World Festival Preview: Bon Iver & TU Dance, Wye Oak, Metropolis Ensemble

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One of KCRW’s most long-standing summertime traditions is presenting the World Festival series at the Hollywood Bowl, which continues this coming Sunday evening, August 5, with one of our most inspiring concerts yet!

Indie folk favorites Bon Iver have been making dynamic, often-impossible-to-categorize music for over a decade. Leader Justin Vernon, always on the lookout for challenging subject matter, was deeply moved after seeing a performance last year by TU Dance, the celebrated St. Paul dance collective led by artistic directors Toni Pierce-Sands and Uri Sands (the T and U in TU Dance). Justin recalls his initial impressions: “There’s real pain, there’s real struggle, and there’s real redemption in it. I didn’t know that bodies moving around with simple music could do that much.”

Almost immediately, he was moved enough to begin building a collaboration with the troupe from the ground up, providing all new music written expressly for the project. The result is Come Through, an extended piece commissioned as part of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series. First workshopped this past March at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the work was officially unveiled with Liquid Music in St. Paul this past April.

KCRW is excited to present the West Coast premiere of Come Through with Bon Iver and TU Dance, at the Hollywood Bowl this Sunday, August 5th. Baltimore’s Wye Oak and NYC’s Metropolis Ensemble open the night with a new collaboration of their own: William Brittelle’s Spiritual America, a series of electro-acoustic orchestral art songs.

I hope to see you this weekend at the Bowl (I’ll be DJing before the concert, so come early!) Tickets are still available here.