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Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

Fri Oct 09, 2020 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Zellerbach Hall
Composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue arrives in Berkeley with his Secret Society, an 18-piece big band from New York, for a performance of video, text, and music exploring the American fascination with conspiracy theories. Taking his title from a 2009 book by Kathryn Olmsted (Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11), Argue has created a multimovement suite packed with plots and paranoia. Argue’s eclectic music combines traditional jazz with postwar serialism, Latin rhythms, film noir orchestrations, and rock sonorities, deploying a mix of distinctly American musical styles to explore everything from the Red Scare to the surveillance state, mind control to fake moon landings, FBI schemes to alien sightings.