Cooling Prongs (Christopher Fleeger & Counterfeit Madison)

Cooling Prongs is the performance and studio project of field recording artist Christopher Fleeger, disporting a song-oriented musique concrète approach often built entirely from voice, sampled objects, and field ambience recordings. With the precision of a true audio and programming professional—and the chaos of someone perpetually debugging and simultaneously expanding their own tools—Cooling Prongs runs on hacked mallet controller hardware and custom software patches that are almost finished, almost working, and always locked to a rhythm system that breathes, stutters, and occasionally falls apart… and then apologizes for making things awkward when they really weren’t something anyone else noticed.

With the arrival of Sharon Udoh—the explosive force behind Counterfeit Madison—Cooling Prongs expands into new visceral terrain as a duo.

Counterfeit Madison is the musical manifestation of Sharon Udoh, a Nigerian-American pianist, composer, arranger, curator, and vocalist based in Chicago. Her work combines vocals that seemingly erupt from the center of the earth with a stage presence that somehow feels both dangerous and kind, abandoning genre for the expansive. Their performances have been described as a warm bowl of soup, a tornado, a jalapeño pepper, a Jackson Pollock painting, a bulldozer, and magnetic. Her collaborators have included clipping., Tune-Yards, Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus, Ben Lamar Gay, Jamila Woods, Angel Bat Dawid, and Cooling Prongs.