You could say that pretty much anything Roc does is a direct homage to the history of house music, but this new audiovisual piece for Lampo and the Graham Foundation is an explicit tribute to the legacy of early Chicago house. Wonky bass lines and drum patterns get continuously bent, flexed and contracted in unexpected ways.

Six Hexaflexagons for Chicago is his weird love letter to the tracks, producers and sounds that shaped dance music, turned into a stream of awkward locked grooves and algorithmically-churned acid motifs.

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (b.1975, Barcelona) is part of the computer music group EVOL together with Scottish artist Stephen Sharp. Their work considers processes of deformation applied to post-acid house culture. Their recordings have been published by record labels such as Diagonal, Editions Mego, Presto!?, iDEAL, Hypermedium and others. Much of Roc’s work is rooted in an interpretation of music in morphological terms: mutated forms, spatial relationships and elasticity, both in a metaphorical sense and a literal one. Since 2013 he has been pushing this spatial-material approach to music in different ways, originally drawing connections between holes and music, then extending that to folds and folding, to produce a series of pieces, talks, light installations and publications that propose a reevaluation of musical phenomena as volumetric and topological structures.

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros has presented his work twice before in the Lampo series. Performing as EVOL in February 2016, he premiered Opus17aSlimeVariation#8—a reinterpretation of Hanne Darboven’s Opus 17a. In October 2011, he played a new four-channel work for computer and hand-held air horns, titled Tetralemma + Tetrafluoroethane.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.