[ 9. August 2013 ]

BERLIN – concerts @ N.K. in August

Von: „NK“
Datum: 9. August 2013 10:28:16 MESZ

Gil Kuno / Trio: Lynn Book, Tomomi Adachi, Dafna Naphtali / Gilles Aubry
Axel Dörner / Toshimaru Nakamura / Lucio Capece
The Logothetis Ensemble / Vasana String Trio

http://www.nkprojekt.de/newsletter/092012_57/nk_newsletter_05.html

CONCERT | Friday August 9 2013 22:00
Gil Kuno / Trio: Lynn Book, Tomomi Adachi, Dafna Naphtali / Gilles Aubry
GIL KUNO Radiologic performance
Due to this decade of the iPod, some have started to become calloused to the existence of radio frequency. Each city has its own unique set of radio stations, each emitting original audio content into the airwaves. This can be considered one of the city’s signature sounds –
morphing, undulating, and shifting at any given moment.

Gil Kuno’s Radiologic is about taming this multi layered beast by sculpting the individual audio streams into a palatable 2 channel mix. He will use 8 radios simultaneously to tune into the
local radio stations, and manipulate them in real time with various effects and mixing techniques. The result is a living soundscape; each unique to the location and time frame.

GIL KUNO’s work is often reminiscent of the organic and social processes that surround us; yet they exceed the familiarity we often associate them with.Flung and displaced from context, natural activity is stretched into metaphorical absurdity with a sense of whimsical play.

From breathing intestines, to masturbating installations, oversized antfarms, silent DJ events, and one string guitar orchestras, Gil Kuno constantly subverts our engagement with the perceptions of reality

Through careful social conditioning, the mind is guided to think within certain patterns. Gil tries to redirect the flow of the mind outside of the set patterns we are taught by society to construct. In his work, he attempts to displace natural activity from its context, revealing an otherwise hidden level of metaphorical absurdity within the ordinary patterns present before our eyes.

The goal of sublimating everyday perception underlies many of the projects he has exhibited or performed. He aims to push people away from paradigmatic thinking through various themes and methodologies – aleatoric systems (chance operations,) exaggerated perception, derailed reality and re-envisioning experiences common within everyday life.

Gil received his MFA at UCLA in 2010. He has achieved recognition from Ars Electronica, Japan Media Arts Festival, Canon Digital Creators Contest, Timothy Leary (Leary.com), among others.

His recent work, „Six String Sonics, The“ ranked second place in a public survey held by the Japanese Government for „Top 100 Japanese Media Art Works“. This resulted in an exhibit at Japan’s largest contemporary art museum, The National Art Center, Tokyo. In the summer of 2012, Gil debuted the performance in the U.S. at the Fringe Festival NYC.

http://www.unsound.com/

„LES AMES AMPLIFIEES“ (AMPLIFIED SOULS)
A LIVE SOUND PERFORMANCE BY GILLES AUBRY

After its spectacular debut at the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival (LUFF) in october 2012 and further successful presentations at Sonic Protest in Geneva and House for electronic arts in Basel, the performance „Les Ames Amplifiees“ by Gilles Aubry is now available for international booking.

In his performance, Aubry improvises on a quad sound system with recordings documenting a neo-pentecostal spiritual seance recorded in 2011 in Kinshasa (DRC). During collective praying sessions and speaking-in-tongues, the church members oppose evil spirits causing various existential problems. The sound, powerful and over-distorted, attests both on their supernatural powers and their capacity for soul amplification… By extension, the performance also questions the devotion of noise music fans, addressing existing cultural boundaries between taste, faith and perception.

The performance is part of a series of works resulting from an artistic field research by Aubry in Kinshasa in 2011 for the Global Prayers project (globalprayers.info). The series also includes „Rain of Fire“, a film without pictures which documents the function of powerful sound amplification systems as an element contributing to the creation of new ‚urban religious identities‘. In an essayistic manner, the movie reflects the author’s presence and practice in a post-colonial context. In that sense, it offers an interesting complement to the live performance and should ideally be presented as part of the same program.

Gilles Aubry is a Swiss musician and sound artist living in Berlin since 2002. Based on an auditory approach of the real, his practice is informed by researches on cultural and historical aspects of sound production and reception. Combining ethnography, critical discourse and formal experiments, his sonic images (phonographies) of more or less identified situations stand as an attempt to challenge problematic aspects of visual representation. Aubry is a member of noise band MONNO and has released several CDs under his own name.

