Sunday 24 November 2019, 7.30pm
‘Mechanosphere’ is Cam Deas’ abstract yet poignant 2nd album exploring ideas of rhythmic dissonance and head-spinning proprioceptions for The Death of Rave. Following directly from his cultishly-acclaimed mini-LP ‘Time Exercises’, which was surprisingly deployed in Richie Hawtin’s recent ‘CLOSE COMBINED - LIVE’ mix and hailed as “Holy F#ck-What is This?!?” by Brainwashed, his new album applies rich polychromatic colour to his signature rhythmic constructions with a greatly heightened emotive traction and broader appeal while only going deeper on his radical ideas about the fundamentals of sound and composition. Big recommendation if you're into Autechre, Xenakis, Ligeti, Rashad Becker.
Using a computer-controlled modular synth, Cam takes the simple idea of layering pitches in multiple tempi to Nth degrees, resulting in a sensational and warped sense of temporality and gravity-defying physics. Effectively placing pitch on a scale in a similar way to Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano programming or even Ligeti’s famous metronome experiment, Cam explores solutions to the problem of grid-locked linearity, or at least perceptions of it, by effectively ripping the rug from under electronic music convention to make his music appear as though in perpetual freefall, or a process of omnidirectional contraction/expansion that never quite resolves - always the same, ever different. – Boomkat
Cam Deas is a musician and sound artist based in London. His work is not subject to straightforward categorisation, with output ranging from solo acoustic guitar exploration through live electro-acoustic performance, to pure synthesis and computer generative music.
In 2018 he released Time Exercises on The Death of Rave, consisting of five works for synthesiser and computer, his first full length purely electronic work. The pieces explore polytempos and relative ratios between pitch and rhythm in a dense electronic space, described as “disembodied music playing out a thrilling dramaturgy and syntax of alien dissonance and disorienting rhythmic resolution”.
As a sound artist and performer Lia Mazzari’s practice is often collaborative, engaging new audiences through encounters with art in non-conventional spaces, physical and virtual. She likes to explore the divisions of site and non-site, private and public through live performance, sound installation and urban intervention. Lia creates recorded and live events that embrace the broader sense of sound in space. This fluid relationship with her environment and towards sonic activism as well as developing an extended technique with cello and whips form the crux of her practice.
https://liamazzari.com/
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Threshing Floor the project of Rory Salter (Malvern Brume) and Ben Victor Waggett. As Threshing Floor the duo draw influences from folklore, history, psychogeography and performance actions. The music is built through improvisation using found objects, acoustic and electronic instruments, field recordings and whatever is to hand. The field recordings used are taken from walks and actions the duo have either done together or collected separately, always in sites of personal or historical significance to them both. Rory and Ben also run the label Infant Tree.
