Three idiosyncratic voices in electronic chamber pop will present their penchants for the baroque and the larger-than-life.

In “Meshes of Voice,” Jenny Hval and Susanna, two of the strongest and also most opposing Nordic voices around today, weave a complex narrative. Whereas Hval’s solo work goes to great lengths to disturb with kinky tangles of body, gender, sexuality, and mind, Susanna strides through graceful, starkly austere vocal landscapes. Their collective project was inspired by Maya Deren's iconic 1943 experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon and "the ugly, the goddess-like, the gruesome" of mythological creatures like Medusa, Athena, and Harpy. Throughout, the two artists' primary instruments — their voices — alchemize, diverge, and create subliminal melodies, set against shifting topographies of billowing reverb, low drones, fractured art-rock, and rafts of noise. "It's spiritual chamber music," writes The Wire. "Mytho-poetically encrusted, captivating, and terrifying at the same time." Supported by a 3-piece band, the duo weaves a surrealistic choral saga that begins as the narrator wakes to find she has "lost [her] soul” at the bottom of a lake. Their collective tale twists through vast dream states, mythological allusions and impressionistic analogies and takes the form of monumental ballads, harsh noise topographies, and fragmented art-rock.

Canadian-born rising pop experimentalist Lydia Ainsworth will appear alongside Jenny Hval & Susanna . Trained as a film scorer and composer, Ainsworth decided to collect the pieces of recreational pop she’d been haphazardly creating in her free time between film composition engagements. The result, her debut album Right from Real (Arbutus Records, 2014) is a network of atmospheric, dramatic, and vivid soundscapes; although her pop constitutes a break from the professional obligations of film scoring, it's inseparable from that skill and cut from the same cloth in its ability to evoke, amplify, and accompany.

Supported by the Embassy of Norway and the Embassy of Canada.