Tuesday 1 July 2014, 8pm
Langham Research Centre - Britain’s leading musique concrète performing group - perform a selection of John Cage's works with pianist Ian Pace, including Music of Changes and Music for Piano. And they give the UK premiere of their new work, “Muffled Ciphers”, a response to Ballard's 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition, described as “an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology”. Prompted by the hugely blown-up images of tiny details in the book, sounds are vastly magnified in this performance, using contact microphones and vintage gramophone cartridges. Sounds are also degraded and fragmented, echoing the decay of Ballard's dystopian vision.
The programme will include:
John Cage:
Selections from Music of Changes
Selections from Music for Piano
Langham Research Centre:
Muffled Ciphers (2014)
langhamresearch.co.uk
MUFFLED CIPHERS
For this new piece Langham Research Centre have sieved descriptions of sounds from J.G.Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, to use as sonic building blocks. The piece's structure is suggested by the collage of discontinuous moments in the novel.
Prompted by the hugely blown-up images of tiny details in the book, sounds are vastly magnified in this performance, using contact microphones and vintage gramophone cartridges. Sounds are also degraded and fragmented, echoing the decay of Ballard's dystopian vision.
¼” tape machines are used in the composition to process sounds, revealing their hidden grain. Interwoven are archive recordings from 1970, including Ballard himself. The piece is a visceral celebration of Ballard and his most avant-garde creation.
Langham Research Centre came together in 2003 with the purpose of using a studio as their instrument: a studio with microphones and also, crucially, several ¼” tape machines. From the start they were interested in manipulating sound on tape and on focusing on one sound source, or a small number of sounds.
Their inspiration and enthusiasm are driven by the soundworlds produced by maverick composers working in the middle of the 20th century. Like an early music group’s use of historic instruments, LRC continue to work with obsolete equipment including tape recorders, gramophone cartridges and sine wave oscillators, to perform authentic versions of 20th century classic electronic repertoire by John Cage, Alvin Lucier and others.
https://langhamresearchcentre.bandcamp.com/
Fiery passion combined with incisive intellect mark the playing of pianist Ian Pace. His vast repertoire, stretching from complexity to simplicity, focuses in particular upon the works of contemporary British, German and Italian composers as well as the 'classics' of modern music by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Nono and Cage. Equally adept as a chamber music and ensemble player, Ian Pace frequently performs with other soloists and groups, most notably pianist Mikhail Rudy and the Arditti Quartet.
Ian Pace has given the world premières of over 100 works for solo piano including Brian Ferneyhough's long awaited Opus Contra Naturam, Michael Finnissy's monumental 5½ hour work History of Photography in Sound and James Dillon's sparkling Book of Elements, Part 3.
