We’re continuing our July spotlight on touring artists with a show featuring guests from Mexico City! This event is a special collaboration with the Volta sound series—presenting the Chicago edition of Hertzwitches, an improvisation exploring sound through analog instruments and transmission-based dialogue - featuring Veronica Anne Salinas (CHI), Juanjosé Rivas (CDMX), and Amanda Gutiérrez (CDMX)
Following the performance, all attendees are invited to take part in a graphic score workshop led by Amanda Gutiérrez and Juanjosé Rivas. Through expanded listening, spontaneous composition, and collective soundmaking, the workshop will explore inherited sonic memory and noise as creative rupture.
No Improv Jam tonight
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bios
Volta, Hertzwitches
Volta, Hertzwitches is the Chicago sound edition of the Mexican based Volta Sound Series*, in collaboration with Veronica Anne Salinas (CHI), Juanjosé Rivas (CDMX) and Amanda Gutiérrez (CDMX). Hertzwitches is a tri-set improvisation from analogue instruments, surrounding transmissions embedded in a sound based dialogue.
*VOLTA is a series of experimental music and sound art concerts in Mexico City, where the formats and proposals tend to wander between the limits of the most risky and sound experimental categories: improvisation, sound art, performance, noise, vocal processes, sound actions, digital synthesis, hardware hacking, interface design, livecoding and different artistic practices that question and transgress the sense of technology and its predominant aesthetics.
Sound is a ghost (Workshop)
This workshop will be presented after the sound improvisation. It invites listeners to dive into the intimate archaeology of their own sonic heritages. Through expanded listening, appropriation, writing, and spontaneous composition, we’ll build a shared soundscape composed of migrations, noise, fractured genealogies, and unfinished harmonies. We begin with the idea that sound is not just produced: it is inherited, carried, distorted, and escaped. We’ll explore the waltz as a migrating form, the archive as an emotional ruin, and noise as an act of rupture. It travels, it seeps in, it transforms, it dissolves. What we inherit doesn’t always make a sound, but it moves through us. Sometimes it sings like a forgotten melody in a fairground. Sometimes it buzzes like electrical noise insisting on presence.
BIOS
Veronica Anne Salinas is a sound artist, educator, writer, and Deep Listener based between Chicago, IL and Texas. Their creative research is rooted in sound, exploring mediums such as compositions, soundwalks, multichannel sound, improvisation, text scores, field recording, writing, and performance. Engaging with themes of perceptual shifts, meditations, slow processes, the body, and ecologies, they use ambient and noise music to attune to subtle perceptual shifts within the environment. She has studied at the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and holds an MFA in Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Juanjosé Rivas has contributed significantly to the Mexican sound scene as director of VOLTA, improvisation and sound experimentation sessions with more than 12 years of work. He has given workshops and conferences on sound art, art and technology and creative processes and has collaborated with other artists and musicians in multidisciplinary projects. His work is characterized by exploring the boundaries between sound, art and technology with a strong artistic background and a passion for experimentation. Throughout his artistic practice, Rivas has used a variety of media, including drawing, photography, video, sound installations, electro-acoustic compositions and live performances.
Amanda Gutiérrez (b. 1978, Mexico City) explores the experience of political listening and gender studies by bringing into focus soundwalking practices. Her experience as an artist has been shown internationally in art residencies such as FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, and Bolit Art Center in Spain, and her sound artwork has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, SBC Gallery, Undefined Radio, Errant Bodies Studio Press in Berlin, Tsonami Festival in Valparaiso Chile, Sur Aural in Cochabamba, Bolivia and En tiempo Real Sound Festival 2024 in Bogota, Colombia, and Volta Sound Festival 2025, En Otros Mundos collective exhibition (as part of Radio Nopal Collective) at Rufino Tamayo Museum, Volta Sesiones at Centro Cultural España in Mexico City in 2025.
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