Wednesday 25 September 2024, 7.30pm
This show has been rescheduled from 20th July - all tickets purchased for the original date remain valid.
The great electronic music pioneer, Moritz von Oswald, presents his choral-music-inspired album, Silencio, which draws on the ensemble works of long-standing inspirations Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, to create a deeply textured collection that shifts between light & ethereal and dark & dissonant to stunning effect.
As masterfully demonstrated in early works of von Oswald together with Mark Ernestus' influential Basic Channel project, repetition and reduction are key elements here, much in the tradition of techno and minimalism. The vast dynamism of the human voice adds to the profound weight of electronics while offering up a rhythmic source and sonic noise palette unexplored in von Oswald’s repertoire. In Silencio, von Oswald dredges a dank murk, pulling clouds over a distant pulse. It hangs, ready to take on new forms.
"Moritz von Oswald's latest solo album is his most startling, time-bending material since the Basic Channel days, a collaboration with a 16-voice choir that refracts techno and choral music into dizzying psychedelic traces, exploiting mind-altering xenharmonic synth tones, Ligeti-like operatic phrases and abyssal kicks with a veteran's cunning. We've been knocked sideways by this one - trans-dimensional afters music at its absolute best." – Boomkat
Patrick Ward is an artist working within moving image, sound and music in various modes of exhibition, performance and installation. In their music the environment of the sound source, the materiality of recording devices, and the apparatus through which music is shared and heard feature as active sonic figurations. Using iPhone recordings, low-res YouTube rips, warped mixtapes and weak wifi signals Ward embraces the technical limitations of the everyday. Grounded in the sonic explorations of their youth in Sheffield – where they learned to mix jungle records on old belt-drive turntables, obsessively rewatched Fantazia and Rave Nation on static riven VHS tape, and sampled pirate radio using cheap Tandy cassette players – their approach to musique concrète evades the strictures of its institutional heritage by embracing the socio-technics of bass music and sound system culture.
Ward’s music is part of a wider audio-visual practice that explores the human relation to technology. Operating between the gallery, auditorium, stage and club, the work is reassembled and reconstructed: often transcribing audio compositions into visual forms, condensing multi-channel gallery installations to single-screen live performances, or presenting audio works by withholding the image-track of a film. Ward’s recent work focuses on the object and formation of the screen itself as a sonic register through which its more opaque qualities might be articulated. Screens appear as thresholds, frames that mark and delineate space; they capture overlapping and contesting states between waking and sleeping, interior and exterior, attention and distraction.
Ward’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Museum Of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal; and Hollybush Gardens, London. Their music has been published by Café Oto as Taku Roku and Otoroku releases and their self-released album Enthusiasm (2020) was described by filmmaker Mike Hoolboom as "like nothing else on Bandcamp. Filled with meticulously detailed cinematic scenes that are forever shifting, it rewards close attention.”
www.patrickward.art
https://patrickward.bandcamp.com
