PASSAGES (Season 4): Merope (with Shahzad Ismaily) and DJ Set by Justin Gibbons (Great Circles), visual projections by Klip Collective
St. Michael’s Lutheran Church
2139 E Cumberland St.
Philadelphia
Jan. 17, 2026
I have an especially vivid memory from my teenage years involving two of my favorite things: music and napping. Home alone on a lazy afternoon with idle hours to fill, I picked an Elvis Costello album from my iTunes library that I hadn’t listened to front-to-back yet and put it on, listening at a decent volume on the desktop speakers while getting cozy on the couch in an adjacent room. Eventually I passed out (by definition: shoes on); I don’t know how much time passed, but my library was playing alphabetically, and after the Costello finished, I slept through some other music before the scroll reached an Explosions in the Sky album I also had not listened to yet. As I slowly regained consciousness, I found I was in the middle of a totally unfamiliar crescendo, mastered at contemporary loudness-wars dB levels. Grogginess gave way to a wave of near panic, the music slowly and steadily getting more and more intense, a confusing and unsettling feeling, unclear that this wasn’t a dream within a dream.
PASSAGES brought that memory back for being its inverse: this time, I was older older, surrounded by people, lying on the floor of the dark sanctuary at St. Michael’s, blissfully drifting in and out of consciousness and attention while Merope performed. For the uninitiated, PASSAGES is an ongoing, long-running audio-visual series focused on the many varieties and guises of ambient music. For this iteration, the guest was Merope, comprised of the Lithuanian musician Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė (kanklės, singing) and the Belgian Bert Cools (electric guitar), accompanied by their frequent collaborator (and returning again to Philly) Shahzad Ismaily, switching between drums, electric guitar, banjo, and Moog synthesizer.
The series utilizes their own bespoke, high-fidelity Klipschorn loudspeakers – and the wonderful acoustics of the space itself – to Platonic ideal effect. Preambling the live-music portion, Justin Gibbons – founder of Great Circles, the multi-purpose platform which presents PASSAGES — DJ’d a two-hour set, engendering an atmosphere of contemplation and deep listening. The mix skewed somber and ethereal, and ran the gamut, with wintry, kaleidoscopic imagery projected on the great walls, and sounded absolutely beautiful. (I know it’s a cliché but I’ve never heard Pink Floyd’s “Fearless” sound like that.) People were lying on blankets and sleeping pads and pillows they brought from home, bundled up; I drank tea and folded up my coat and claimed a spot behind where Cools would be stationed later. The performers would be in the middle of the room, facing each other, no stage: the soft, warm center, circulating out.
In this space, in the enveloping dark and projections and sound, Merope sounded massive and gentle, divine and earthbound. The ringing sustain of the plucked and strummed kanklės, Jurgelevičiūtė's gorgeous voice (singing in Lithuanian throughout), and the seemingly telepathic blend of Cools and Ismaily’s guitars – Cools especially using countless effects pedals and processing, mostly sounding entirely unguitaristic, more like evaporating water, conjuring a hot spring – was that classic more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts collision: reverbs and pitch-shifted delays applied to acoustic sources, electronics made to feel analog and human, voice-like. It was all wide-open tonalities and gorgeously-rendered folk melodies, commanding music that powerfully soothed. Perhaps needless to say, I fell asleep (shoes off; I planned ahead), lying there with my eyes closed – I’m sure I wasn’t alone – and was delighted, on waking, eyes still closed, to notice that the source of Jurgelevičiūtė’s singing seemed to have changed, seemed to be right above me. I opened my eyes and there she was, stillness in motion, stepping lightly among us. Music and napping were made for each other. I don’t know if I’ve ever fallen asleep in the company of so many strangers while feeling so safe; I’ll cherish that sensation.
