Ipek Eginli w/ Steve Baczkowski & Lihuen Sirvent / Martin Freeman

Hallwalls is pleased to collaborate with BICA, Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (https://www.thebica.org/) to present an evening of music featuring Atlanta-based Turkish-American pianist/multi-instrumentalist Ipek Eginli in a first-time collaboration with Buffalo musician Steve Baczkowski and the duo project of 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.

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.

Eginli holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts in piano performance from the University of Georgia, with a research emphasis on piano pedagogy. She also holds a master’s degree in piano performance from Purchase College, State University of New York, and a Bachelor’s degree from Mimar Sinan University State Conservatory in her hometown Istanbul, Turkey. In the last two decades, Eginli has performed hundreds of solo, chamber, and orchestral performances at various renowned venues and festivals across Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, and numerous cities in the United States. more info at: https://ipekeginli.com/

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.

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.