Monday 10 February 2020, 7.30pm
Anthea Caddy and Judith Hamann are recognised nationally and internationally as two of Australia’s foremost innovators in Australian contemporary cello performance practice. Their work combines acoustic phenomena, amplification, spatialisation, and extending the technical capacities of the cello into a holistic framework: one that uses co-composition and acoustic materialities as the central guide towards immersive, durational new work.
Their project has been invited to compose work in the past in residence at one of Italy’s flagship experimental sound practice institutions Tempo Reale (Florence), at q-02 (Brussels), and EMS (Stockholm). They have presented their work in Melbourne (Inland Concert Series), Amsterdam (Sonic Acts - Acousmonium), and Milan (O' Gallery). Individually, they have been recognised for their excellence in the field of experimental practice through awards (Music Victoria Best experimental/avant-garde act), festival presentations (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Darmstadt Festival, LA Philharmonic Fluxus Festival, Tectonics Festival etc.), and invitations to present their work in venues and galleries.
Anthea Caddy and Judith Hamann are presenting their new work thanks to the APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund.
Anthea Caddy is a cellist and artist living and working between Melbourne, Australia and Berlin, Germany. Her practice explores the spatio-temporal aspects of sound and architecture, applying these to audio works that manipulate and distort perceptions of time, space and experience. Caddy’s work focuses on the incorporation of acoustic, electro-acoustic and recorded space within performance, installation and concert presentation, often using amplified cello as her primary sound source. In her live performance she uses multi-channel configurations in low lighting or complete darkness.
She has performed and exhibited in Australia, New Zealand, USA and Europe notably at, Bludenzer Tage, Austria, Liquid Architecture National Festival, Australia, Diapason Gallery, New York, Leipzig Museum of Modern Art, Reina Sofia Center of Contemporary Art, Madrid, Observatori Contemporary Arts Festival, Valencia, Issue Project Room, New York, Goethe Institut, Boston, Project Space Gallery, Melbourne, Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art, Poland, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Borealis, Norway, Wien Modern, Tesla Centre of Media Arts, Maerz Musik and Radial System V, Berlin.
Anthea is a Ph.D candidate under media historian Douglas Kahn at UNSW, Australia
Judith Hamann is a cellist and performer/composer from Narrm/Melbourne. They have “long been recognised as one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts), and as a composer who “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane” (WIRE). Their work encompasses performance, improvisation, electro-acoustic composition, site specific generative work, and micro-tonal systems in a process based creative practice.
In their recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates ‘collapse’ as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the ‘de-mastering’ of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy. Their process-driven and embodied practice, considers the ways sound operates as a subject, object, and actant. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they frequently challenge the boundaries of their instruments, whether the cello, voice, or body, considering how sonic thresholds offer generative sites of instability and movement.
Judith likes working with and thinking-with other artists which has sometimes included people like Marja Ahti, Oren Ambarchi, Joshua Bonnetta, Dennis Cooper, Charles Curtis, Lori Goldston, the Harmonic Space Orchestra, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Alvin Lucier, Éliane Radigue, and La Monte Young. Judith’s work has previously been published by labels including Blank Forms, Black Truffle, Another Timbre, and Longform Editions. Judith is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart 2021-22 and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego.
Billy Steiger was born in Howth on the 16th December, 1986. Now he plays the violin.
“Then he sat down by a pond and began to play a tune. As he played, the most extraordinary thing happened. One by one the fish in the pond began to jump out and fly about in the air. And what is more, they were all different colours and they were singing to the music.”
Patrick, Quentin Blake.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Paddi Benson and Grace Lemon are two highly acclaimed Uilleann Pipers who met in London's thriving folk music scene. The pair joined forces in 2017 to write new music and explore the boundaries of piping, interchanging motifs and layering voices so that the two sets of pipes serve as accompaniment to each other.
Their current workings are centred around the archive catalogue held at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind; the historic mental health records of ‘Bedlam,’ and their resonance within the existing social context. Their debut piece, acuriousdance, is representative of the patient ballroom dances that took place throughout the 19th century, taking the listener on a journey through jig and waltz motifs into more mournful and chaotic movements drawing attention to a darker pervasions of Bedlam history. The intention is that the listener is caught between ‘who is playing what’, inspired by a line in Charles Dickens’ journal, The Uncommercial Traveller, where, walking passed the Bedlam Hospital in Southwark he commented, “Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?’ – a remark that sums up the wrongs of delineating the ‘affected’ from the ‘unaffected.”
The duo will be joined by James Patrick Gavin on guitar and fiddle.
Follow Paddi Benson & Grace Lemon on @acuriousdance or visit their website www.paddiandgracemusic.com
