I just had a chance tonight to visit for the first time the new, absolutely astounding performance space High Concept Laboratories; it's located literally across the street from famed alt-country venue The Hideout, or in other words 1400 W. Wabansia, about a block north of North Avenue and Elston and roughly equidistant from both the blue-line Damen stop and the red-line North and Clybourn. (It's roughly one mile from either.) Open for less than a year now, the two-story HCL essentially sponsors a series of "artists in residence" in different media like music, dance and the visual arts, providing them a professional high-end space at no personal cost in order to workshop coming performances and present more cutting-edge, non-commercial work; I was there tonight, for example, to see the debut "preview performance" by their newest musicians in residence, the avant-garde chamber group Fifth House Ensemble. They're about to do a high-profile performance later this week of Olivier Messiaen's 1941 Quartet for the End of Time down at the Adler Planetarium's Sky Theatre, complete with synced 360-degree visuals shown over the audience's heads; tonight was a free dress rehearsal of sorts, including a limited version of the visuals projected on screens behind the group, something they'll be doing at HCL three or four more times over the next year. (This piece has a fascinating history, by the way; it was literally composed and premiered inside a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp during World War Two.)

Anyway, it's looking likely that I'll be interviewing both the HCL staff and the members of Fifth House Ensemble for two different podcast episodes coming this fall; they're both really intriguing organizations, and I have a feeling that they're going to have a lot of interesting things to say. And of course I'd be remiss if I didn't thank my new acquaintance Majel Connery for making me aware of both these groups in the first place; she's the artistic director of the similarly avant-garde Opera Cabal, last year's musicians-in-residence at HCL, and she too will be appearing on the CCLaP Podcast later this autumn, once the group's regular fall schedule is up and running. This is something I've been getting into more and more this year in my personal life, reconnecting with the classical and other chamber music that used to be a part of my own youth (I played both piano and trumpet when growing up), so I hope to have the chance to share what I'm finding here in Chicago with all of you as well. I encourage you to solicit all three groups whenever you have a chance.