Steve Baczkowski / Bill Sack Duo & Lihuen Sirvent / Martin Freeman Duo

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Ipek Eginli is not able to make it to Buffalo for this concert as originally scheduled. The brilliant Bill Sack will be performing in her place. We appreciate your understanding.

Hallwalls is pleased to collaborate with BICA, Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (https://www.thebica.org/) to present an evening of music featuring two duo projects: guitarist/composer Bill Sack and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Steve Baczkowski and Argentine composer/flautist Lihuen Sirvent and Rochester-born electronics wizard Martin Freeman. Join us as Hallwalls continues to celebrate our 50th Anniversary on Thursday, Oct 10th at 30 Essex St., in the Essex Arts Center, where Hallwalls was founded in 1974 and BICA currently resides.

María Lihuen Sirvent is an Argentinian composer and flutist currently based in Buffalo, New York. Humor, levity, and joy are common threads that bind her work beyond her different aesthetic and philosophical interests. She explores these feelings through explicit or insinuated means to trace in her identity the intersections of the collectivism of her Latin-American cultural background and her millennial mindset. In the last few years, she has been working on music with live electronics that generate interactions between sound and light (including video) employing feedback systems. This path includes the development and combination of different technologies (both digital and analog), as well as the rationale of the artistic practice and its communicative possibilities when visual elements are at play.

Martin Freeman a Buffalo, NY-based improviser, toolmaker and tinkerer working predominantly with sound and electronic circuits in the overlapping disciplines of instrument-building, installation, arts education and performance. His production practice concerns new ways of making music informed by deep investigations of electronic circuits and working methods that complicate the roles between performer, instrument and audience. As an educator he has taught art at SUNY at Buffalo and has led workshops in electronics at Eastman School of Music, Detroit School of Arts High School and Rhizome DC. He will perform on instruments of his own design.

Bill Sack is a multimedia and electronic artist, musician, guitarist, composer, computer manipulator, and programmer. He is the former Technical Director at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, and is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Media Studies Department at the University at Buffalo. He has been an active part of the arts and electronics community in Buffalo for many years. In addition to countless other projects, Sack exhibited in Beyond In Western New York in 2010.

Buffalo-based baritone saxophonist/improviser Steve Baczkowski performs solo, in trio with drummer Ravi Padmanabha & bassist Brian DeJesus (BPD Trio), and in frequent collaborations with guitarist Bill Nace, drummer Chris Corsano & bassist Brandon Lopez, among many others. In Sept 2024 Relative Pitch released Cheap Fabric, his 1st solo recording. (https://relativepitchrecords.bandcamp.com/album/cheap-fabric). His 2021 performance with Brandon Lopez and Gerald Cleaver at the 25th annual Vision Festival in NYC was selected as a “concert of the year” by NYC Jazz Record and in Spring 2022 and Summer 2023 he toured Europe with the renowned Brooklyn Afrobeat group Antibalas. Baczkowski frequently collaborates with improvisers from all over the globe and has performed in basements, clubs, DIY venues and festivals in the US, Canada, Mexico & Europe.