Sunday 15 February 2015, 8pm
Great triple-bill featuring compelling and immersive approaches to film projection from Japanese artist Makino Takashi and Unconscious Archives' Sally Golding – both solo and in a special collaboration – and solo percussion from American composer Nick Hennies, who'll be performing peices by Peter Ablinger, John Cage and his own work. For the Takashi/Golding collaboration they will be joined by Spatial on sonic devices and mixer.
Nick Hennies: 8.30–9.10pm
Sally Golding: 9.25–9.55pm
Makino Takashi: 10.10–10.50pm
Sally Golding / Makino Takashi / Spatial collab: 10.50–end
Born in 1978, Takashi is at the forefront of a new generation of Japanese experimental film-makers. He began by working with Super-8 as a student at Nihon University and apprenticed under the Quay Brothers in London 2001. Takashi treats image and sound as elements of equal importance - working live with both 16mm and digital he merges immersive, layered abstract imagery with live sound collage. He has won awards at film festivals throughout the world. “Words feel woefully inadequate to describe Makino's practice, where the abstract is drawn out of the real through the layering of images, flickers of light and the perpetual movement of dots and grains. Screen space is redefined with a flattened image surface that engulfs our peripheral vision and feels deeper the closer we focus our eyes. Makino's own sound collages, not only accompany his visual cacophony but interweave to concoct a breathtaking audiovisual experience of transcendent measures.” – ICA
“My approach to sound similarly rejects synchronisation in favour of inserting audio and music seemingly unrelated to the images. My collaborations with musicians from overseas have been, in one sense, a way to stage such unforeseeable encounters.” – Makino Takashi
Sally Golding is a British-Australian artist whose work considers participation and liveness in audiovisual art as a mechanism for shared experiences and dialogues within technological contexts. Golding’s audiovisual performances are edgy and intense in nature– unravelling in the style of a ‘happening’ to incorporate aspects of the performance space, blending discordant sonics and harsh lighting to investigate the social potential of opto-sonics. She has performed for forums including Tate Britain, Serralves Museum (PT), Digital Culture Centre (MX), Whitstable Biennale (UK), Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CAM2 (ES), Sound of Stockholm, Australian Centre For the Moving Image, KRAAK (BE), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Abandon Normal Devices (UK), SONICA (SI), Cafe OTO (UK) and Contemporary Art Centre (LT). Golding’s participatory installations, shown at the Institute of Modern Art (AU), Contemporary Art Tasmania and South London Gallery, are audiovisual compositions which spatialise the viewer’s presence via reflection and image capture, questioning states of perception across contemporary portraiture. Golding has collaborated with Joel Stern (AU) as the punk film/sound duo Abject Leader, and with electronic music producer and creative technologist Spatial (UK). Golding has been featured by The Wire, Millennium Film Journal, Tate Modern and Palgrave Macmillan, and received an Oram Award 2017 (New BBC Radiophonic Workshop/PRS Foundation) for innovation in sound and creative technologies, and is part of the innovative SHAPE platform 2019 dedicated to promoting and exchange for musicians and interdisciplinary artists in Europe. Golding is also the curator of the event and festival platform Unconscious Archives (UK), and previously OtherFilm (AU). She has written on audiovisual culture and digital art for the San Francisco Cinematheque (USA) and Austrian Cultural Forum London (Parsing Digital, 2018).
“The British born, London based Australian artist has created dozens of installations and performances in recent years, stradling lines between expanded cinema and sound art. She ceremonially piles dizzying sensations onto audiences, from the trembling light of multiple projectors to the serrated noise pulsations of the scores”. – Tristan Bath (The Wire, June 2016, issue 388)
“...[Golding’s] performances resemble a nineteenth century séance, careering between elegance and precarious awkwardness as noisy awe-inspiring spectacle.” – Steven Ball (Senses of Cinema, 2016)
Artist website - http://sallygolding.com/
Curatorial - http://unconscious-archives.org/
Nick Hennies is a percussionist and composer from Louisville, KY currently residing in Ithaca, NY. His work is primarily concerned with an immersive, psychoacoustic presentation of sound brought about by an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice that Nathan Thomas of Fluid Radio described as, "a highly sophisticated and refined performance technique...that starts and ends with listening and encourages a different way of listening from its audience." He received his M.A. in percussion from the University of California-San Diego in 2003 where he studied with renowned percussionist Steven Schick and is also a member of Meridian, a percussion trio with Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart. Prior to relocating to Ithaca Hennies was based in Austin, TX for ten years where he performed with the Austin New Music Co-op, The Weird Weeds and a variety of other projects.
Hennies is also an interpreter of the work of other modern composers having recorded and performed music by John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Jandek, Peter Ablinger, Kunsu Shim, Jürg Frey, Ellen Fullman, Radu Malfatti, Arnold Dreyblatt and many others. His work as both composer and performer can be heard on a wide variety of labels including Quakebasket, Senufo Editions, Accidie, Quiet Design and many others.
In 2013 Hennies also founded the record label Weighter Recordings for releasing his own work and other new and unusual music by living composers.
London electronic music producer and low-end provocateur Spatial (aka Matt Spendlove) weaves together a mix of dubbed-out techno and rave experiments, alongside fanciful noise in his dj sets which offer both creative musings and dancey moments. In his own live sets and recordings Spatial approaches low frequency vibrations with a minimalist’s scalpel, carving out space for snare grooves and tech house glitches. First emerging in 2008 as part of the UK’s nebulous post-dubstep brew, Spatial has a long history of making music that’s difficult to classify. Subverting established genre formulas and standard drum patterns, his dancefloor experiments pull from dubstep, garage, techno and vintage rave, ultimately sounding like none of them. The most adventurous Spatial creations have always surfaced via his own Infrasonics label, including the four-part 10” series that kicked off his career in 2008, and Emergence, his more recent triptych of nuanced EPs. Spatial has released on labels including Ultramajic, Well Rounded, WNCL and Niche N Bump. Spatial has created radio and live mixes for Red Bull Music Academy, Solid Steel, Secret 13, FACT Mag and Unsound.
“Matt Spendlove’s forward-thinking bass mutations have been mangling our brains since way back in 2008, and now he returns with the third part of his excellent Emergence series of EPs.” - FACT Mag (2016)
