Saturday 3 September 2022, 8pm
The event marks the launch of the album "I Think of Another Time When You Heard It" by Liew Niyomkarn on Chinabot.
An untuned lyre. A mother speaking in soft Northern Thai dialect. The pulse of a Moog Subharmonicon. A gush of a waterfall, enjoyed with friends. A snatch of mundane conversation with a lover; a session with a psychotherapist. On Liew Niyomkarn’s new album, released on Chinabot, the Thai sound artist builds a soft, dreamlike replica of the world around her with field recordings and found object samples, and invites us to slip into her subjective experience with pulsating synth experimentalism and delicate folk sounds.
The result is a diaristic, ambient soundscape, with a light, spacious musicality, a reflection of her extensive work in sound installation and film soundtracks. Her juxtaposition of vocals, electronic and acoustic elements, as well as some Southeast Asian tuning systems, gives her work a granular singularity.
Liew Niyomkarn is a Thai sound artist and musician based in Antwerp. Her work focuses on listening practice and the conveyance of memories through sound. She uses field recordings to detect time, (non)human voices, everyday routines, text, archival sounds, and different tuning systems in nature -- to combine them with a sonic palette and the properties of sound itself such as sounds of spaces. She presents her work in the form of live performance and sound installation.
Label night from Chinabot, a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music.
A record label est. London, 2017.
Jon Davies (b. 1988) is a musician based in Liverpool, born in Hong Kong and raised in Croydon, producing work under the name of Kepla. Since 2016 he has produced a number of records, including collaborative records with DeForrest Brown, Jr. aka Speaker Music, and experimental writer Nathan Jones. His last full length was a debut solo record titled Within The Gaze, A Shadhavar released by Alien Jams in 2019, described "as a thoroughly idiosyncratic journey into the depths of an alien psyche." The Album In Furnace was released on Chinabot in 2023.
His compositional techniques are based on field recording and collaging, granular resampling and generative composition, and most recently he has incorporated improvisations on acoustic instruments and synthesis.
"The mournful echoe of the instrument called the Suona, recently banned from funeral rites in rural China, when heard in the repurposed religious space of In Furnace, makes one of Kepla's most ditinctive and moving releases so far." – The Wire Magazine
https://alienjams.bandcamp.com/album/within-the-gaze-a-shadhavar
https://euphonicrhythms.bandcamp.com/track/the-crown-weaver
https://purpletapepedigree.bandcamp.com/album/the-wages-of-being-black-is-death
Hisham Akira Bharoocha is a Japanese born mixed race (Japanese/Indian Myanmar) multi-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, York. In addition to being a founding member of the experimental rock group Black Dice (1997-2004), Bharoocha has played in many bands who have toured the world, such as Pixeltan (DFA Records), Soft Circle, IIII, Nick Zinner’s 41 Strings, and Boredoms. He has the lead music director in pieces that were performed at prestigious venues such as the Sydney Opera House (Australia), ICP (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), Rockefeller Plaza (NY) MoMA (NY) and MoCA (LA) to name a few. Bharoocha is known for the large-scale drum centric performances he directed with the Japanese experimental rock group Boredoms called the BOADRUM series. BOADRUM performances had up to 77-100 drummers performing with the band at site specific locations around the world (2007-2015). Bharoocha also performed as a touring member of Boredoms at the Barbican (London), the Ruhrtriennale (Halde Haniel Germany), and several All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals (London/Minehead/Tokyo). Bharoocha has collaborated on many site specific music performances with esteemed artists such as Doug Aitken, Ikue Mori, Yoshihide Otomo, Yoshimio, and Eye Yamataka to name a few. Bharoocha proudly endorses Sensory Percussion drum sensors and Morphbeats instruments. His latest band, Kill Alters, has a new album out on Hausu Mountain. Bharoocha’s latest club oriented solo project called YOKUBARI has released 'Sakai' on Chinabot.
Yewen Jin is a multidisciplinary artist who creates sound pieces as an endeavor of place making. Often layered with otherworldly soundscapes and vocal samples, her sound can be best described as hypnotic witchery, often accompanied with organically disintegrated rhythms and intricate sound textures.
