The gripe stuff

YAMMER IT HOME The Complaints Choir sounds off on an array of melodious gripes.

Photo: Courtesy Heidi Piiroinen

More than a month before Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen’s performance project was slated for it’s Sat 3 Chicago debut, the duo was already inundated with complaints. But bad reviews weren’t the source of the grumbling. The Helsinki, Finland–based artists needed the gripes for a successful run of their international community art project, the Complaints Choir.

 “We’ve received almost 100 complaints so far,” Kalleinen says about the forthcoming performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “So that’s quite a lot.” Those complaints, all submitted by average local citizens in an open call for participants, eventually became the songs that the Chicago group will belt out to cheery, original tunes supplied by live musicians. The mostly amateur singers are scheduled for two shows at the museum on Saturday, plus a handful of traveling performances in the city’s neighborhoods, performed from a double-decker bus.

The Chicago Complaints Choir, which boasts about 70 members, is just the latest, local manifestation of a worldwide phenomenon that’s already spread to about 20 cities. The artists dreamed up the idea for the choral groups two years ago, basing it on the term “complaints choir” a literal interpretation of the Finnish word valituskuoro. “In Finland, when you have a lot of people complaining at once, this is an expression we use,” Kalleinen explains. Though the artist believes the desire to complain is universal, the grievances have varied from city to city: In Birmingham, England, for example, the chorus that launched the phenomenon whines that beer is too expensive downtown; in Helsinki, the singers gripe that their dreams are boring; in Budapest, a neighbor holds Hungarian folk dance classes in the apartment above.

Although at least three Complaints Choirs already exist in the U.S., Chicago’s chorus is the first in the country to kick off with the help of the founding artists. According to Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen, they wanted to take the project beyond Europe, and bring it to the U.S. to see if any similarities emerged among all of the complaints. “I think the U.S. is quite interesting because there seems to be this positive attitude unlike in Finland,” Kalleinen says. “In the U.S. you ask, ‘Hey how are you?’ And everybody answers, ‘Oh, I’m fine.’ Everything is always so well. In Finland when you ask, ‘How are you?’ you get a long monologue—it’s very different.”

Chicago’s version of the choir will undoubtedly have its own unique set of complaints (watch out, CTA and winter months) but it’s set to have its own sound, too. The songwriter-conductor behind the chorus is local music-scene vet Jeremy Jacobsen, who’s also known as one-man band the Lonesome Organist. Having put out records on Thrill Jockey and played with bands such as 5ive Style and Euphone, Jacobsen’s background in indie rock, jazz and experimental music is already apparent in the project. “I’m bringing in Charles Rumback from Leaves on drums and Nick Macri of the Zincs on bass, so we’ll sound a little different than the other choruses,” he says. The choir is also likely to sound more professional than most: Jacobsen moonlights as a choir master at a Northwest Indiana church so he’s accustomed to molding the talents of amateur vocalists.

As for Complaints Choir participants, they’re a varied bunch, too. Choir member Angela Allyn, a 46-year-old Evanston arts coordinator, is participating with her kids, Alex, 10, and Tess, 6. “In our household you hear a lot of complaints like, I have too much homework; he got more than I did; it’s not my turn,” Allyn says. “For us, kvetching is an art form—and it’s universal, too, so we’re joining the human chorus of complaints.”

Kochta-Kalleinen elaborates on the choir’s mass appeal. “It’s not about singing well, but about singing energetically,” he says. “It’s like taking the energy and negativity people put into complaining and transforming it into something really big and collective, something fun and powerful. So in that sense, volume itself is a kind of attitude.”

The Complaints Choir gives you something to gripe about Saturday 3.