Sunday 10 September 2023, 8pm
Another great line-up from the Infant Tree label, featuring Banana - aka the duo of Australian sound artist and musicians, Alexandra Spence and MP Hopkins, a solo from cellist Ute Kanngiesser plus a duo of London-based artists Ecka Mordecai and Rory Salter.
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Through her practice Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions.
Alex has presented her art and music in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America including BBC Radio; Ausland, Berlin; Café Oto, London; EMS, Stockholm; Punkt Festival, Kristiansand; Standards Studio, Milan; AB Salon, Brussels; Radiophrenia Festival, Glasgow; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; MONO, Brisbane; The Substation, Melbourne; Soft Centre, and Liveworks Festival, with Liquid Architecture, Sydney.
She regularly collaborates with MP Hopkins as Banana and has released her music with labels Room40, Longform editions, Mappa, More Mars (Banana) and Canti Magnetici.
(She holds the belief that electricity might actually be magic)
MP Hopkins is a sound artist and musician working on Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. He uses voice, feedback, recording/playback devices, and text scores within different acoustic environments, which are deconstructed and presented to the listener in delicate and degraded ways.
He has released recordings with Penultimate Press, Canti Magnetici, Tahalamos, Regional Bears, and Nice Music. He has performed locally at events organised by the NOW now, Liquid Architecture, Avantwhatever, Performance Space, Humming Grotto, and Omniversal Hum. International appearances include Café Oto, London; LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore; Les Ateliers Claus, Brussels; TUSK Festival, Newcastle Upon Tyne; and Colour Out of Space Festival, Brighton.
In 2018 MP participated in Sounding Paths; a site-specific residency for sound & intermedia projects in the Old Jesuit Monastery, Ano Syros, Greece. In 2020 Double Goocher Shop and Federico collaborated on una grammatica dell’ornamento; an outdoor text, sound, and object installation produced for the Unlocked Sounds program as part of the Tempo Reale Festival held at Villa Strozzi, Florence, Italy. Forthcoming in September 2023, Hopkins will present a live-to-air commission for Radiophrenia at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.
Hopkins also works with Alexandra Spence in the duo Banana, with Renato Grieco as Double Goocher Shop, and plays in the band Warm Currency with Mary MacDougall.
Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London. Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
Rory Salter is a musician, artist and technician living in London. He has published albums under various monikers with Index Clean, TEETH, Zoomin' Night, Alter, TakuRoku, Infant Tree, Bison and amongst others.
His work is formed through experimentations with acoustic & electronic instruments, faulty & functional technologies, cassette tape, feedback and walking; motivated by exploring relationships to environment, work/labour & materials. It is rooted in practice and the forms of documentation and theory that come from that practice. He has performed and worked with Derek Baron, Ecka Mordecai, Russell Walker, Mark Peter Wright, Regan Bowering, Li Song and others
He co-runs the record label and mail-order distribution Infant Tree with artist Ben Victor Waggett and curates a series of concerts in London between Cafe OTO, Dalston and Spanners, Loughborough Junction. He also works as a sound technician.
Ute Kanngießer is a London based cellist and composer from Germany. Over the years, she has carefully deconstructed her classical roots and almost exclusively performs unscripted, improvised music. Much of her work has evolved in relationship with other art forms such as film, poetry, dance and site specific work. She is interested in the vast expressive possibilities of her instrument in relation to body, space, and others, always looking to rediscover or redefine what is musical/lyrical in this moment in time.
Recent releases include Blue Monday - a collaboration with writer Zara Joan Miller - on New York label Reading Group.
