Sunday 8 October 2023, 7.30pm
Marcia Bassett is a NYC-based musician, performer, and artist known for her innovative and unconventional approach to music. Her work explores areas of sound collage, improvisation, and immersive audio-visual environments. Whether working with traditional instruments or electronic media, Bassett constantly pushes the boundaries of sound and image to create a heady sonic interplay of otherworldly narratives that are equal parts trance and critique. She is the founder of Yew Recordings. Recent solo recordings include Midnight Xpander LP recorded at the EMS (Stockholm); Undulating Arkasboning cassette released on Artsy Records (2022), and a Digi-EP, Altering The Form, on the Belgian KraakRecords label KRUT. She frequently joins others in collaborative installations and multimedia projects.
Recent work includes FA/CE sound and live visual collaboration with Ursula Scherrer; "Triangulated Waves," an electric guitar and violin improvisation with Samara Lubelski for an abstract film showcased at Tabakalara in San Sebastián, Spain; Buchla Music Easel improvisation with Ted Gordon and colorslide stroboscopic light experiments by Jeffery Perkins; sound and video collaboration with Katherine Liberovskaya; Social Entropy, a 4-channel sound installation at Human Resources, LA, and group collaboration with Margarida Garcia, David Maranha and Manuel Mota. Her boundary-pushing approach, penchant for collaboration, and relentless exploration of the sonic realm continue to inspire and shape the contemporary music landscape. She has been integral to several influential bands and pursued solo work under the moniker Zaimph.
‘This has more to do with improvisation and its allied possibilities of transcendence and failure than running up and down 12-bar schemes at lightning speed.’ The Wire
Ignatz is the alter-ego of Bram Devens. With an acoustic guitar and a few effects, he creates his very own style of improvisation-inspired Euro blues.
In 1910, the illustrator George Herriman created the Krazy Kat comic strip. Ignatz, a vicious mouse, was Krazy Kat’s arch enemy, and his favourite pastime was to throw bricks at Krazy Kat’s head (who misinterpreted the mouse’s actions as declarations of love). Belgian artist Bram Devens uses Ignatz as his alter-ego, and comes armed with his own pile of bricks; sparse, emotive songs born of the human condition, wrapped in effects, corroded by tape, driven forth by improvisation and spontaneity.
Ignatz’s songs stem from a familiar stripped folk framework, with Devens’ delivery recalling the louche primitivism of V.U. or Henry Flynt – but these songs sound inverted, cast adrift, their cool touch belying a stymied heat beneath the surface. Where Devens’ fretwork is adorned, it is executed with a refined coarseness. Autonomous loops entwine each other. Songs brush past percussion, bass notes, or a scant keyboard motif. A voice recedes from the heart of the song into a dislocated, cracked drawl.
Apart from working solo, Ignatz plays with his band “de stervende honden” since 2013, after a friend (being tired of Ignatz’s solo concerts) suggested playing with Erik Heestermans and Tommy Denys.
