sounds.    

HxH spent June conjuring in the studio of Pioneer Works’ highly lauded music residency program, recording music that will hopefully begin to see the light of day in the second half of 2023 and early next year. An early-in-the-month gig at Roulette, part of St. Louis’ residency with that Brooklyn arts organization, saw their sound coalesce even further. [The HxH performance begins at 23:09 in the above video].

HxH are now cohering ideas not only from their own long development, but bringing inspiration from the work of other young artists making sense of digital tools for rhythm and improvisation, ambience and noise, tradition and innovation. (DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s name comes up a lot in our chats.) It’s a sound that isn’t crystallized and might never be. But that’s a good thing. As Chris said to me at one point, “I feel like we're part of a community that's in the making.” 

(Present Sounds x Dada Strain present HxH + selections by Piotr Orlov, Thursday, July 13th, 6p (live music at 8p) @ secret Greenpoint Loft (RSVP for exact location) - RSVP/$20 - use the code DADAFAM for Dada Strain subscriber discount)

This Week’s Shows: