The Nighttime Ensemble

The Nighttime Ensemble is a longform structured improvisation organised by Daniel Wyche (guitar) and Brian J. Sulpizio (piano). The group is an exercise, the exercise is the piece, the piece is the group. First performed with Brian and Ro Lundberg (bass) at Elastic Arts in Chicago on July 29, 2022, this iteration is further sustained by the addition of Lia Kohl (cello, radios) and Sam Scranton (drums, objects). The project is inspired by a YouTube comment, left by user Fadi, nearing a decade ago now, on an upload of Bohren & der Club of Gore’s iconic 1995 Midnight Radio, and which reads: “I can feel how fragile our world is, how lonely people are after midnight, how absurd it is to be attached to anything!” Together, and for an hour, in the dark and cold of a Chicago February, not far from the rime of Lake Michigan, we worked carefully and methodically to refract Fadi’s sentiment – exchanging the end-times heat it evokes for our own familiar cold. There is something, after all, about space and patience that invokes extremes of temperature, and there is something about these unbearable temperatures that dilates time. Through the lens of the Chicago tradition of extended-technique based free improvisation, the open space and quiet patience of certain threads of new music, a general stillness and the sense of nothing every really touching, the help of old friends, and any of a number of other problems, we worked toward something new, and left the studio late enough unclear in all ways.