Talk Low Music Festival is proud to partner with Longworth-Anderson Series to bring a night of adventurous sounds to Memorial Hall

Clipping.

The critically acclaimed West Coast-based experimental hip-hop trio, “clipping” is fronted by Tony and Grammy winning actor, rapper and writer, Daveed Diggs along with producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. They initially rose to prominence with their debut album MIDCITY and follow up, CLPPNG. In 2016 they released their opus, SPLENDOR & MISERY, a science fiction concept album that garnered international critical acclaim, including a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. This was only the second time ever a music album was nominated for a Hugo Award, putting them up against the likes of GAME OF THRONES and BLACK MIRROR. Their follow up, THE DEEP, garnered similar attention including another Hugo Award nomination as well as influencing a Simon & Schuster published novel of the same name. Most recently the band diverted from their sci-fi storytelling and released a set of horror-based concept albums, THERE EXISTED AN ADDITION TO BLOOD and VISIONS OF BODIES BEING BURNED. Line of Best Fit’s Jack Bray hailed it as “sonically intriguing” and “another successful experiment for the group and one of the eeriest examples of modern hip- hop to date.”

Why? x concertnova

Why? is an American alternative hip hop and indie rock band. The band was founded in 2004 by Cincinnati rapper and singer Yoni Wolf, who had been using Why? as his stage name since 1997. In addition to Wolf, who serves as lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, the band consists of multi-instrumentalists and backing vocalists Doug McDiarmid and Matt Meldon, and drummer and backing vocalist Josiah Wolf, who is Yoni Wolf’s older brother.

Why? has released eight studio albums, along with several extended plays, demo albums, and live albums, since their inception. Yoni Wolf‘s final solo album under the Why? moniker, 2003’s Oaklandazulasylum, is typically considered part of the band’s discography.[1] Their first album as a full band was 2005’s Elephant Eyelash. They followed this album with Alopecia (2008), Eskimo Snow (2009), Mumps, Etc. (2012), Moh Lhean (2017), AOKOHIO (2019), and The Well I Fell Into (2024).

Concertnova is a Cincinnati based organization whose mission is to: transform hearts, minds and communities through thought provoking musical exploration.

concertnova is a collective of like-minded musicians who create unique multi-sensorial performances that bring art forms together.

Our collaborative process draws inspiration from everywhere: visual art, dance, film, gastronomy, even the performance location itself.

We instigate an intimate dialogue between artist and audience, blurring the line between sender and receiver, creator and participant.

Concertnova will join Why? During several songs. 

Kelly Moran

Over the past decade, New York-based composer and producer Kelly Moran has challenged the piano’s traditional, classically-imposed school of thought with a more contemporary, experimental approach. An accomplished and highly sought-after composer, Moran has collaborated and performed with FKA twigs and Oneohtrix Point Never as part of their live ensembles. Moran has also composed for classical musician Margaret Leng Tan and recorded collaborations with other visionary contemporaries like Kelsey Lu, Yves Tumor, The Avalanches, Helado Negro, Bibio, and more.

As a solo artist, Moran’s critically acclaimed albums, Bloodroot and Ultraviolet, have explored a variety of extended piano techniques like John Cage-inspired prepared piano and exercises in improvisation. Her unique strand of experimental piano compositions, which conjure hypnotizing textures and dramatic compositional arcs, have been included on year-end lists across classical, avant-garde, and metal genres. Moran’s most recent album out on WARP Records, Moves in the Field, was praised by the New York Times for being “a softhearted but steel-skinned set of 10 piano pieces that are as rapturous as a waterfall or as delicate as vapor. Her first album in six years, it is the redemptive conclusion in an extended span of personal tragedy and professional doubt, all ingrained in its sweeping songs.”

About Talk Low Music Festival

Whited Sepulchre Records presents the second annual Talk Low Music Festival, Sept. 26–28 at it’s new home at Contemporary Arts Center and Memorial Hall, bringing three days of experimental music from around the world to Cincinnati, The festival is organized by Ryan Hall, founder and executive director of Cincinnati-based record label Whited Sepulchre Records, Britni Bicknaver, and Brianna Matzke, executive director of concertnova.

