Local experimental trio Haptic adhere to two constants. One is the involvement of Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Steven Hess, who formed the group in 2005. The other is that everything else changes. Originally convened to provide a framework for in-person improvisations with different musicians, they’ve since performed exacting scores and developed multilayered and complex pieces of music that can only be executed on a recording, often without collaborators. Their performances have ranged from quiet sounds to dense sensory overloads, and their instrumentation has included computers, drums, piano, turntables, a Morse code Instructograph, VHS tape decks, and heaps of rice. They’ve played sets hunched around a single table, and last year they scattered their instruments across the floor of Constellation and made their movements between them an absorbing part of the performance. Now Haptic are observing Mills’s impending move to Arizona with a big, communal blowout with percussionist/turntablist Tim Daisy, guitarist Michael Vallera, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Evans-Weiler, who’ll be on piano here. A Boston resident, Evans-Weiler has mostly recorded with violin, which is what he’ll play in his opening solo set. But whether performing alone with sine waves, leading an ensemble, or duetting with Swiss keyboardist Christoph Schiller on their excellent new CD Spinet and Violin (Another Timbre), he has the same concern: exploring the ways that contrasting elements complete one another by combining melody with timbre, discreet notes with elongated tones, and sound with silence. v
