Sunday 27 October 2019, 7.30pm
Negativland's new album is TRUE FALSE, and their new live show is NO BRAIN. Teaming up with hands-on video artist Sue C., the legendary sound collage groups new performance project is about our nervous systems, our realities, and the evolving forms of media and technology that inevitably insert themselves between them. Original music, found sounds, unique visuals, Boopers, and a few surprises....NO BRAIN will all make sense eventually.
Read Negativland's bio for more background on this unclassifiable and uniquely American experimental music and art group.
https://www.negativlandtruefalse.com/about
https://www.negativlandtruefalse.com/truefalse-preorder
“Declared heroic by their peers for refashioning culture into what the group considers to be more honest statements, Negativland suggests that refusing to be original, in the traditional sense, is the only way to make art that has any depth within commodity capitalism.” - NEW YORK TIMES
“Negativland isn’t just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images, objects, and sounds to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements. Hilarious and chilling.” - THE ONION
Under the name “People Like Us,” artist Vicki Bennett has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, concert appearances, gallery exhibits and online streaming and distribution since 1992. Bennett has developed an immediately recognisable aesthetic repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant. Most of the People Like Us back catalogue has been available for free online since 2002. For many artists, profit and publicity is more likely through free distribution (the gift economy) than independent publishers and distributors, which often struggle with limited resources. Online self-distribution allows an artist to keep their work available, resolving a tension between label production costs and the desire of an artist for work to be available. UbuWeb generously hosts the discography and filmography of People Like Us.
This year marks 30 years for People Like Us, marked by a cover feature in The Wire Magazine (May 2021, a touring of Gone, Gone Beyond, a 360 immersive cinema installation to nyMusikk Oslo, SPILL Festival Ipswich, Attenborough Centre (ACCA) Brighton and London Barbican, and an evening hosted by People Like Us at their favourite venue Cafe OTO.
Yuko Araki is one of a number of young female artists emerging from Japan that are redefining the outer boundaries of noise, post-industrial techno and experimental electronics.
Raised as a pianist, Araki’s teenage obsession with metal opened a gateway towards various types of intense sonics. Exploring a range of diverse music projects over the past decade (KUUNATIC, Concierto de la Familia), her solo work resolved in 2019 after she developed an approach to freeform analog noise, releasing her first EP “I” via Indonesian label Gerpfast Kolektif and her debut album “II” via Italian label Commando Vanessa. Working with a reductive set of tools, her methodology was to create work that created a sense of timbral density and complexity through a weaving together of competing elements.
In April 2021 Australian label Room 40 releases “End Of Trilogy”: the new album pushes this approach outward, taking in almost Kosmiche sensibilities, creating a sound that glints with the unsteady radiation of a dissolving pulsar. The album is an offering of competing states of tension and release. It merges polychromatic pulses against waves of sheering noise and uneasy ruptures of sound.
End Of Trilogy is a record of unpredictable momentum and tempered ferocity. Even at its most intense. Yuko Araki’s work maintains a sense of playfulness, and a determination not to succumb to mere sonic nihilism. Drawing on techniques borrowed from 70s prog-rock and even free jazz, she dissolves expectation and in the process reveals an utterly personal approach to noise and experimental electronics.
End Of Trilogy is not merely a conclusion, but rather an interrogation of what comes next.
