CONCRETE AND GLASS – PERFORMANCE
Three sound art & music performance events have been commissioned especially for Concrete and Glass by co-founder Tom Baker of Eat Your Own Ears, with support from Sound and Music (SAM). Details of the lineup of these performances and ticket prices are as follows:
VOLCANO THE BEAR live soundtrack to FISCHLI AND WEISS’S THE WAY THINGS GO
THE OWL PROJECT
Thursday 13th May 2010 at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen (doors 8pm)
CUTUP COLLECTIVE – SOLINA HIFI
SLEIGH BELLS
ROCKETNUMBERNINE
DAVE I.D
MUSCLEHEAD DJs
Tuesday 18th May 2010 at The Macbeth (doors 8pm)
DAVID SHRIGLEY presents
MARTIN CREED
DAVID SHRIGLEY’S WORRIED NOODLES
PLEASE
Thursday 27th May 2010 at Hoxton Bar and Kitchen (doors 8pm)
Hoxton Bar and Kitchen, 2- 4 Hoxton Square London N1 6NU
The Macbeth, 70 Hoxton Street, Hoxton, London N1 6LP
Buy tickets to these performances here:
Arch experimentalists VOLCANO THE BEAR will provide a live soundtrack to Fischli and Weiss’s acclaimed chain reaction film, The Way Things Go. This will be a one-off gig, and will be performed by Aaron Moore and Daniel Padden.
Volcano The Bear’s own music is an often-absurd meeting of unlikely instruments, objects and sounds. Narratives and momentum are created and sabotaged, and accidents happen.
Though the band are high-improvisers and the film a carefully choreographed sequence, the pairing is an apt one; Volcano The Bear’s live performance is constructed from an assemblage of weird gadgets and gizmos; mirroring the chain reaction of objects and utensils used in the Swiss artists’ legendary film.
Drawing on a huge range of musical influences, including indigenous folk musics, free jazz and musique concrete, Volcano The Bear produce music that is wholly their own, moving freely between improvisation and composition, and between instruments, voices and objects. Their music is often ritualistic, theatrical, beautiful and absurd, and in live performance allows anything to happened at any given time. They have released over a dozen albums on a variety of labels including United Dairies, Textiles & Beta Lactam Ring as well as their own imprints, Volucan & Volfurten.
OWL PROJECT straddle the worlds of sound and visual art, with their peculiar sculptural musical instruments, including the mLog, their woodcraft interpretation of an iPod, which contrasts the disposability of modern technology with the labour intensive processes inherent in traditional handcraft objects. This group of process-orientated artists has recently won a coveted grant to create one of the major projects for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.
The SOLINA HIFI project developed through involvement with the London based arts collective CUTUP. Solina Hi-Fi seeks to glimpse truth through
sound. Playing with pure tones and drones created by hand built analogue synths and live instruments, Solina Hi-Fi explores the spectrum of raw and it’s permutations, revealing the essence of sound. Their influences reach form the early acid house movement through to the experimental Krautrock scene of the late 60’s.
Analogue processes are further explored through the visual element to the performance. Randomly edited clips of found VHS tape are collaged and reassembled, producing corrupted snippets of film & haunting flashbacks of TV past.
SLEIGH BELLS the New York City duo emerged in the Fall of 2009 with rhythmic pop songs that combine overdriven guitar riffs and sugary female vocal melodies. Derek Miller, who played in the popular Florida hardcore outfit Poison the Well, teamed up with singer Alexis Krauss after he happened to serve her and her mother at a Brazilian restaurant in Brooklyn. As proof of their winning formula, Sleigh Bells quickly earned the adoration of critics at the New Yorker, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice. They are celebrated by both their hometown’s outer-borough lo-fi rock scene and international pop acts like M.I.A., who collaborated with Derek on her forthcoming third LP.
SLEIGH BELLS spent the first two months of 2010 at Treefort Studios in Brooklyn re-recording the demo tracks that had generated so much excitement in the previous year. They’ve also added a handful of new songs to round out their debut record, due out Spring/Summer 2010. Tours with Yeasayer and Major Lazer, including dates at South By Southwest, Coachella, Pitchfork, and Primavera Festivals, have been announced for the first half of 2010
ROCKETNUMBERNINE are brothers Benjamin and Thomas Page. Their music is an intense, emotional sonic assault and all the while they’re searching, seeking to find the deepest channel…
For 3 years, RN9 sets were purely improvised. Now, keeping the spirit and musicianship built from those “edge of the seat” shows, the brothers move into 2010 creating a firmer ground beneath their feet. With Ben calling on the deepest Detroit and Chicago influences and Tom conjuring the spirits of the great Jazz drummers, Rocketnumbernine arrive at an all consuming sound that is at once very much their own. Fresh from an acclaimed UK tour supporting Fourtet in March 2010, Rocket Number Nine will release a new album due for release on Gravid Hands label in June.
DAVE I.D’s brooding vocal adds weight to the already glowering atmosphere and unabating, exposed beats of his music. Superbly weighty music for one so young, Dave is as anonymous as he is indefinable.
The stellar tracks of shadowy duo MUSCLEHEADS are experiments in droning discofied Krautrock.
