Friday 12 July 2024, 7.30pm
Excited to host a duo performance with Limpe Fuchs and Mark Fell, as well as a special solo piano set from Limpe, following on from a pair of solo piano releases from her this year, Pianoon and Piano in the Rain, which was recorded by Mark at his home in Yorkshire.
"Mark Fell’s gonzoid recordings of Limpe Fuchs, a longtime pal and inspiration, ribbons beautiful and curiously bluesy-jazz rhythmelodies on the Fell household. Actively playing and making music since the late ‘60s, Limpe brings an enormous depth and breadth of experience to contemporary music’s peripheries, in between avant garde, improvisation, free-jazz and krautrock." – Boomkat
Limpe Fuchs studied classical piano and violin in Munich and percussion with Hans Holzl, citing avant-garde composers such as Murray Schaefer and John Cage as her early musical influences. She prefers to call herself a percussionist in the tradition of sound-scape artists yet it is also clear that the visual aspect of her work has always been given the same attention as the acoustic. Over her forty-year career she has continued experimenting with “no formalism” improvisational sound and visual performance using handmade instruments and sound sculptures. Her engaging performances are meant to be carefully listened to, requiring attention from the audience as she moves freely in space evoking her natural sound-scapes while playing her viola woodhorn, pendulumstring, a four-meter- steel constructed lithophone, sheet metal, pieces of wood and singing in her unique ephemeral bird-like style.
Limpe Fuchs has been accredited as a seminal influence on the “Krautrock” scene of the late ‘60s and ‘70s and later became an inspiration for the experimental psychedelic underground of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (HNAS, Nurse with Wound, etc.) and for generations after. Limpe started her career in the late sixties with Anima Musica along with her then partner, the sculptor Paul Fuchs, and in 1971 they recorded their first album called Stuermischer Himmel. The next release was an unofficial release of the three-day Ossiach Festival recorded live including performances by Weather Report and Tangerine Dream among others. It was here that they met with the organizer, the famed pianist Friedrich Gulda, who soon joined Limpe and Paul to create Anima. Subsequently the albums entitled Anima and Musik Fur Alle were both released in 1972. From 1969 till 1989 the duo continued performing, recording, touring (most notoriously on a tractor travelling at 30km/h which pulled the stage) often adding new members including their son, Zoro. She then started on her solo career and continues to perform live, also collaborating with many musicians and she has even ventured into theater performance. Most recent collaborators include flamingo Creatures, the organ player Matthias Ank, Christoph Reiserer, Julia Scholzel, Christoph Heemann, Timo van Luijk.
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). After studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic he reverted to earlier interests in computational technology, music and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for exploring the relationships between popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, and typically academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early electronic music pieces Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving image works, sound and light installation, choregoraphy, critical texts, curatorial projects and educational activites. He has worked with a number of artists including Yasunao Tone, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Peter Gidal, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi and Carl Michael Von Hausswolff.
The diversity and importance of Fell's practice is reflected in the range and scale of international institutions that have presented his work which include - Hong Kong National Film archive, The Baltic (Gateshead), Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Laboral (XIxon), The Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Royal Festival Hall (London), The Serpentine (London), The Australian Centre For Moving Image, Artists Space (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), Corcoran (DC), Curtis R.Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Lampo/Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), Hanger Biccoca (Milan) and others. Fell's work is in the collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna) and has as been recognised by ARS Electronica (Linz).
