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A mysterious evening of music and film at Chicago’s cinephile epicenter – the Music Box Theatre.

Three-time Grammy nominees the Spektral Quartet present an evening of mysterious transformations featuring art-pop luminary Julia Holter, composers Alex Temple and Gene Knific, and the Chicago Film Society.

As the centerpiece of the evening, Alex Temple's 'Behind the Wallpaper' tells the story of a person undergoing a puzzling metamorphosis one night in a college science park – a moment that will alter her mundane life, but not necessarily in ways apparent to those around her. The music here effortlessly slips between 19th-century romanticism, indie pop, Weimar cabaret, and Elizabethan music. It's a gripping and often comically devious piece, but it's also a glimpse inside the brilliantly divergent imagination and intellect of its author.

Spektral is joined by vocalist/songwriter Julia Holter for this performance, an artist about whose music Pitchfork Media writes is "so full of un-jaded wonder and attuned to the secret music of ordinary things that the world looks a little bit different while it's playing." The quartet is especially keen to offer concertgoers an encounter with her beguiling voice in a setting far more intimate than a sold-out Pitchfork Festival or Thalia Hall set.

Augmenting this enigmatic experience is a world premiere by composer Gene Knific, who fans will know as the keyboard sorceress of Chicago's own synth-slaying outfit, Iverson. For it, Knific reimagines and reshapes a number by Sufjan Stevens, to be revealed at the show.

Spektral Quartet is pleased to be partnering with the Chicago Film Society for this unique event at Chicago's iconic haven for cinephiles, the Music Box Theatre. Selected in collaboration with composer Alex Temple, CFS will screen a 16mm print of the experimental short, "Uzi's Party" (2015), directed by Lyra Hill and starring Johanna Hill. Shot entirely in-camera on 16mm film, using intricate multiple exposures and thirteen body doubles, "Uzi's Party" is a disorienting – and often comic – trip into darkness.

Known for presenting events that are not so much concerts as experiential thrill-rides, the New York Times writes of Spektral Quartet: "The quartet proved that they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily, a capacity to make complicated music clear, and...an ability to cast a magic spell.