Name: Gregory Allison & Slow Meadow
Start: 2024-05-16T20:00:00-05:00
Location: The Bur Oak

A night of transportive neoclassical soundscapes by two visionary composers.
Gregory Allison creates with a single violin a sound that travels across great landscapes. He has toured the world with violin in hand and is endlessly inspired by the instrument’s journey around the globe, especially its use in South Indian Classical music. His live performance blends the Indian Classical melodic improvisation with his classical sensibility as a film composer, offering the listener a sonic journey through time and space.
He will be performing his 2021 debut album Portal in its entirety with a local Madison string quartet, along with new music for amplified violin and string quartet inspired by his time in South India in 2023.
Gregory's classical violin training began right here in Madison, WI. His early interest in jazz, improvisation, and world music traditions led him to land a four-year scholarship at Berklee College of Music, where he studied Composition. After college he moved to Vermont and was a founding member of the ME/2 Orchestra, a nationally-recognized full orchestra based in Burlington, VT created for people with mental disabilities and those who support them. He also performed in the traditional middle eastern music ensemble Grup Anwar, and traveled to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with the Vermont theater troupe Spielpalast Cabaret. In Portland, OR he opened a private studio teaching violin, viola, mandolin, and piano while performing over 200 shows a year with Three for Silver, Eliza Rickman, as a sideman for various local bands, and as a studio musician. He has received two U.S. State Department grants to tour and teach in Russia.
He moved to Los Angeles in 2018 to pursue a full-time performing, recording, composing and touring career. That year he toured in Europe and the US with whimsical songwriter Eliza Rickman and also as a solo artist. He formed his own acoustic instrumental trio RAQIA who released their debut album in December of that year. The band toured on the west coast and southwest and their work with songwriter David J (Bauhaus and Love & Rockets) has resulted in a collaborative album that is set for release in 2024.
Gregory recently moved back to Portland after 5 years living in LA, where he started the record label and recording studio Holy Volcano. He has released three solo albums on the label and is currently collaborating with electronic composers to create ReWorked versions of the music from Portal.

Slow Meadow is Houston multi-instrumentalist Matt Kidd. Kidd's releases as Slow Meadow have been celebrated by the New York Observer, NPR's Stephen Thompson, Echoes' John Diliberto, and who sampled Lachrymosia for the platinum-selling song on his debut album, FREE 6LACK. In 2022, Kidd provided the original soundtrack to the film, "My Mind & Me".
Two years following 2017’s Costero, Slow Meadow returned with its third full-length album Happy Occident, a collection of textured ambient melodies. Fueled by the anxiety derivative of modern life and the frenetic and often uncertain state of these ever-changing times, Happy Occident provides music for reflection. A soundtrack to life’s contemplative moments, and an experience akin to mindfulness meditation.

In 2021, Slow Meadow is back with Upstream Dream, its first wholly new music since 2020’s By the Ash Tree, which bookends a period of creative output that introduced Kidd’s vision of calming and meditative ambient music.
With a foundation of piano, string orchestration, and an ever-evolving electronic palette, Slow Meadow has traversed the borders of neoclassical and minimalist electronics with Upstream Dream, delivering a deeply personal and transportive experience that speaks directly to the ebbs and flows and mundanity and marvels of life. With sublime patience, understated elegance, and surreal atmosphere, Slow Meadow savors the present, remembers the past, and imagines what could be.