Friday 28 October 2022, 8pm
Thrilled to present a very special three-day residency with French percussionist, Camille Émaille, whose most recent release, Belisama – the metallic roots, was a huge highlight of our Takuroku digital series.
Having been invited several times by Peter Brötzmann to play with him and others, as well as collaborating with Lê Quah Ninh, Fritz Hauser, Fred Frith and more during the last few years, Émaille has presented numerous solo and group performances around the world. The performances of Camille Émaille are balanced as much as sound sculpture. It is an architecture that is both precarious and spectacular, a tenuous and tense dramaturgy that is played there, melee and animal with a molten sound material that it kneads or operates.
Camille Émaille is a French percussionist born in 1993 in Nice. She studied at the Musik-Akademie of Basel (Switzerland) with Christian Dierstein on contemporary music and with Fred Frith on free improvisation where she got a Bachelor Degree in percussion with Excellence in 2018. In 2016 she was a guest scholar at Mills College and studied there with William Winant, Fred Frith and Roscoe Mitchell. In 2017 she released her first solo album on the portugese label Creatives Sources Recordings. She considers music a part of everything, part of everyday life. That’s why she began to improvise, to feel music more as a flux, as something which is already here, something that we (the musician and the audience) just jump into… She works with many artists from varying fields, such as video, muppet theatre, shadow theater with the show Fontanalbe and plays in the musical projects Oxke Fixu (duo with clarinet), Ghoast (duo with american saxophonist Tom Weeks), ESCARGOT (her quintet with Timothée Quost on trumpet, Xavière Fertin on clarinet, Louis Frères on e-bass and Tom Malmendier on drums). She used to organize and play in « wild » events, happenings that took place in unusual locations such as closed tunnels, abandoned hospitals, highway bridges, old synagogues (festival Myosotis); events where people go without any knowledge of what will transpire…
Frith's work has ranged from ground-breaking avant-garde rock with Henry Cow and Art Bears to extended compositions for choirs, orchestras and saxophone quartets and collaborations with figures such as Mike Patton, John Zorn, Brian Eno, Ikue Mori and Derek Bailey. His highly individual approach to the guitar and use of extended and unorthodox techniques give his music a unique and at times disorienting sense of texture and space.
Frith's musicial journey started when he formed Henry Cow with Tim Hodgkinson in 1968, a legendary group that expanded the parameters of rock music to include complex compositional forms as well as improvised elements.
After moving to New York in 1979, Frith was a key figure in the downtown experimental music scene, his collaborations with Zorn, Laswell, Mori and others helping form an important new musical vernacular in which elements of rock, contempary composition, noise and improvisation overlapped and intertwined.
Since 1999 Frith has been Professor of Composition at Mills University, California. Recent projects have included duos with Anthony Braxton and Evelyn Glennie, collaborations with the Arte Quartett and choreographer Donna Uchizono, and numerous festival appearances in Europe and America.
“A masterful sound colorist, Frith is in no way subject to analyses of has artistic legitimacy - (he) redefines the possible uses of the guitar and makes traditional discourse irrelevant” – L.A. Herald Examiner (USA)
