Through our brilliant events and festivals, you’ll experience the vibrance of the Champaign-Urbana area! Discover something new every day!
Note: Fundraisers, sales, and meetings related to membership-based groups are not included on the calendar.
Pygmalion: Alan Sparhawk (of Low)
Rose Bowl Tavern
106 N. Race St.
Urbana, Illinois 61801
(217) 367-7031
Category
Hours
View Website
Over decades as one half of the pioneering band Low, Alan Sparhawk and his wife and lifelong creative partner Mimi Parker explored the force of powerful, gentle places by weaving together layering sounds, production, and emotion. Following Parker’s passing in 2022, fellow Duluth, Minnesota musicians Trampled by Turtles invited Sparhawk to join them on tour, and thus gave him a space to be surrounded by friends. Occasionally, he would join them onstage. Meanwhile, he was working on his first solo material, while playing around Minnesota with his son Cyrus in Derecho Rhythm Section, a funk band that also frequently features his daughter Hollis on vocals. And in Fall 2024, he released his first solo album, a haunting batch of mostly electronic anthems and e?loges called “White Roses, My God.” Pitchfork wondered out loud how something so “blown out, staticky, inhuman” could simultaneously elicit “freedom” and “spiritual necessity,” a combination that the last Low releases had been developing already. Touring in support of “White Roses,” Sparhawk and band widened that same frame to incorporate mirthful soul, drones and Crazy Horse-like shredding, along with the unfiltered vocal majesty fans had long come to expect. With his follow-up album, veritably titled “With Trampled by Turtles,” Sparhawk’s guitar work is once again at the forefront, the songs still beamed from a unique inner sanctum of one, then reshaped in full collaboration with the band. Performing new solo material to a dedicated fan base around the world, collaboration fits his exemplary work ethic, which is fueled by his ceaseless need for reinvention. Sparhawk’s music is, at any given moment, very now.