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First dates can be fraught and awkward. But in improvised music, where the word “date” means something different, they’re mostly opportunities for discovery and excitement. That’s why violinist gabby fluke-mogul particularly relishes them. “A lot of my recordings include first meetings,” they say over video chat from their home in New York. “There’s something very specific about the heightened sensitivity and the heightened listening and just the spark of that type of encounter that I’m really curious about.”
The intensity of fluke-mogul’s August duo releases with saxophonists Ivo Perelman (Duologues 2: Joy) and Dave Rempis (Lip) affirms the potential of a first improvisatory meeting to enable incendiary interaction. But the violinist’s newest album, Throw It in the Sink (Sonic Transmissions), offers another angle. This first-time duo with Chicago drummer Lily Glick Finnegan demonstrates how the players’ heightened attunement to each other can give a listener access to something about them that isn’t so much heard as understood. You don’t just experience the affective jolt of their short, songlike improvisations—you also get a handle on the relationships these musicians have to (among other things) queerness and punk rock.
Born in 1991, fluke-mogul grew up in Florida. They first learned violin by the Suzuki method, later switching to classical training, but their attraction to raw, emotionally charged sounds (regardless of genre) soon drove them to abandon the classical path in favor of more experimental and improvisational terrain. In 2013 they graduated from Hampshire College in Massachusetts with a degree in music and early childhood education. After finishing an MFA in music performance and literature at Mills College in Oakland—where their professors included Fred Frith and Pauline Oliveros—they moved to Brooklyn in 2020, just before COVID shut down the country.
Since then, fluke-mogul has rapidly risen in prominence. They’ve become a galvanizing presence in the U.S. and Europe, playing or recording with the likes of violist Joanna Mattrey, violinists Charles Burnham and Biliana Voutchkova, cellist and sound artist Paula Sanchez, and drummer Mariá Portugal. They first visited Chicago in 2022, and they recorded Throw It in the Sink with Finnegan on a subsequent trip in June 2023.
Finnegan was born in Chicago in 1997 and studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston with pianist Kris Davis and drummers Terri Lyne Carrington and Francisco Mela. She graduated with a master’s degree in 2021 and returned to Chicago the following year, at which point she connected with local reedist, composer, and organizer Ken Vandermark. These days she plays in Vandermark’s band Edition Redux and leads several of her own groups locally.
She’s toured with Christof Kurzmann and James Brandon Lewis, helps curate the Option Series for Experimental Sound Studio (with Vandermark and guitarist Andrew Clinkman), and runs the online record shop for Catalytic Sound, a multinational artist collective formed in 2012 that lets fans buy and stream music directly from musicians. Since 2020 the collective has also presented an annual festival, usually in a few cities at once—the fifth installment takes place this weekend in Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Finnegan and fluke-mogul first met in New York in fall 2020. At the time Finnegan was still a student, taking classes online and nannying for the children of drummer Allison Miller. “I barely met anyone, but I did go to a few outdoor shows, and one of them gabby played,” she says by video from Germany, where she’s touring with Lewis. “We kind of just stayed in touch, but we didn’t play or anything. And then I invited gabby to come play the Option Series. I was like, oh, gabby is going to be here for two nights, so I asked if they want to just record together. We really connected, kind of off the bat, and so it just felt right.”
Several commonalities bound the two of them from the start. “We met at the beginning of the pandemic,” recalls fluke-mogul. “We were both taking care of young children in New York. Throughout my whole life, I’ve worked in preschools, I’ve worked in homes, been with very young little ones, and that’s something that Lily and I spoke about at an outdoor gig—our relationship to young people and how that impacts our listening and our music. We also talked about [Lily] being a younger person on the scene, and how that felt for her as a nonman and as a not-straight person. She was like, ‘You’re one of the few older folks I know who are doing this music, who are committed in this way, who are outwardly queer and speaks outwardly about your politics and your praxis.’”
They’d never played together before the session, but they were already comfortable hanging out. Finnegan and fluke-mogul spent a day together before going into Experimental Sound Studio. They agreed to work with shorter forms, but the only other guidelines for the session came from a list of loose, even silly prompts they’d put together while getting to know each other better: they joked about the beachfront lodgings fluke-mogul had found, which they called “Carol’s condo,” and they lamented that as queer people they were just feeling too sad to get on board with the hype around Pride Month.
