Tuesday 26 April 2016, 8pm
Tania Chen, Steve Beresford and Stewart Lee bring their interpretation of John Cage's ‘Indeterminacy’ back to OTO after a knock-out performance here back in 2012. Chen opens the evening performing with Jon Leidecker, in a program that explores John Cage's indeterminate compositions "Music for Piano" and his involvement with electronics in collaboration with David Tudor.
“John Cage is funny: this much we know. The deadpan prankster at the heart of 20th-century artistic experimentalism was always about the inadvertent punchline, the chuckle that comes from unexpected disjunction, the relief that comes from reminders of the absurdity of reality, as much as he was ever about any engagement with progress, technology, the transcendent. It's entirely natural, then, that Stewart Lee, who has spent his whole career reaching outwards from the comedy circuit towards the avant-garde, should want to present his work.” – The Arts Desk.
“I don't believe he wasn't aware at some level that the stories in Indeterminacy, when juxtaposed at random, wouldn't produce comic effects. They're a mixture of the pretentiously philosophical and the banally mundane. A disproportionate number of them have a lot to do with mushrooms – not the magic ones, just mushrooms.” – Stewart Lee on John Cage, in The Quietus.
PART ONE
Tania Chen - piano, keyboards, electronics
John Leidecker - electronics, keyboards
John Cage Electronic Music for Piano
duration - 18mins
written in Stockholm, September 1964
Tania Chen Color Fields for Electronics and Keyboards
duration - 15mins
written in San Francisco, February 2016
John Cage Music for Piano 85
duration - 4mins
written in 1962
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PART TWO
Stewart Lee - speech
Tania Chen and Steve Beresford -pianos, objects, electronics, etc.
John Cage indeterminacy - 1958
WOBBLY / Jon Leidecker has been producing music under the name Wobbly since 1990, improvising with recordings to produce music which inherently resists the act of being captured. Recent performances deploy a battery of mobile devices driven by their built-in microphones, reacting instantly with error-prone variations on the notes and sounds they believe they are hearing: a tightly-knit orchestra with inhuman reflexes, resulting in structures which the human performer influences more than controls. Your phone is the instrument, and your phone is always listening. Wobbly's live and studio collaborations with Negativland, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, The Freddy McGuire Show, Matmos, Fred Frith, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, Sagan and Tania Chen compliment live mix media collages broadcast twice a month on KPFA FM's Over The Edge radio program.
www.detritus.net
Tania Caroline Chen is a performance, sound artist, and free improviser. She performs internationally on piano, keyboards, digital, vintage electronics, found objects and video. She creates multidimensional sound pieces for video and live performance and has shown these works in the UK, Asia and California.
Tania has recorded with Stewart Lee, Steve Beresford, Henry Kaiser, William Winant, Wadada Leo Smith, Jon Raskin and with Bryan Day & Ben Salomen in the bands Bad Jazz and Tom Djll & Gino Robair in the trio Tender Buttons. Her solo recordings include Michael Parsons, Cornelius Cardew's Piano Sonatas and John Cage's "Music of Changes". She has recently recorded Feldman’s piano pieces “Triadic Memories” and “For Bunita Marcus” in New York and at KPFA radio in California.
www.taniachen.com
https://taniacarolinechen.bandcamp.com/music
Steve Beresford has been a central figure in the British and international spontaneous music scenes for over fifty years, freely improvising on piano, objects, electronics and other things with people like Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink and John Zorn. Long-standing groups have included Alterations (with David Toop, Terry Day and Peter Cusack), The Melody Four (with Lol Coxhill and Tony Coe, both RIP) and London Improvisers Orchestra.
He has written songs, composed for large and small ensembles, and scored short films, feature films, TV shows and commercials. He was part of the editorial teams of ‘Musics’ and ‘Collusion’ magazines, writes about music in various contexts, and was a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster.
Steve has worked with Christian Marclay on various Marclay mixed media pieces. He has also worked with The Slits, Najma Akhtar, Stewart Lee, Ivor Cutler, Prince Far-I, Alan Hacker, Tania Chen, Louis Moholo-Moholo, Faradena Afifi, Blanca Regina, Ray Davies, Mandhira De Saram, The Flying Lizards, Zeena Parkins, The Portsmouth Sinfonia, Ilan Volkov, Rachel Musson, Vic Reeves, Lore Lixenberg, Valentina Magaletti and many others.
Beresford has an extensive discography - around 500 releases - as performer, arranger, free-improviser, composer, conductor and producer. He was awarded a Paul Hamlyn award for composers in 2012.
In 2021, Bloomsbury published a book by Andy Hamilton: ‘Pianos, Toys, Music and Noise: Conversations with Steve Beresford’.
In 2022, Siglio published the book ‘Call and Response’, which partnered photographs by Christian Marclay with notated improvisations by Beresford.
Highly regarded writer, stand-up comedian and director. Stewart Lee has been described as "the comedian's comedian, and for good reason" by The Times, whilst he has described himself as "fat" and his performance as "positively Neanderthal, suggesting a jungle-dwelling hermit, struggling to coax notes out of a clarinet that has fallen from a passing aircraft". Despite this Stewart has been involved in numerous interesting musical projects and maintains a strong association with the avant-garde and improvised scene.