Artist, cartoonist, filmmaker and musician DAVID SHRIGLEY will curate a night of music with two specially chosen bands:
The direct nature of conceptual artist MARTIN CREED’s works are evidenced by their baldly descriptive titles, for example, Work No. 227, the lights going on and off, for which he won the Turner Prize, was exactly that. This literal approach extends to his music with eponymous song titles and direct, propulsive rhythm.
PLEASE solder together garagey jangle and 60s out-there rock, relentlessly bombarding with their clattering drums and eccentric vocals, a fresh alloy of sound.
www.myspace.com/volcanothebear www.owlproject.com/ www.martincreed.com/ www.davidshrigley.com/ www.myspace.com/rocketnumbernine www.myspace.com/gravidhands www.myspace.com/solinasound www.myspace.com./muscleheadsvisualtropicalpop
http://www.myspace.com/sleighbellsmusic
CONCRETE AND GLASS – ART
The contemporary art aspect of Concrete and Glass is being curated by Flora Fairbairn and Paul Hitchman. Details of the exhibitions are as follows:
Heart of Glass is an eclectic exhibition. The works have been selected via open-submission in conjunction with 20 Hoxton Square Projects, murmurART, Adam Waymouth and the Contemporary Art Society.
The chosen artists are:
Alexander Baynes
Alice Anderson
Ben Long
Brass Art
Charlotte Warne Thomas
Claire Morgan
Clarisse D’Arcimole
Lilah Fowler
Matt Clark
Oliver Beer
Paul Westcombe
Robert Montgomery
Suki Chan
Tamsin Snow
Thomas Lindvig
Tim Phillips
Tyson Howard
A panel of art experts will select a “winner” who will be offered a solo show at the following year’s festival. This year’s panellists include John Kieffer, Creative Director Sound & Music, Paul Hobson, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, and Sabine Unamun, of the Arts Council, as well as other representatives from the world of arts and music – names to be confirmed.
The winner from the first Heart of Glass was Kate MccGwire, who has since exhibited at a number of shows in London, Holland, Berlin and most recently at the Age of the Marvellous exhibition produced by All Visual Arts. Kate will be presenting a unique installation of her work at this year’s Concrete and Glass using feathers that she has been collecting especially for this show for the past 12 months (with support from All Visual Arts).
Shop & Office calls attention to the distinct art of Tom Saunders and Idéfix Bloc. The works in this exhibition appropriate the language and methodologies of advertising, business and retail to ask important questions about that which we make, display and sell today.
The Emerging Artist Derivative Contract is a conceptual artwork by Tom Saunders developed in reaction to the space, the idea of the emerging artist and the artist’s dissatisfaction with his own work. Idéfix Bloc is a pseudonymous collective identity adopted uniquely for the purpose of this exhibition. Operating between a collective and a cell, Idéfix Bloc aims to offer alternative models for the conception and production of cultural objects. In its deindividuating, collegiate method of practice, Idéfix Bloc seeks to develop a more direct critique of the process of cultural production in contemporary society. After the show, Idéfix Bloc is redundant and will disband.
The show is a collaboration between the artists and murmurART, Hannah Barry and Guy Gormley.
Lumin has been invited by Concrete and Glass to commission two new collaborative performances and sound installations. Both pieces take a traditional instrument and deconstructed it. The two are using mechanical sources and through digital tools elevating them into something new, unique and contemporary.
The first piece, Techno Harmonium, is a collaboration between Felix Thorn and digital visuals artists Weirdcore. Used to doing reactive live visuals for cutting electronic acts and bands, Weirdcore have been asked to focus their attention on Felix’s new machine, the Harmonium. The piece will open with an improvised live visual and audio performance on 13th May followed by a weeklong installation.
Felix’s Harmonium as a kinetic musical sculpture. Characteristics of electronic synthesizers can be traced back to mechanisms in early organ designs. The Harmonium make use of these pre-existing mechanisms by automating them for performance. The design of this machine aims to not only to match, but also to surpass the human performer by enhancing the machine with LEDs and movement that creates a truly multi sensory performance on the demand. For concrete and glass Lumin has invited visual artists and programmers Weirdcore to create video response for the piece. This will add a truly digital dimension both as a performance and visual installation. The Harmonium will then become the ultimate performer.
www.felixsmachines.com
www.weirdcore.tv
The second commission is for a variation of Kathy Hinde’s Piano Migrations series: Piano Migration II – Video responsive instrument. The inside of an old upright piano, rescued from destruction, is transformed into a light activated instrument. Video projections move across the surface of the piano strings, triggering small machines to twitch and flutter causing the strings to resonate. For one night, this installation becomes a site for performance. Video projections activate the piano strings, and simultaneously provide a graphic score for improvisation. Audio-visual artist Kathy Hinde is joined by laptop musician Matthew Olden, cellist Simon McCorry and multi-instrumentalist Nahum Mantra to present a performance where image through a series of transformations realised through acoustic sound, live sampling, automata and projections.
www.kathyhinde.co.uk and www.pianomigrations.co.uk http://iamthemightyjungulator.blogspot.com
‘SEEN’ at Hoxton Square / a collaboration between the artist Martin Sexton & musicians BO NINGEN ‘SEEN’ at Hoxton Square is the continuation of the ‘Seen’ series from The Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery, of Redchurch Street, that fuses a radical music performance with the curation of a ‘show’ by an inspirational artist. More details of this event will be announced shortly.