Music @ First U presents: Nick Zoulek “Enter Branch” Album Release

Chicago-based saxophonist, composer, and multimedia artist Nick Zoulek celebrates the release of his new album Enter Branch (Better Company Records, 2025) with an immersive concert at the First Unitarian Church of Chicago on Friday, October 24 at 5:30 PM.Enter Branch invites audiences into a kinetic, breath-driven sound world. Onstage, Zoulek's performance draws on circular breathing, multiphonics, vocalizations, and every sound of the saxophone's mechanisms, creating richly layered textures in real-time without looping, sampling, or digital effects. The program features collaborations with songwriter/ composer Casey Foubert and Chicago-based saxophone quartet ~Nois, traversing the meditative, cinematic sounds of Enter Branch. The result is a concert that bridges contemporary classical, indie, and experimental sound worlds."Enter Branch is about breath, memory, and resilience," says Zoulek. "Each piece grows outward, accumulating color and complexity while staying connected to a living core.""...boundless, kaleidoscopic, absolutely unconventional. Browse an imaginary dictionary in search of the genre-defying entry and you will come across the second album of this brilliant musician stationed in Chicago: an extraordinarily multifaceted record, of a totally out-of-the-box evocative capacity."- ROCKAMBULA"The border between avant-garde jazz and certain flavors of modernist chamber music is porous, of course, and Zoulek's performance, on saxophones in every range, is stunningly virtuosic, whatever the genre. Circular breathing yields rapidly undulating, swirling figures that seem unstoppable. Overblowing produces ... fascinating chordal figures, as well as evocations of electronic timbres and feedback. None of that would matter much (except to saxophonists) if Zoulek were a less imaginative composer." -The Wall Street Journal

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