More info & video excerpts under:

http://www.earpolitics.net/les_ames_amplifiees_2013

Lynn Book, Tomomi Adachi, Dafna Naphtali
vest: voice/electronics/sound//text

A first time trio performance by three formidable musicians working with voice, electronics, sound, and text in various and overlapping ways. Expect outrageous adventures into vocal sound and sound manipulation, expect unexpected forays into inner dialogues and expect intense interaction.

BIOS

Lynn Book has a 25 year history of interdisciplinary artistic practice that traverses boundaries between performance art, dance, theater, writing and new music forms. Critics from the New York Times, Village Voice and Chicago Tribune have called her work „bold“, „inspired“ and „unlike anything anyone else is doing“. Her diverse works have received citations, fellowships, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Franklin Furnace, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation funding for the production of a radio drama based upon her performance theater piece, „Gorgeous Fever.“ Book’s recent large scale work „RE:garding Next“, is a collaborative culture project launched in spring 2007 at the SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC and involves numerous collaborators, most notably, Austrian composer and extended pianist Katharina Klement.

ADACHI Tomomi (family name is ADACHI), born in Kanazawa, Japan in 1972, is performer, composer, sound poet, installation artist, occasional theater director. He studied philosophy and aesthetics at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has played improvised music with voice, live electronics and self-made instruments. He had composed works for his own group „Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus“ which is a punk-style choir. He has performed contemporary music: vocal, live-electronics or performance works by John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Dieter Schnebel, TAKAHASHI Yuji, YUASA Joji and Fluxus including world premiere and Japan premiere as Cage’s „Variations VII,“ „Europera 5,“ and „Waterwalk“. He is the only performer of sound poetry in Japan and has performed Kurt Schwitters‘ „Ursonate“ for the first time in Japan. He has made several sound installations and original instruments (e.g.“Tomomin“, his hand made electric instrument is familiar with many musicians). In the field of theater music, he has collaborated with some experimental theaters and dancers. He also has organized many concerts which picks up experimental music, sound art, collaboration work and inter-disciplinary performance in Japan and Germany, include concerts with Chris Mann, Trevor Wishart, Nicolas Collins and STEIM in Japan. He founded „Ensemble for Experimental Music and Theater“ with his students in Tokyo in 2011, the group is working for pieces by Fluxus and recent conceptual composers.

Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist/ improviser/composer from an eclectic musical background. As a singer/guitarist/electronic-musician she performs and composes using her Max/MSP programming for sound processing of voice and other instruments. She has collaborated / performed with many experimental musicians and video artists over the past 20 years, such as Ras Moshe, Hans Tammen, Shelley Hirsch, Eric Singer, Kathleen Supové, Lukas Ligeti, David First, Joshua Fried, Darius Jones, Alexander Waterman and as well as video artists (Benton-C Bainbridge, Lenore Malen and others) and with choreographer Daria Fain. Dafna’s work has been supported by American Composers Forum, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Harvestworks and other organizations.

She’s co-led the digital chamber punk ensemble, What is it Like to be a Bat? with Kitty Brazelton since 1997 (more music in the works!) and a founder of Magic Names vocal ensemble (performing Stockhausen’s Stimmung). This past busy Spring she premiered Adam Kendall’s Toy’s Opera for voice, video and servo-controlled train set, performed Spanish Civil war songs with Shelley Hirsch and Barbez. Dafna is currently mixing several pieces for a CD of her compositions.

| more info |

CONCERT | Tuesday August 13 2013 21:00
Axel Dörner / Toshimaru Nakamura / Lucio Capece
Axel Dörner: Trumpet Pär Thörn: Electronics / Toshimaru Nakamura: No input mixing board
Lucio Capece: Soprano Saxophone

http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/musician/mdorner.html
http://www.japanimprov.com/tnakamura/
http://luciocapece.blogspot.de/

CONCERT | 17/08/2013, 20:30h
The Logothetis Ensemble / Vasana String Trio
The Logothetis Project

Scores by Anestis Logothetis (1921-1994)

Music by The Logothetis Ensemble (Werner Durand, Richard Douglas-Green, Michael McInerney and Michael Neil)

Anestis Logothetis (1921 – 1994) was one of the first – and remains one of the finest – artists to work simultaneously in the auditory and visual domains. His drawings take their start from Western traditions of musical notation before moving out into feasts of virtuosic penmanship. As scores, these images identify every aspect of the musical work which accompanies them, whilst remaining open to new technological developments.

