Liz Downing Music and Performance
The Cups
Creative Alliance Crankie Festival 2026
The Cups
Hanna Olivegren, Greg Hatem, Liz Downing
The aim of this project is to create short structures of sound forms, cups, which conjure places in the psyche. Within each cup, we cast incantations, hold singing conversations and sound out wordless stories.
Curving Tooth
Photo by Dave Iden
Curving Tooth was recorded in Baltimore, MD as a collaboration between painter, writer, and vocalist Liz Downing and arranger, producer, and instrumentalist Greg Hatem. It threads an odd needle between darkly comedic avant-folk and electro-Appalachian pop music. These dream-inspired odes to Mother Dirt, shapeshifting animals, and the reptilian brain are delivered earnestly from Downing's time bejeweled book of songs, now reimagined by Hatem's sampling and arrangements. The Curving Tooth refers to that rare and singular beauty to ponder.
Video credits: Costumes, props, performance, direction, photography, and editing by Robi and Alen Predanič. "Daisy Bed" written and performed by Curving Tooth, Liz Downing and Greg Hatem. From their debut LP Curving Tooth, available now on 20/20 Records and Tapes.
In The Womb Of The Everywhere Room
Allison Clendaniel and Liz Downing are "In the Womb of the Everywhere Room". They meet for discussions of life, ideas and experiences, creating improvisations to illuminate the meanings.
Allison Clendaniel is an interdisciplinary artist in Baltimore, MD. Her work encompasses sound, classical & extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, technology, and theatre.
Liz Downing is a painter and musician, creating images and stories in the form of songs, scrolling panoramas and plays.
Your Soul Boat, My Soul Boat
Tears will become the river that will take you somewhere. In this particular place you will see the Dagon Twins dancing to the Dirt song, and the soul boat being tossed on existential waves. This sound piece, I created in May 2020 with collaborator, Allison Clendaniel in duo "In the Womb of the Everywhere Room". The visual, I recorded alone on my iphone using hand held puppets moving to a soundtrack by Lurch and Holler, (Liz Downing, Michael Willis). Allison Clendaniel and I added vocals and Allison created further sound layers with James Young on Oboe . Full credits are at the end of the piece.
Underworld Orchard
Underworld Orchard
Liz Downing, lyrics, vocals, banjo / Hanna Olivegren, vocals
/ Steve Strohmeier, guitar / Recorded by Steve Strohmeier
www.underworldorchard.bandcamp.com
"Tiny Fingers"
Mole Suit Choir | Liz Downing and Rupert Wondolowski
Mole Suit Choir
Liz Downing and Rupert Wondolowski
Doomsday Lamp CD
www.molesuitchoir.bandcamp.com
"Doomsday Lamp"
The Mole Suit Choir, comprised of Liz Downing and Rupert Wondolowski, are one banjo, one guitar, a triangle, two maracas and two interweaving voices in harmony singing of glories past and those promised in all new breaths drawn. Burrowing beneath the fecund soil like cagey moles are the dreams of life eternal.
The Choir was first given life beneath a starry sky at a Shakemore Festival in Westminster when Rupert was on parole from the Patsy Cline Institute for the Emotionally Disabled and Liz was forced into community service to pick back up a damaged soul. Long fans of each others' voices they were given extra cause to join forces by the passing of their beloved friend and poet Chris Toll and by Liz finding occult messages in Rupert's book The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit.
Lurch and Holler | Liz Downing and Michael Willis
...is E. Liz Downing and Michael R. Willis. For 25 years, Liz Downing and Michael Willis have been making sounds together in configurations including "Lambs Eat Ivy", "Radiant Pig" and "Lurch and Holler". In these musical performance art groups they have employed banjo, synthesizer, washboard, field recordings, sets and costumes to create plays and concerts in venues such as The Whitney, The Hirshhorn, The Museum of Art and The Baltimore Museum. They have been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Franklin Furnace Interdisciplinary Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council, with residencies from Yellow Springs Institute and the Wooster Group. "Lurch and Holler" creates sound fields in collaboration with experimental film makers such as Catherine Pancake and Julia Oldham.
