Friday 13 May 2022, 8pm
Excellent double-bill with Montreal-based saxophonist and electro-acoustic composer, Jason Sharp, alongside New York sound artist and musician, Sydney Spann.
A mainstay of Montreal’s avant-jazz, experimental and improv music community for many years, Jason Sharp is a saxophonist and electro-acoustic composer whose increasing focus on solo work since 2015 has yielded an intense and immersive corpus of music that fuses technology and the human body. Sharp blends a mastery of extended saxophone technique with customized microphones and electronics that translate his horn, breath and physical pulse into an array of triggers, samples and modular synthesis – resulting in formidable, visceral, highly evocative and unfailingly musical works of electroacoustic biofeedback. Across three albums for iconic experimental music label Constellation, Sharp has been charting a singular soundworld embedded in his unique compositional processes, which rely on a combination of exceptional instrumental performance on baritone and bass saxophones, prefiguration/configuration of bespoke technology, discipline/control of corporeal bloodflow, and responsiveness to the stochastic variability of each performative iteration.
Sydney Spann, originally from Baltimore, MD, is a sound artist and musician based in New York. She works with synthesis, chance operations, recursive compositional processes and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in long form compositions and improvised performances. Her music engages the private experiences that shape public spaces, and the affective dynamics within childcare work. She has released albums with Ehse Records (Baltimore), She Rocks! (NYC), and Reading Group (NYC), with a full-length release forthcoming on Recital in 2022. She has performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, The Walters Art Museum, Bar Laika by e-flux, and in diy spaces and galleries throughout the US. Recent works for streaming include Sending up a Spiral of on Montez Press Radio and Attached/Detached (partial disappearance) for ISSUE Project Room’s With Womens Work Series. She is a 2022 Artist in Residence at ISSUE Project Room and an MFA candidate in Music/Sound at Bard College.
Li Yilei is a Chinese-born, London-based artist and composer whose work moves through tacit listening, perceptual thresholds, and the quiet tensions between presence and disappearance. Guided by a quietly mystic approach to sensing, Li treats sound as a porous field of attunement where intuition, resonance, and the barely perceptible begin to speak. Li’s multi-media practice attends to silence, absence, and non-verbal states as active agents that shape perception as much as the audible.
Unfolding through restrained gestures and spectral drift, Li’s compositions often incorporate instruments, objects, spanning tapes, theremins, ethnic instruments, field recordings, self-built devices, and organic materials. Fragments, objects, and transient sites enter the work as momentary anchors within shifting terrains, creating spaces where attention deepens, thresholds blur, and sound becomes a mode of attunement.
Since 2017, alongside releasing music records, Li’s work has spanned performance, installation, and composition for film, theatre, and dance. Their work has been performed and presented internationally at Barbican Centre (UK), King’s Place (UK), Cafe Oto (UK), Nottingham Contemporary (UK), TATE Britain (UK), V&A East Storehouse (UK) ESEA Contemporary (UK); Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes (FR), UCCA Contemporary (CN), Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK), Lincoln Center (US); MAO Torino (IT) and more.
https://liyilei.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@li_yi_lei_/videos
Li Yilei at Cafe OTO, 7th May 2023:
