CUSP Presents: Ipek Eginli + Stephan Haluska // Liam Battle

Name: CUSP Presents: Ipek Eginli + Stephan Haluska // Liam Battle
Start: 2025-02-07T20:00:00-05:00
Location: 1433 E 33rd St, Cleveland, OH 44114-4031, United States

Schedule

Fri, 07 Feb, 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

1433 E 33rd St, Cleveland, OH 44114-4031, United States | Cleveland, OH

Friday, February 7
Calicchia Gallery Studio, 1433 E 33rd St Cleveland
Doors 7:30, Music 8PM
Admission: $15 suggested donation
No one will be turned away for lack of funds
Ipek Eginli + Stephan Haluska
Ipek Eginli is a Turkish-American experimental sound artist and improviser who describes her music-making as “a process of a creation and a creation of a process.” Her ever-evolving creative process involves electroacoustic free improvisation on piano, voice, modular synthesizers, and no-input mixing boards. Eginli’s work is often described as adventurous, daring, playful, and vibrant. Watching her perform, one can witness a dynamic sonic exploration, effortlessly shifting between organic and mechanical sounds while evoking a range of emotions, from tender and soft to dark and explosive. She explores the convergence of acoustic and electronic sounds, blurring and, at times, overemphasizing the lines between the two to create surprising sonic illusions and interactions.
Her electroacoustic solo debut album ‘Field Recording in a Black Hole’ from WeirdCry Records and a live improvised duet album ‘Explorers’ with cellist Daniel Levin from EyesAndEars Records were released in the summer of 2024, coinciding with her invitation to perform at the New York Electroacoustic Music
Festival and her solo northeast US tour. Following her midwest tour, Eginli is now in the process of recording her third album with Purplish Records to be released in February 2025.
In 2023, Ipek was awarded a residency at the Westben Centre for Connection & Creativity in Canada and also received the Reiser Atlanta Artists Lab grant from the Alliance Theater as the lead artist for the multimedia project “Hold on To Your Names,”. As a contemporary classical music pianist, she has performed solo, chamber and orchestra concerts at various venues in Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada and in many cities in the US including New York, Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta for over two decades. Ipek is the founder and director of a successful piano academy in north Atlanta and holds a doctoral degree in piano performance from the University of Georgia all while raising a beautiful girl named Mira.
https://ipekeginli.bandcamp.com/
https://ipekeginli.com/
CUSP's own Stephan Haluska joins Ipek for a collaborative performance. Stephan first met Ipek during his 2024 Behind Glass Residency in Brooklyn, New York. They quickly booked studio time in Brooklyn to record their yet to be released, collaborative project.
Through his idiosyncratic approaches to the harp, Cleveland-based harpist, improviser, and composer, Stephan Haluska draws from the instrument’s unique textural, percussive, physical, and kinetic qualities. Viewing the harp as a frequently misunderstood and underrepresented instrument in contemporary music, he often rejects conventional modes of playing in favor of finding new ways to expand his sound palette. Stephan plays with an advanced vocabulary of extended techniques and preparations, which include the use of various tools, materials, gadgetry, and electronic processing. He incorporates interdisciplinary elements of found object, assemblage, sound art, and performance art into his artistic practices.
Stephan is on faculty at Case Western Reserve University as Part-Time Lecturer in the music department, where he teaches Digital Music Composition and Production.
https://stephanhaluska.wordpress.com/
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Liam Battle
Liam Battle is a cellist in search of spirituality and liberation through performance and ritual. The music he specializes in concerns a wide range of American and Western styles from the mid-century Avant-Garde to new experimental music and free improvisation. He regularly performs in settings that straddle the improvisation, classical, and experimental worlds and hopes to blur the lines that create such distinctions.
The common thread in all of Liam’s work is a commitment to newness. As a founder of the Antigone Music Collective, he regularly curates and performs contemporary classical music. The ensemble was noted for “Their technical mastery, rich tone, and fluid character…” by Cleveland Classical. Always on the cutting edge of performance and technology, they have also been hailed for their unique integration of mixed media into performance: “the pedal stomping to turn digital pages was distracting.”
Bringing new works into the world is a major part of the work Liam does with the AMC and outside of it. Liam has been the commissioner or dedicatee of dozens of works by composers including Brian Raphael Nabors, Gregory Rowland Evans, Kevin Kay, and Emma Tucker. He has also collaborated with a wide variety of today’s leading classical composers including Joan Tower, Marilyn Shrude, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Juri Seo.
Classical concertizing has brought Liam in front of orchestras performing the concerti of Qigang Chen and Iannis Xenakis. His improvisations have recently been heard on the New Ghosts concert series and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s NeoSonicFall. Beyond performance, Liam hopes to communicate his mission of revolution in the concert space through regular public lectures on aesthetics and contemporary music.
Liam holds a BM from the University of Cincinnati and is pursuing an MM at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Invisible Arc (2017) and Quiver (2018) by Raven Chacon are two works from Chacon’s three-piece cycle of solo cello works on the tracking of animals. This set of works expand the possibilities of the acoustic cello and combine Chacon’s precisely worded instructions with rhythmic indeterminacy and graphic notation. Solitude (2013) by Rebecca Saunders explores a multi-dimensional expression of isolation. The work calls for a radical reconfiguration of the instrument’s tuning and extreme attention to an endlessly detailed score. It is at once terrifying as it is virtuosic.
https://liambattle.com/
https://www.instagram.com/liam_battle/