Friday 27 May 2016, 8pm
A rare UK appearance from the Taipei-based Kandala Records, presenting the irregular landscape of the current experimental music scene in Taiwan with noise, power electronics, free improvisation and leftfield Nakashi.
This two-day residency is part of Formless, a project exploring Taiwan’s experimental music and sound culture, which is organised by Taipei Representative Office in the UK with sponsorship from the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.), in collaboration with Café OTO and Bertha DocHouse. As a related event, the UK premiere of TPE-Tics (2015), a documentary follows the life story of Dawang “yingfan” HUANG by the filmmaker Lin Wan-yu, will be held at Bertha DocHouse (Curzon Bloomsbury) on Thursday 26 May.
Born in 1975, Huang Dawang began as a self-taught bedroom musician in his mid-teens, and left many recordings unreleased. After returning from a five-year-and-half stay in Osaka, Japan, with experiences of sessions and live performances in Kansai, he has been known as the most active figure in the realm of outsider music in Taipei's underground scene, and been invited and commissioned to perform at many events. Among his projects, “yingfan's Blackwolf Nagashi” combines comedy songs and storytelling, which is best known as his lifework. Other joint music projects based on improvisation and power electronics include: the harsh noise duo Taipei Hot Winter; the psychedelic blues trio 'Les forts invisibles'; and the sound recording and improvisation group, Minkoku Hyakunen, for which their 2012 release Project Integration / Intervention Into Tenryu City won the Honorary Mention of Sound Art and Digital Music in Prix Arts Electronica that year. Huang also worked as a performing artist, actor, director, visual artist, writer and translator. He is featured in numbers of films, including TPE-Tics (2015) by Lin Wan-yu which is the first documentary follows his life story. The film will be screened at DocHouse in London on 26 May as a related event.
Xie Zhongqi, a.k.a. Wolfenstein, is a sound artist, computer music composer, and the member of Taipei Sound Unit. He received awards in BIAS Sound Art Exhibition and Sound Art Prize in the Digital Art Awards Taipei in 2006 and later released his debut album Napoleon's Kef in 2009. His lately live recording is included in a split album Cyplosion, with the Chinese sound artist Wang Changcun, released by Kandala Records in 2015.
A young noiser emerged in Taipei’s recent underground scene with his harsh noise approach and nisemusume (girl-like cosplay). He is also a founder of InnerMind Radio focusing on free jazz, improvisation, industrial noise, and psychedelic rock. He has been performed with Japanese noise artists, Motoki Yoshinori and others. His split album with Merzbow (Akita Masami) will be released by Kandala Records in 2016.
Roberto Crippa is a Sound Artist, Composer and Improvisor based in Milan, whose work includes live electronic music and installations investigating the responses of physical bodies to architectural acoustics. His music combines realtime performance on custom analogue oscillators and effect pedals with acoustic sound sources such as zithers, bells and percussion instruments. He has released on We Can Elude Control and Portals Editions.
https://soundcloud.com/robertocrippa
