The Friction Brothers
Thursday, September 30
@ The Project Lodge (817 E. Johnson)
The Friction Brothers (Michael Colligan, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Michael Zerang) are perhaps the only dry-ice/cello/percussion trio in the visible world. Begun in 2005 to perform improvised works that explore their love of scraping, rubbing, hitting and freezing various objects to the point of vibration, they have appeared at a number of questionable venues in Chicago. While often sounding like electronic music, they make all their sounds mechanically. To produce these sounds each member has developed an expansive vocabulary of extended techniques. Zerang has raised the back scratcher to an essential component of the modern drummers stick collection. Colligan, warms up metal objects and then super cools them on a block of dry ice making them vibrate in the audible range. Lonberg-Holm’s grind tone remains an unexplainable phenomena by acousticians. Although the trio is a relatively new group, the members have worked together extensively for over 15 years in a wide variety of settings from the seminal lower case 4tet Pillow to the internationally known free improvised jazz powerhouse Peter Broetzmann’s Chicago 10tet.
Their first CD was released by the Sort Of Records imprint Abstract On Black. They are currently working on a second release due out on the Flying Aspidistra label in June to coincide with their first North American tour.
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