Olivia Block (1970) is a media artist and composer based in Chicago. Currently, her practice includes live performance, recordings, immersive multichannel sound installations, sound design, and scores.
Recordings:
Block’s body of recorded music has evolved over the space of her career. Her most recent solo album, The Mountains Pass (Black Truffle Records) is a series of experimental songs about a mountain range in New Mexico. Her early electroacoustic music includes field recordings, electronic sounds and long chamber music passages. She has released solo recordings for piano, pipe organ and additional instruments. Since the 1990’s, Block has received critical acclaim for her recordings, including Heave To, Karren, Dissolution, 132 Ranks and Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea among many others. These recordings feature varied modalities and styles, but maintain Block’s distinctive emotional sensibility. Her recordings are published on Another Timbre, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels.
Performance:
Block has developed a body of songs, scored and improvised performances for synthesizers, amplified breath, inside-piano, electronics, organ and various materials, including metal pieces and shards of broken glass. She has also developed site specific works for pipe organ, most recently at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. Her current work features vintage synth sounds.
Block has performed, premiered and exhibited her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including Incubate (Tilburg), MoogFest, Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Redbull Academy, Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, The Kitchen (NYC), ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia (Brooklyn), and TIFF (Toronto).
Installation:
Block’s installation work reflects her interests in site specificity, ethnographic sound, architecture, and found/archival materials. Block investigates themes related to memory, wind, non-human animals, and time.
Block has created site specific sound installations for public spaces and exhibition spaces worldwide, including the including Arthur Ross Gallery at University of Pennsylvania, CEAM at Flagler University, MCA Chicago, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Museo Reina Sofia, and University of Chicago, Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design, Sokolowsko Sanitorium (Poland), CONTEXT (Miami and NY), The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago), and at the “Echoes Through the Mountains” exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics (Turin, Italy). She is currently completing an installation for The Nasher Sculpture Center, to be included in the Harry Bertoia Retrospective in early 2022.
In addition to her artistic work, Block is committed to her pedagogical practice. She is a faculty member in the sound department of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Sound Arts and Industries department of Northwestern University.
She has completed visiting teaching residencies and premiered works at Mills College of Music, RISD, University of Michigan,The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Thacher School, Flagler College, DePauw, and The Berklee College of Music, among others. Block has presented talks and workshops at additional universities in film, music, media arts, and anthropology departments, including Yale University, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Concordia and Indiana University.
Block also volunteers her time for community based art projects.
Block resides in Chicago, and travels for her work.
History:
Block’s solo career started in the 1990’s, in Austin, where she played in bands and started making solo tape music. She then moved to Chicago, becoming one of few women in the field of experimental music and sound art from her generation. Her debut solo album, Pure Gaze (Sedimental), released in 1998, introduced an emotive style of Musique concrète.