"Lurch and Holler" have lately been inspired by the works of Homer, Flannery O'Connor, Edith Piaf, and Walt Whitman. As always, they integrate the grunts and cries of our early human ancestors with personal stories and the twang of Tammy Wynette. The resulting experimental sound is Appalachian Psychedelia. Currently "Lurch and Holler" is working with Laure Drogoul on a theatrical endeavor based on the homeward journey of Odysseus.
Omens CD
"Omens 2015 is Lurch and Holler's most adventurous recording to date, though it's steadfast to the artistic arc in terms of themes and aesthetics that the duo has followed. The fact that Lurch and Holler has abandoned the compositional confines of the formal "song" in favor of capturing a more open and expansive sense of the music that is around all of us all the time (if we listen) is terrifically exciting and inspiring." David Beadouin.
These musical experiments use field recordings gathered from Alabama's Tallapoosa River and are reformed into psychedelic techno rythms and layered with plaintive vocals, harmonies, kazoo, piano and banjo. All used to explore the evolution of human psyche.
In The Cabin Below CD
"Sadness of a Trash Truck"
"Quivering White Light"
Lambs Eat Ivy
Lambs Eat Ivy
Nancy Andrews, Emma Elizabeth Downing, and Michael Willis
Photo: Michael Biondo Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine NYC 1988
Nancy Andrews, Emma Elizabeth Downing, and Michael Willis, recently joined by Jonathan Gorrie, are the eccentric, decidedly unsheeplike minds behind Lambs Eat Ivy. In a quasi-backwoods style, the Lambs perform foot-stomping nouveau folk songs, with lyrics chock full of pancultural transcendentalism. Self-described as “Appalachian Zen” or “Mystic Hillbilly Theater,” they draw on sources that include the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Baptist sermons, and Native American folklore. The Lambs’ slightly warped, hoedown sound is heightened by vocalist Downing, whose otherworldly warbling weds a Dolly Parton twang with falsetto keening reminiscent of Kate Bush. The group’s instrumentation includes a cowbell, washboard, guitar, fiddle, melodica, and harmonica.
The first half of the set consisted of the most recent version of their eerily amusing passion playlet entitled “Dream Bardo,” 1989, performed as if by priests-in-training of some religion of the future that includes humor as sacrament. Birdcalls, yips, and chirps of enthusiasm peppered the singing. Costumed like child-escapees from a demented vegetable pageant, the Lambs issue instructive warnings to the recently deceased not to panic and thus rush into being reborn too quickly: “If the newly dead sees ripe fruit spoiling, / animals fighting, willow trees bending, / great bulls drowning, red mud sliding, / pictures of his future parents mating. / . . . he will seek a womb.”
Part two of the program consisted of a looser set of songs evincing interests along the same lines as those presented in “Dream Bardo;” the repertoire of evocations includes lotus blossoms, lakes of fires, snakes becoming backbones or swords, Jesus, Shiva, and bloody cakes being served up. In a wide-eyed introduction to one number, Downing blithely described the experience of nursing a lamb at her breast. Another song was an expression of gratitude to household objects and an acknowledgement of their resident souls. During this second part of the show, the three main players’ personas remained consistent. Andrews maintained the mien of a shell-shocked, gawky, knock-kneed librarian—a deadpan female Harpo Marx, armed with a fiddle instead of a harp, descending into the underworld in a state both fallen and full of grace. Willis’ character suggests a satyr/Elvis figure from some garish limbo, and Downing’s a lively mythical bird. As the newest addition to the group, Gorrie held his own; though he stayed somewhat in the background, he contributed musically, calling to mind an Adam in search of other Edens. The bright, surreally painted sets, covered with images of eyes, flowers, supine bodies, and flying heads partook of the Lambs’ interest in hallucinatory imagery.
The wacky and spiritual exist side by side in Lambs Eat Ivy’s fertile circus. The gothic excess of the American rural South meets ornate Buddhist imagery in their performances, and the juxtaposition throws both traditions into surprising relief, exposing unexpected commonalities. The combined fervor, richness, and sensuality is enough to give the audience shivers. This is country music with a pancultural bent, brimming with ancient wisdom.
https://www.artforum.com/events/lambs-eat-ivy-218393/ —Amy Gerstler