Wednesday 26 April 2017, 7.30pm
The duo of New Zealand-born, Berlin-based producer Ollie Peryman a.k.a. FIS, and New Zealand-based musician and anthropologist Rob Thorne perform together at OTO for the first time ahead of their debut album release on Subtext this summer. The two artists share a broad theoretical and critical background and both teach or have taught about indigenous musical traditions. They apply their own practices to the reimagining of indigenous musical traditions and the bridging of a gap between long-established and experimental approaches.
Hailing from New Zealand, Fis produces physical, spirited, exploratory electronic music very much informed by his surroundings and connection to the natural world. After cutting his teeth on powerful sound systems throughout NZ, Oliver Peryman dropped a string of stand out EPs on Samurai Horo, Exit, and Tri Angle in 2012/13, followed by epic A/V performances on the main stage at Berlin Atonal in 2014 and 2015, and an EP and his debut LP “The Blue Quicksand is Going Now” on London’s Loopy in May 2015.
Rob Thorne (of Ngati Tumutumu) is a Maori musician and anthropologist from Palmerston North, New Zealand. He has been researching and performing on taonga pūoro, or traditional Maori instruments such as the pūkāea, (wooden trumpet), pūtōrino (bugle flute), and pūtātara (conch shell trumpet) since 2001.
Thorne’s own compositions, praised as arbiters of 21st century naturalism, operate around the belief that tradition is both fixed and fluid. In his own paper, “Jumping The Gap: The Distance Between Taonga Puoro and Experimental Music”, Thorne describes taonga pūoro’s incorporation of improvisation to work “laterally”. His music fuses ‘modern’ experimentation — Thorne performs with a boss RC300 loop station in tow — and traditional Maori musical conventions. These conventions, deeply informed by a conceptual geographical framework and archaic local orientation, are indebted to and inseparable from the New Zealand terrain.
Rob Thorne’s album, Whāia te Māramatanga (Rattle Records), released in 2014, was described as a “modern eye on stone, wood, shell and bone… reflect[ing] the beauty and splendour of the natural landscape of Aotearoa” (Martin Pepperell, VanguardRed).
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
