Tag Archives: Art

SARAH HENNIES and SAPAT at ART SANCTUARY, Friday March 6th

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Poster for Sarah Hennies and Sapat at Art Sanctuary, Louisville, KY on Friday March 6th, 2026.
(Poster designed by Ella Lumpkins)

The Other Side of Life is proud to present:

SARAH HENNIES

and

SAPAT

Friday, March 6th, 2026
Art Sanctuary (back room)
1433 S. Shelby Street
Louisville, KY 40217

$15 advance tickets, $20 day of show
Advance tickets available online at Art Sanctuary;
Physical tickets available for in-person purchase on Wednesday February 4th at Surface Noise (cash only), 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204

18+
7:00 PM doors
8:00 PM music

Photo of Sarah Hennies in performance by GlassHertzzPhoto.
(Photo of Sarah Hennies by GlassHertzzPhoto)

SARAH HENNIES (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Sarah Saviet/Joe Houston, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.

She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, fellowships in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2025 and 2016, a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and the Composer In Residence at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.

She works collaboratively in a duo with double bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause and in the percussion trio Meridian. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

For 25 years, SAPAT has operated as a Louisville-based large-group ensemble, shaping slow-moving architectures of sound across drone, minimalist composition, and experiments in rock, jazz, and folk idioms. The work drifts between extended environments and tighter, song-shaped forms, allowing time, density, and volume to act as compositional forces. More recordings circulate under affiliated names and alternative identities than under SAPAT itself, and even so, the catalog only gestures toward a much larger body of work. Each performance becomes a new room to enter: a site where resonance is risked rather than managed, and where sound answers back through the interplay of players, space, and duration.

Special thanks to Kris Abplanalp.

Live music events in Louisville, KY. Show announcements, music and news, and other ephemera at: https://bsky.app/profile/theothersideoflife.bsky.social.

Walter De Maria, R.I.P.

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Reports across the internet indicate that Walter De Maria has died. He is one of my favorite sculptors and musicians of all time, his most famous works being the installations “Lightning Field” (in New Mexico), “The New York Earth Room,” and “The Broken Kilometer” (both in New York). He also briefly played drums in the Primitives, a precursor band to the Velvet Underground. Back in 2005, I wrote a review (for Swingset Magazine) of his self-released compact disc Drums and Nature, containing two pieces of his from the 1960s, in contrast with then-new works by Watersports:

Painting, sculpture, hell even being in a regular rock band wasn’t enough for Walter De Maria. After moving to New York in 1960, hobnobbin’ and theorizin’ and fluxus-izin’ with crazyman composer La Monte Young, playing drums for a stint in The Velvet Underground, and establishing himself as one of the prominent sculptors in the emerging “minimalist” scene, De Maria looked for – and found – the ever-larger gesture. In search of an art that was more than just “art,” De Maria in 1968 filled the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich with dirt, kicking off the whole earthworks movement. That same year, he recorded “Ocean Music,” which along with “Cricket Music” (from 1964) is available for the first time on Drums and Nature. “Ocean Music,” recorded with the help of rediscovered minimalist badass Tony Conrad, is a meditative piece beginning with – you guessed it – the sound of waves crashing along some shore somewhere. Some heavy solo tribal drumming eventually mixes in, then subsumes the ocean sound, and what we’ve got is something akin to New Age if New Age wasn’t fucking lame. That is, a perfect representation of the “natural,” but with an acknowledgement of the “human” (incidentally, La Monte Young also recorded a vocal piece with the ocean off Long Island as his backin’ band around the same time for Columbia, but it has yet to see the light of day). “Cricket Music” is less meditative, but no less amazing (and no less truth-in-advertising, title-wise). Listening to these compositionally simple, yet striking pieces, it’s too bad that De Maria hasn’t seemed to have done much since, musically…

De Maria’s Drums and Nature will be available for download here for a limited time: http://www.sendspace.com/file/9vcr0i. If you miss it, you can also download it from UbuWeb here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/demaria.html.

UPDATE, 7/26/13: The Los Angeles Times has confirmed De Maria’s death by publishing an obituary here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-walter-de-maria-died-20130725,0,1642854.story.

UPDATE, 7/27/13: The New York Times has published their obituary of Walter De Maria here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/arts/design/walter-de-maria-artist-on-grand-scale-dies-at-77.html.

MUSIC and ART This Weekend, 11/17-11/20

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There’s a lot of things going on this weekend to tell you about, so let’s get started…

Tonight, at the Clifton Center, none other than BASSEKOU KOUYATE AND NGONI BA will be performing. We wrote about their album Segu Blue way back in 2009 here:

Given the recent collaboration between Bela Fleck and Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, it’s possible that there’s been no greater spotlight on the West African nation at any other time than right now. Fortunately, all the attention on Mali is casting some light on other worthwhile players as well. Countryman Bassekou Kouyate plays the ngoni, a six-stringed instrument, which is arguably less complex than Tiabate’s 21-stringed kora, but still retains a beautiful melodicism. Kouyate’s 2007 album Segu Blue, issued in the United States this year, contains all the beauty one has come to expect from acoustic music from Mali. And on the blue “Lament for Ali Farka,” a requiem for the departed guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Kouyate and his group Ngoni Ba emerge from the shadows cast by their better-known comrades.

You can buy tickets here: http://www.cliftoncenter.org/?post_type=events&p=144. The Clifton Center is located at 2117 Payne Street, just off Frankfort Avenue. Tickets are $20 and the doors are at 7:30 PM.

Tomorrow night, KING’S DAUGHTERS & SONS make a rare appearance at 21C with SELUAH. Read an exciting interview with KD&S in this week’s LEO here: http://leoweekly.com/music/justice-served-king%E2%80%99s-daughters-sons. Doors are at 8 PM, and it costs $10.

Finally, tomorrow night is the opening reception of THE EXPANDED MUSIC PROJECT, a new show at the LAND OF TOMORROW gallery exploring the relationship between music and art. Here’s their description (with more information here: http://www.landoftomorrow.org/events-exhibitions/expanded-music-project/):

Land of Tomorrow (LOT) is pleased to present the Expanded Music Project, a showcase of work illustrating the intersection between art and music.  The opening reception will be held at our Louisville location on November 18th from 7pm, and the show will run through the 3rd of January.  Included in this exhibition will be work by Heather Cantrell, Aurora Childs, Saiman Chow, Hirsuta, Geneva Jacuzzi, Leslie Lyons, Andrea Stanislav, Thieves Like Us, as well as Raurouw with Shedding, Peaking Lights with artist Letitia Quesenberry, and musician EMA with artist Jacob Heustis.

The premise of this show is to highlight the fluidity between creative forms and artistic practices.  The influence of album art, video production, stage design, graffiti, and the appropriation tactics of remixing have established an ongoing conversation between artists and musicians.  This dialogue between visual artist and musician continues to play a major role, and creative forces as diverse as Elvis, The Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, and Afrika Bambaataa have delved into the realms of the visual and the auditory to produce work that both fields accept and champion.

The show will be up through January 3rd, but tomorrow night is a great chance to see it first. And it’s free! LAND OF TOMORROW is located at 233 W. Broadway, in the St. Francis High School Building.