Kyle Kellams: Now in its third year, the Creative Exchange Fund, administered by The Medium in downtown Springdale, supports local artists by providing financial support as well as a space to take creative risks. KUAF is partnering with The Medium to profile some of this year’s 37 multidisciplinary artists. We’ll hear about their art, their process, and what it means to be a creative in Northwest Arkansas at this moment.
Wednesday night, Lauren Sonder will present an intimate concert as part of the Creative Exchange Fund Mixtape music series.
Lauren Sonder: I’m excited to be presenting my felt piano dream show at The Medium. Felt piano is a technique that creates a more intimate, muted sound on an acoustic piano. What you do is you literally just put a piece of felt between the hammers and the strings. So when I come to The Medium, I’m not going to be bringing my acoustic piano. I’m bringing an electric MIDI keyboard, but it uses samples of this sound plus other effects, so you get that same sort of intimate, muted sound. It’s just a product of me wanting to perform without using electronic piano sounds that I don’t like.
So a lot of electronic piano sounds—to gig as a pianist, it’s challenging. You don’t have a piano everywhere that you can use, or maybe it’s not in good condition. So I have something that I can gig on, but a lot of the sounds that you traditionally hear as electric piano sounds, I just don’t care for them. I really wanted something that would help bring my vision of piano music to life, and this is the sound that matches what I do best.
This composition is pretty unique in that it was inspired by object manipulation, which is a subset of the broader art of flow arts. Flow arts—you can think hula hooping, juggling, all kinds of things. Inside that artistic sphere, there’s a subset of prop manipulation. It’s hard to explain it, but in this particular case, I was inspired by the ways that a flow artist can manipulate objects in time. They create all these wonderful patterns and illusions, and that was my springing-off point for creating this music.
It actually culminated in a video that I made with a flow artist where we collaborated on the final product. That was my inspiration.
There will be chairs, but if you’re more comfortable, we’re encouraging people to lay down. You can bring a yoga mat. We’ll have a few mats scattered around that I’m going to bring. But the idea is to just be really comfortable so that your body feels like it’s at rest and you can really open up, go inward, and experience the music on an intimate level. Comfort is important for that.
You know, there are lots of different ways to experience music. Some music makes more sense to stand up and get really excited. For my music, I think it makes the most sense to be at rest.
I’m extremely grateful to The Medium for giving me this opportunity and excited because every space is unique. You can do this kind of show almost anywhere that there’s a floor. But this particular space being a black box—it’s like an open canvas.
I’m really interested in breaking down walls about how events are presented in general. I feel like a lot of times events follow a trajectory of tradition, and we have accidentally excluded some people out of those traditions at times. So maybe if we rethink the way events are structured, in particular from a sensory lens, that can be helpful. That’s something I’m interested in. I’m just going to mention that so people can think about that in advance before the show. That would be great.
Kellams: Lauren Sonder’s felt piano dream show is Wednesday night at The Medium, beginning at 7. Admission is free.
All of the music we heard during that piece was taken from her EP Missing. You can find her music at Bandcamp and other platforms. Her website is laurensonder.com. She spoke with us from her home in Norman, Oklahoma, via Zoom.
The Creative Exchange series is produced by KUAF Public Radio in partnership with The Medium. Support for this project comes from the Tyson Family Foundation. The Medium and the Creative Exchange Fund are projects of the Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange, or CACHE. For more about this project and the 2025–2026 recipients, you can visit themedium.art.
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