Friday 20 April 2018, 7.30pm
The excellent Discrepant record label celebrates its seventh anniversary with a diverse and vital cross section of artists from the roster.
Across decades, Porest (aka Mark Gergis) has issued a trail of confounding agitprop sound art, post-globalised hate-pop, diabolical radio dramas and carefully re-arranged realities on multiple labels. His blatant embezzlement of human syntax and cultural misunderstanding broadcasts vital mixed messages. Since 2003, with the Sublime Frequencies label, an ethnographic music and film collective out of Seattle – and more recently with his own label, Sham Palace – Mark has shared decades of research of scores of archived international music, film footage and sound recordings from the Middle East, South East Asia and elsewhere.
People Like Us is audiovisual collage artist Vicki Bennett, who has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, performances, gallery exhibits and online streaming for 25 years. Since 1992, she has developed an immediately recognisable aesthetic repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and appropriation as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. For this event Vicki will present the London premiere of People Like Us’ new audiovisual immersive cinema performance called “The Mirror“. The subject content will be appropriated sample collage exploring concepts of inward reflection, and outward reflection and projection into the beyond.
The musician and DIY music ethnographer Laurent Jeanneau returns to London with his Kink Gong project. Since 1999, over many trips to Southeast Asia, Jeanneau has documented the local music traditions of ethnic minorities whose cultures are threatened by modernisation. Jeanneau collects and compiles these unedited recordings into an ever-growing sound and video archive, mostly published on his own private press label Kink Gong Records. In addition, Jeanneau uses these recordings, which focus mostly on vocal and percussion music, as the starting point for his own emotionally-charged electronic experiments and sound compositions then broadened by other field recordings. In these compositions, the traditions and avant-gardes of a diverse range of places merge into new, contemporary statements. Discrepant has released 6 of these electroacoustic works and counting. He returns to London to present his new double LP for the label with collages and recordings based on Chinese pop culture, expect kitsch noise art galore.
