Lightninging

Lightninging comprises various members of Milwaukee’s experimental and jazz scenes and includes current and former members of Gauss, Social Caterpillar, Frenia, The Naima, and King of Salads. The group’s widely varying musical interests and exploratory outlook produce a densely layered and continually evolving sound, in which strands of rock, jazz, electronic music, experimental music, and pop music refract each other to kaleidoscopic effect. Song structures follow a sort of warped dream logic: jagged polyrhythms give way to shoegaze-y walls of sound; a jazz-indebted dirge dissolves into a noise-laced sound collage.

Lightninging’s creative ethos is similarly layered, variously involving meticulous composition, loose improvisation, and stream-of-consciousness musings, invoking both the power of collective work and intention as well as the power of spontaneity and play; the joy of building a sonic and semantic world with your friends, wrecking the foundation and sending its building blocks tumbling to the ground, only to pick them back up again and start anew.