Solo Bassist James Ilgenfritz

James Ilgenfritz performs his work MRI Dark for bass, amplified sound, and mechanical instruments.

Bassist and composer James Ilgenfritz (PhD, UC Irvine) presents a lecture and performance that connects his work as an improviser and composer to his research on African American conceptual art since the 1960s (such as Charles Gaines and Fluxus founding artist Benjamin Patterson), and creative improvised music by Ornette Coleman, Matana Roberts, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

His research expands the concept of Entrainment from its traditional association with humans’ capacity for synchronization and rhythmic alignment to one that considers social structures as distinct agents that perpetually vacillate between disunion and cooperation.

Much of the creative work discussed raises questions about relationships between subjectivity and objectivity, or structure and intuition.

His concert will focus on his 2023 work MRI Dark, which brings together his compositions and improvisations in Just Intonation scordatura with the Autonomous Mechanical Instrument Array: a set of twelve mechanical instruments that play themselves in reaction to his movements, while a four-channel speaker setup surrounds the audience with intermittent sounds of an MRI machine.

MRI Dark turns traumatic medical struggles into sites for meditation on the patience and empathy that enables humans to relate to each other and become stronger through cooperation.