Continuing the tradition of MusicNow and No Response Festival, Talk Low Music Festival makes Cincinnati a destination for world-class musicians, claiming space between multiple disciplines, genres and identities. The festival is designed to create unique contexts that foster deep listening and develop opportunities for collaboration and education. 

The Talk Low lineup features LA experimental-rap group clipping, featuring stage and film star Daveed Diggs (Hamilton); Moor Mother pianist Kelly Moran; Cairo-based experimental electronic Nadah El Shazly; White Boy Scream; Cole Pulice; organist Sarah Davachi; and a special collaborative performance between Why? and concertnova.

Created by Whited Sepulchre Records in 2024, the inaugural Talk Low presented artists such as New Age legend Laraaji, Peruvian sound artist Maria Chavez, bassoonist Joy Guidry, and Kenyan electronic artist KMRU. With its return in September, the festival continues to grow, adding placemaking collaborations throughout Cincinnati, educational workshops from established artists and educators, and a line-up of artists at the pinnacle of their craft.

Talk Low makes Cincinnati a destination for inspiring world-class experimental music, with the goal to rival festivals such Big Ears( Knoxville, Tenn.) or Time:Spans (New York City) and to contribute to Cincinnati’s cultural fabric and economic development.

“I’M THE MESSENGER,” MAVIS STAPLES SAYS ON THE EVE OF HER 80TH BIRTHDAY. “THAT’S MY JOB—IT HAS BEEN FOR MY WHOLE LIFE—AND I CAN’T JUST GIVE UP WHILE THE STRUGGLE’S STILL ALIVE. WE’VE GOT MORE WORK TO DO, SO I’M GOING TO KEEP ON GETTING STRONGER AND KEEP ON DELIVERING MY MESSAGE EVERY SINGLE DAY.”

That message—a clarion call to love, to faith, to justice, to brotherhood, to joy—lies at the heart of ‘We Get By,’ Staples’ spectacular twelfth studio album and first full-length collaboration with multi-GRAMMY Award-winner Ben Harper. Backed by her longtime touring band, Staples breathes extraordinary life into Harper’s compositions on the record, delivering roof-raising performances with both a youthful vigor and a commanding maturity. The arrangements here are spare but weighty, matched by Harper’s suitably lean and thoughtful production, and Staples seizes the opportunity to showcase her remarkable and continued evolution as an artist, one still growing and exploring more than half a century into her storied career. ‘We Get By’ is undoubtedly a timely collection, arriving such as it does in the face of deep social divisions and heightened political tensions, but like everything Staples touches, it’s also larger than any particular moment, a timeless appeal to the better angels of our nature that’s universal in its reach and unwavering in its assurance of better things to come.

“When I first started reading the lyrics Ben wrote for me, I said to myself, ‘My God, he’s saying everything that needs to be said right now,’” Staples remembers. “But the songs were also true to my journey and the stories I’ve been singing all my life. There’s a spirituality and an honesty to Ben’s writing that took me back to church.”

Hailed by NPR as “one of America’s defining voices of freedom and peace,” Staples is the kind of once-in-a-generation artist whose impact on music and culture would be difficult to overstate. She’s both a Blues and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer; a civil rights icon; a GRAMMY Award-winner; a chart-topping soul/gospel/R&B pioneer; a National Arts Awards Lifetime Achievement recipient; and a Kennedy Center honoree. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., performed at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, and sang in Barack Obama’s White House. She’s collaborated with everyone from Prince and Bob Dylan to Arcade Fire and Hozier, blown away countless festivalgoers from Newport Folk and Glastonbury to Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, performed with The Band at The Last Waltz, and graced the airwaves on Fallon, Colbert, Ellen, Austin City Limits, Jools Holland, the GRAMMYs, and more. At a time when most artists begin to wind down, Staples ramped things up, releasing a trio of critically acclaimed albums in her 70’s with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy that prompted Pitchfork to rave that “her voice has only gained texture and power over the years” and People to proclaim that she “provides the comfort of a higher power.” In between records with Tweedy, Staples teamed up with a slew of other younger artists—Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Nick Cave, Valerie June, tUnE-yArDs, and M. Ward among others—for ‘Livin’ On A High Note,’ an album The Boston Globe called “stunningly fresh and cutting edge” and which first introduced her to Harper.