Finnegan’s playing on the nine resulting pieces is distinct from her negotiation of Vandermark’s segmented structures. Sometimes she’s spare and coloristic, implying shapes around fluke-mogul’s lines, and at other times she slings around masses of sound like her drum kit is doing the job of an entire ensemble. The amount of sound she produces means that fluke-mogul’s playing also stands out from what they’ve done on other recordings—even their duo with another drummer, Nava Dunkelman. Those have tended to be free-form, mercurial explorations of the acoustic violin’s potential to project expressive sound, but here fluke-mogul digs into the melodies they might only imply elsewhere—and they don’t just vocalize but actually sing lyrics.
Lily Glick Finnegan and gabby fluke-mogul recorded Throw It in the Sink at Experimental Sound Studio.
Throw It in the Sink begins and ends with versions of “Fragmented Memory” (the latter called “Memory Fragmented”) where fluke-mogul recites a reminiscence of a moment of shared happiness over an insistent, martial snare-drum beat: “Do you remember that time when we were in bed and you started crying and you said to me you made me so happy?” In the second version, both musicians play more lightly, and fluke-mogul switches “made” to the present tense. Each time, fluke-mogul ends their recitation with short bowed slashes that sound more like turntable scratching than fiddle playing.
For “On the Fringe,” fluke-mogul returns to the microphone to sing a song by Dora Magrath, a fellow music student at Hampshire College who committed suicide in 2008 and whose work they grew close to by playing with her friends and bandmates after her death. Their voice adopts a confiding, bluesy tone as it weaves between Finnegan’s tumbling blocks of battering sound.
On the nonvocal tracks, fluke-mogul saws through blunt, in-the-red phrases with more than a hint of blues, while Finnegan builds out rhythmic constructions so complete and varied that she sounds like a whole band. Pithy and in-your-face, the music feels punk without resorting to punk-rock form.
“I came up playing a lot of punk music, and then I got into jazz as well, and improvised music,” says Finnegan. “Those worlds felt separate for me for a long time, and it was like an identity crisis, confusing, because I was in these different worlds. But then I’m realizing, with improvised music, I can bring all parts of my influences together. That was important to me for this project. I wanted it to be pretty punk, because that’s a big part of who I am.”
In a follow-up email, fluke-mogul writes, “Throw It in the Sink isn’t about neglect or abandon. It’s about two people navigating the intimacies of survival, queer resistance, joy, and the power in taking care of yourself and others amid apocalypse—all while honoring those who have come before, ancestors in the music and beyond. Sometimes you have to throw it in the sink and do what you gotta do, feel what you gotta feel, remember what you are remembering. Whether it’s standing up for what you believe in, coping with your pain, or finding god in the music. Pauline Oliveros once said to me, ‘gabby, you gotta remember to remember!’ Remember to remember, throw it in the sink.”
Since recording the album, Finnegan and fluke-mogul have played together just once, when the violinist filled in for an ailing Sarah Clausen for one set at the 2023 Catalytic Sound Festival. They will reconvene to celebrate the record’s release on the last night of this year’s fest, but not as a duo. They’ll be joined by video and vocal artist Kim Alpert—who, like them, is being inducted into the Catalytic collective. Alpert plans to contribute security-camera footage, public-domain videos that propagate stereotyped gender roles, spoken poetry, and jazz singing.
Full listings for the three Chicago concerts, with acts in order of performance
Ben Hall, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Victor Vieira-Branco; Wendy Eisenberg (solo); Earscratcher (Elisabeth Harnik, Dave Rempis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Tim Daisy)
Fri 12/6, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15–$35 single-day ticket, $60 three-day pass. 18+
Vandermark Lane Tech Workshop Band; Dorothy Carlos (solo); Percussion Discussion (Ben Hall, Lily Glick Finnegan, and Chris Corsano)
Sat 12/7, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15–$35 single-day ticket, $60 three-day pass. 18+
Kim Alpert, gabby fluke-mogul, and Lily Glick Finnegan; Elisabeth Harnik & Chris Corsano; Damon Locks
Sun 12/8, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $25 single-day ticket, $60 three-day pass. 21+
The Reader devotes a lot of coverage to Chicago’s improvised-music community. You can read more about Catalytic Sound and Lily Glick Finnegan in our archives.
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