Friday 13 October 2017, 7.30pm, OTO Project Space
Three live performances by artists who developed their own, unique ways of making live electronic music performance truly 'live', so that the audience can experience and appreciate the process on a new, deeper level. Each of the acts has different characteristics, from pretty and mesmerizing sounds of Leafcutter John, through haunted soundscapes of Howlround, to more noisy side of the sound-spectrum of Ctrl Freq.
Bradford-born, Wakefield-raised, Leafcutter John has performed and collaborated widely, including as part of mercury-nominated band Polar Bear, and solo at places like Jarvis Cocker’s meltdown and Planet Mu raves. John first found recognition twenty three years ago through Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu record label – a gold standard for the experimental fringes of electronic music. His discography ranges from the experimentalism of The Housebound Spirit, to the folk-infused Forest and the Sea – the latter containing “Seba '' which James Acaster named in his top nine essential tracks.
John moved up to Sheffield a few years ago and quickly fell in love with climbing. In this rare London performance John will explore using actual gritstone in his performance.
‘First coming to prominence with hugely-acclaimed 2012 LP The Ghosts Of Bush, Howlround have now expanded to a sextet (four machines, two people) and create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and even the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread’.
In an age where one can create all manner of electronic music with a simple swipe of a mouse, Howlround prove not only how much fun is to be had in making things complicated again, but conversely just how little effort is sometimes needed to create a genuinely uncanny and beguiling sound-world: the rough underbelly of our pristine, Pro-Tools universe. Since then, they have released four more LPs – 2013’s Secret Songs Of Savamala, recorded almost entirely in a flooded basement in wintry Serbia, 2014’s Torridon Gate, which was created using an ordinary suburban garden gate, 2015’s Tales From The Black Tangle and 2017’s A Creak In Time. They have also released tracks on numerous compilations and one side of a split album The Blow vol. 2.
Kacper Ziemianin a.k.a. Ctrl Freq could be described as circuit bender, sonologist, vagabond, improviser, music producer, audio-hacker, instrument designer, nomad, radio presenter, workshop leader, squatter... the list goes on. His works have been presented in many places across the globe.Currently based in the Hague, NL working as a freelance instrument designer and performer as well as teacher of DIY electronics.His latest endeavor, the ‘LightSeq’, which he is going to use for his performance during this evening, has received funding from Stimuleringsfonds NL and won an award at an international electronic music festival ‘Radical dB’ in Zaragoza, Spain in May 2017. You can see video documentation of this project below, but seeing it live makes much more sense.