Blending acoustic, electro-acoustic and computer-generated resources, the Logothetis Ensemble creates a rich and satisfying tapestry of sound. As each piece is performed, the appropriate drawings are projected on the screens above, providing that rare experience, a truly unified audio-visual event.
The Logothetis Project

The Greek/Austrian composer Anestis Logothetis was the forefather of contemporary electro-acoustic audio-visual art. After finding a new way of working with notation and sound in 1959, he developed a relationship between music and the visual which gave rise to a body of extraordinary works – electronic compositions, chamber and orchestral works, an opera which has not yet been fully realised as a live performance, and several hundred amazing scores.

It is the scores which form the core of his extraordinary oeuvre. From the composition in 1959 of Struktur/Textur/Spiegel/Spiel onwards, he worked with a new notational paradigm which he had devised, a paradigm which, in his own words, created ‚an equivalence between the visual and acoustic‘ (‚though literally speaking, such an equivalence is not physically possible‘)*. Logothetis‘ achievement was to approach the acts of writing to and reading from musical performance in a totally new way so that the score might ’sustain a high level of representational accuracy, at least in the visualisation/representation of internal sonic movement,‘ whilst preserving ‚interpretative flexibility’*.

Not only that, but they look beautiful. Logothetis was also a gifted visual artist and he worked at his scores in the same way a visual artist might – making layouts and sketches before completing the final illustration. The results are almost as nourishing to the eye as their realisation in sound is to the ear.

And this is where the Logothetis Project ensemble take their cue: we work painstakingly – taking resources from recent technological development and our own electronic and acoustic practices – to find a sonic event which is rich and evocative whilst remaining faithful to every nuance of Herr Logothetis‘ pen. Then, in performance, beautiful drawing (projected on screens behind us) and live sonic realisation (using all the resources of today – laptops, synthesised choirs, live sound manipulation and live interface between acoustic instruments and electronic technology) are presented simultaneously. It is a simple idea, and a strong one: the Logothetis Project ensemble – despite the frequent density of its soundworld – allows time for patient reflection on the links between the visual design and its sonic realisation. It is the experience of hovering in that uncertain mimetic field which forms the exquisite kernel of the aesthetic experience that these events make possible.

The ensemble has the imprimatur of the artist’s daughter, Julia Spitzer-Logothetis. A painter of considerable reputation in her native Vienna, Julia sees the support and continued promotion of her father’s neglected legacy as part of her life’s work. She supports my work as a scholar and artist, and regards my research and the work that I am doing with the Logothetis Ensemble as the most faithful approach to the musical aspirations of her father.

Each of the four artists working in this ensemble is an expert performer/composer/ sound artist in his own right.

Further details can be found on the website http://www.logothetisproject.co.uk

The Vasana String Trio was formed in 2012 in Berlin, born of the desire to create original string music with an approach that emphasizes the personal vision of the performers in addition to the composer. The pieces in Vasana’s repertoire are predominantly composed by the bassist of the group, Adam Goodwin, but each involves a great deal of personal interpretation and input from the performers, juxtaposing traditionally notated segments with graphic notation, spatial notation, and all out free improvisation. The members of the trio are all active improvisers as well as skilled classical and contemporary players, so the music can move freely from composed material to improvisation with no discernable gap in quality or intention.

The name „Vasana“ suggests patterns which are created from past activities, and as such the music of Vasana represents trends and approaches to musical performance spanning throughout the history of stringed instruments to the present day. These imprints from the past are still present, but do not suppress the incessant urge to explore and expand into new territory.

The musical output of Vasana represents a vast array of influences, ranging from Scelsi to LaMonte Young to sludge metal, all the while shifting color according to the particular performance situation. The result is at times subtle and meditative, and at other moments ferocious and frightening. Harmonically, the compositions explore various approaches to tuning, including microtonal clusters, pure ratio tuning, and quartal and quintal harmonies. At other times, a lyrical and not-so-distant melody might arise out of a sound mass, only to dissolve back into a buzzing bed of insect sounds. In terms of rhythm, „Umweg,“ for instance, is a polymetric piece, requiring all of the performers to play in different time signatures for the duration of the piece. „Wanderlust,“ on the other hand, is spatially notated and requires the use of performer cues to signal the arrival of a new section. And of course, all of this may be altered at the discretion of the performers, who have as much or more control over the resulting music as the composer.

Our current program includes just over one hour of music, including solos, duos, and trios performed by the members of Vasana. The pieces were all written over the span of the last five years, mostly specifically for the Vasana Trio.

The members of the Vasana Trio are:

Makiho Yoshida, violin
Hui-Chun Lin, cello
Adam Goodwin, contrabass

https://soundcloud.com/vasanatrio

http://www.nkprojekt.de

http://www.nkprojekt.de
NK, Elsenstr. 52/2.Hinterhaus Etage 2, 12059 Berlin Neukölln

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