Thursday 16 January 2020, 7.30pm
The evening is curated by KJJ and promises to be an immersive non-linear experience, she has developed a sample pack of her sounds, including sounds recorded from the lithophones based in the John Ruskin Museum, that she is sharing with amazing artists, friends and collaborators to work with in their own unique way. The evening will be a journey into abstracted, deconstructed sound worlds, melded collaborations and quantum fictions. Please bring comfortable clothing, cushions, mats to sit/lie on.
This event was made possible by the commission of this new work by Kelly Jayne Jones 'Lower Liths of Cybele in Obsidian' from Full of Noises Festival Barrow and funded by Arts Council England.
Kelly Jayne Jones is a Manchester based artist making work that combines performance, installation and sound. She is mostly self taught and began working in DIY experimental noise music and her practice has expanded to include dance, gesture, sonic drawings, stone sculpture and film scores.
She is interested in creating a multi-sensory experience that creates possible conditions for communication and exchange. Creating contemporary zones bordering quantum fictions, where communion may have the potential to explore our inner dimensions. She is currently exploring animist ideas around the breath and spirit of mountains and rivers and how we can reconnect with our planet by means of ancient and modern rituals. Her work traverses the emotions of desire and anxiety, the comfortable and uncomfortable edges of our inner spaces and social co-existence. She is interested in presence and performance as a site for potential transformation; interpersonally and communally.
KJJ has collaborations with Hannah Ellul (White Death), Greta Buitkute (Clout then Grappling), Dan Valentine from Rainer VeilandHaris Epaminonda. She was one half of the grouppart wild horses mane on both sides,which disbanded in 2016. She has performed across Europe in DIY venues and has been commissioned for works with projects at dOCUMENTA13, Tate Modern, ICA London and CCA Glasgow, Le Plateau Paris, Borealis Festival & Kunsthalle Bergen Norway, Tectonics contemporary music festival, Hangar Bicocca gallery Milan, Sheffield Site Gallery, the Whitworth Manchester and the Huddersfield contemporary music festival (hcmf//2019). Recently she had a collaborative work with Haris Epaminonda,Chimera, shown at 58th Venice Biennale 2019, Haris won the Silver Lion for best young participant for this film. Nominated for Tetley Jerwood solo exhibition Nov 2020.
Upcoming commissions with CoMA, Bristol New Music, TUSK festival and a residency at Bidston Observatory in Liverpool.
Manchester UK’s Space Afrika make music of what they term “overlapping moments” – oblique mosaics of dialogue, rhythm, texture, and shadow, half-heard through a bus window on a rainy night.
Their releases Above The Concrete/Below The Concrete (2014) and Somewhere Decent To Live (2018) were sparse, spacious yet intimate electronic abstractions, partly inspired by their observations of industrial landscapes and experiences of life in the North of England.
In 2020, Space Afrika released their most emotionally charged project to date, hybtwibt? (have you been through what i’ve been through?). First recorded for broadcast on NTS Radio before being edited down to a half-hour collage and released a few days later in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. As Black Lives Matter protests were gathering momentum across the U.S. and UK, the Manchester duo’s self-released mixtape captures the unrest with intercutting fragments of their own unreleased work. Described as a “dreamlike tapestry”, and hailed by Pitchfork and Bandcamp as one of the best ambient albums of 2020, sales of the mixtape continue to raise funds for Black Minds Matter UK and the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust in support of the fight for racial equality.
The duo went on to release in the spring of 2021, Untitled (To Describe You), a collaboration with photographer, filmmaker and poet Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, generating a living, breathing study of the duo's Northern working-class Black British reality.
In January 2021, they announced their signing to Dais Records. Honest Labour, the duo's first full-length since 2020's landmark "hybtwibt?" (have you been through what I’ve been through?) mixtape expands the project's palette with classical strings, shimmering guitar, and visionary vocal cameos, leaning further into their enigmatic fusion of ambient unrest and cosmic downtempo. It's a sound both fogged and fragmented, at the axis of songcraft and sound design, born from and for the yearning solitudes of life under lockdown.
Head of Liberation Through Hearing, Gabrielle Gaf is a passionate sound selector with shows running every month on Montréal based n10.as radio and Manchester’s Reform radio. For many years working backstage as a journalist, event organizer and part of MUTEK festival’s communication team, she is more and more attracted by the power of the performance, allying a background in contemporary dance with poetry and sound collages.
https://lthrecords.com/
One half of the duo Rainer Veil, Dan Valentine is a Manchester based music producer with a recent release on Modern Love records.
NTS Profile https://www.nts.live/artists/6591-rainer-veil
Vanity (2019) https://open.spotify.com/album/4SWekU7rdZGzNnEGfDnWML
Guillaume Dujat (b.1993) is a French sound artist & electroacoustic composer based in the UK (Manchester). He is currently doing his PhD at the NOVARS sound research centre (University of Manchester). Guillaume's work is based on extracting the musical & spacial gestures from field recordings, using these to inform multichannel compositions. His work includes site-specific commissions for the Manchester Central Library (Wakes Week 2015), Peoples History Museum (Manchester After Hours 2016) and an 1 week installation in John Rylands reading room exploring 'hidden' sounds of the space (Manchester Science Festival 2017).
https://gdujat.com/bio