“Ben wrote a song for that album called “Love and Trust,’” explains Staples. “When he said he that he wanted to produce me, I told him, ‘Well shucks, if you write another song like that, count me in.’”

Harper did more than write just another song, instead penning an entire album of emotionally riveting and spiritually uplifting tracks that hit Staples directly in the heart. The tunes fit her like a glove—due in no small part to the decades Harper spent listening to Staples’s music, both with The Staple Singers and as a solo artist—and Staples found herself fighting back tears as she fell in love with the beauty and sincerity of those early stripped down demos.

“I come from a family of Mavis fans,” explains Harper, “so her music has been woven into the fabric of my life from the very start. When I got the call for this gig, it felt like my entire career, everything I’d ever written, had been pre-production for this.”

Leading up to the recording sessions, Harper sat in the audience for several of Staples’ concerts, approaching her performances now as a student more than a fan. As brilliant as Staples’ studio output was over the years, Harper came to understand the stage as her home and her touring band as her family, and capturing as much of that spirit as possible seemed like the obvious approach for ‘We Get By.’

“There’s so much soul and Muscle Shoals in that band,” explains Harper. “They’ve got a specific chemistry that I recognized instantly. When you have a guitar player like Rick Holmstrom, a bass player like Jeff Turmes, a drummer like Stephen Hodges, and a vocalist like Donny Gerrard all supporting the voice of the century, why would you ever want to go outside of that foundation?”

With Harper at the helm, the band recorded everything live at Henson Studio in Hollywood, CA, capturing the kind of powerhouse energy and deep pocket grooves that have come to define Staples’ legendary concerts. While Harper had a distinct vision for the sound of the record, he purposely kept his demos to skeletal sketches, leaving space for Mavis and the band to interpret and give flight to his songs in the inimitable way that only they could.

“The more I’ve produced over the years, the more I’ve heightened my sensitivity to what different artists require,” reflects Harper. “Every artist and every album is different. With Mavis, sometimes the most important thing you can do is press record and just get the hell out of the way.”

The record opens with the stirring “Change,” which finds Staples proclaiming, “Say it loud say it clear / Gotta change around here” over a simmering, fuzzed-out guitar line. It’s a song focused as much internally as it is externally, and after one listen, it’s plain to see why Staples and Harper referred to the studio’s vocal booth as the “prayer room.” Staples’ performance is hypnotic, holy even, restrained in its delivery but relentless in its urgency, and it lays the groundwork for an album that insists on joy and communal celebration without pulling any punches or sugarcoating any ugly truths. The funky “Anytime” looks fearlessly to the future, while the rousing “Brothers and Sisters” is a call for action in the face of injustice, and the gritty “Stronger” promises there’s no power in this world greater than our love for one another.

It’s impossible to listen to a voice like Staples’ without contemplating all she’s been through in her life—the album cover features a heartrending Gordon Parks photo that speaks to the casual cruelty of racial segregation in 1950’s Alabama—but it only serves to make her optimism and resilience that much more inspiring and contagious. There is darkness and doubt on the album to be sure (the spirit of Pops Staples informs the mournful “Heavy On My Mind,” which recognizes that some wounds never heal, while the poignant “Never Needed Anyone” stings with the pain of lingering regret) but it’s consistently overpowered by hope and conviction. “Been holding on too long to let go / Running too hard to slow down / Believing too deep to not have faith,” Staples confesses on the soulful “One More Change To Make.” In that sense, the album’s title is more than just an observation. When Staples and Harper join forces to sing “We Get By,” it’s a prayer, a promise, an invitation.

“I sing because I want to leave people feeling better than I found them,” Staples concludes. “I want them to walk away with a positive message in their hearts, feeling stronger than they felt before. I’m singing to myself for those same reasons, too.”

Even the messenger needs a reminder every now and then.

Another Longworth-Anderson Series evening of great music, food, and drink! Complimentary pre-concert reception features live music, light bites from Ollie’s Trolley and N.Y.P.D. Pizza, and craft beer tastings from HighGrain Brewing Co.