Side Yard Sounds: Scorpio Celebration
October 11, 2026 – October 25, 2026
Compound Yellow, 244 Lake Street, Oak Park IL 60302
An evening of fire and fellowship. Norman W. Long & Sharkey Zalek w/ special guests TBA. There will be cake. Tickets available here. As an artist living on Chicago’s South Side, Norman Long works at the intersection of sound, ecology, and community, utilizing nature as both a material and conceptual foundation in his multidisciplinary practice. His work centers on local ecology and landscape—particularly the sonic ecologies of Black neighborhoods in southeast Chicago—as a space to explore and reimagine memory, identity, and futures. Norman leads soundwalks, improvising in groups and duos with modular synths; conducts field recordings; composes; and creates sound installations. His practice foregrounds nature not as a neutral backdrop but as a dynamic and politicized terrain shaped by race, history, migration, and place. His work engages discourses on landscape and sound, including Rosalind Krauss’s Sculpture in the Expanded Field and R. Murray Schafer’s development of acoustic ecology in the 1970s, while grounding his sonic, conceptual, and compositional vocabulary in contemporary Black diasporic sonic practices.