Sunday 19 July 2015, 8pm
Great to host Brooklyn-based noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician Bob Bellerue at OTO alongside a welcome return for experimental sound artist, composer and improviser, Phil Julian, and multimedia artist Tom White. Drawing on over 25 years of eclectic and wide-ranging music making, Bellerue will tonight be performing a piece for amplified piano.
“I can’t tell how much hearing the title Damned Piano before I heard the music colored my experience of Bob Bellerue’s masterful double LP, but either way it strikes me as one of the most apt names ever. In these four brain-encroaching slabs of drone, ambience, noise, and sonic terror, Bellerue sounds like he’s doing everything he can to exorcise demons out of a piano. The process he used sounds a little ritualistic too, but it’s the results that bear ghosts, erecting a black-toned universe of creepily-calm, subconsciously-urgent music.” – Marc Masters, The Out Door (Pitchfork) on ‘The Damned Piano’
Bob Bellerue is a noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn NY. Over the last 25+ years he has been involved in a wide range of creative activities – experimental electronic music, junk metal percussion ensembles, Balinese gamelan, sound scores for dance/theater/video/performance art, and installation art. Bob's work utilizes custom electronics and programming, incorporating feedback, prepared field recordings, de-musicalized instruments, and found oscillators. He is in the midst of long-term collaborations with the choreographer Wanda Gala, and plays regularly as a solo artist, in KILT (with Raven Chacon and Sandor Finta), and in collaboration with many others (Z'EV, Mister Matthews, and Philip White, most recently). Bob's work has been presented at the Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, New Genre Festival, CEAIT Festival, Ende Tymes Festival, Denver Noise Fest, Experimental Intermedia, Issue Project Room, Diapason Sound Gallery, Roulette, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver Noise Festival, Olympia Experimental Music Festival, PDX Noise Festival, Radio Epsilonia (Paris), WFMU, WKCR, WNYC, KFJC, KXLU, East Village Radio, Stanford University, The New School, UCSD, and UCLA. His discography includes dozens of releases on Banned Productions, P-Tapes, RRR Records, Love Earth Music,Prison Tatt Records, Los Discos Enfantasmes, Zelphabet, Anarchymoon Recordings, Sleepy Hollow Editions, Peyote Tapes, and Important Records (as a member of Tecumseh). He curates and produces noise and experimental music events on a regular basis, including the Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Experimental Liberation. He was formerly based in Los Angeles, where he ran the sub-garde experimental music/performance space the Il Corral, and curated the Beyond Music series and festival.
Phil Julian is a UK based composer and improviser active since the late 1990’s principally working with modular electronic devices and computers.
Releases have appeared on labels including Superpang, fancyyyyy, Entr'acte, Harbinger Sound and The Tapeworm.
Tom White is an artist focusing predominantly on sound-based practices such as live performance, installation, recordings, composition for dance and film. He is interested in the physicality and phenomena of sound; how it can be felt by the body and experienced in architectural space. Past projects include commissions and appearances for Radiophrenia, Glasgow (CCA); BRAUBLFF (KRAAK & De Player); Whitechapel Gallery, London & Colour out of Space Festival, Brighton. Recent collaborators include Surface Area Dance Theatre, Maya Dunietz, Ben Knight, Renato Grieco and Lia Mazzari. He has performed extensively across the UK and Europe, travelled to North America and Japan and had work published by labels such as Takuroku (Cafe OTO), Glistening Examples, Vitrine, Chocolate Monk, Calling Cards Publishing and South London Gallery. He won the British Composer Award in 2014 (Sonic Art) for Public Address, commissioned by South London Gallery.
In 2016 he founded Apologies in Advance; a
platform for artists presenting work in progress performances.
https://tomwhitesound.com
http://tomwhite.bandcamp.com
