Wednesday 28 August 2019, 7.30pm
With the help of guest writers, musicians and sculptors, David Toop will do some or all of the following:
1. revisit his first radio programme, broadcast as Crossthreads on BBC Radio 3 on the 29 th May, 1972, originally a mix of BBC archive recordings documenting the web of musical interconnections between non-human, human and extra-human entities.
2. as a variant on the Sharpen Your Needles format of playing ethnographic recordings (devised with Evan Parker) he will introduce a bioacoustic version called Sharpen Your Claws.
3. talk about and play ‘instruments’ exploring ecologies of cultural exchange and cohabitation that reject anthropocentrism and speciesism.
Music and Other Living Creatures is a series at Cafe OTO (curated by OTO Projects) dedicated to music about, with, or by other living creatures. Birds, tigers, chickens, insects and many other living creatures are explored through sound-walks, listening sessions, commissioned performances, live responses and discussions.
David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.
Yifeat Ziv is an experimental vocalist, composer and arranger, creating in between the free-improvisation, jazz, contemporary new music and sound art fields. She has worked and performed with a wide variety of artists and ensembles, including the William Parker Orchestra (US), London Experimental Ensemble (UK), Igor Krutogolov Toy Orchestra, The Revolution Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and Meitar Ensemble (IL).
Her recent sound works were presented at Design Museum Holon, The Israeli Center for Digital Media, Eretz-Israel Museum and Beit Hansen Gallery (IL), and excerpts from her new solo performance VOC:COMP Fantasies, for voice and electronics, were performed in Noizemaschine London (UK) and Tmuna Theatre (IL). She is also the co-founder of jazz vocal trio The Hazelnuts and experimental vocal quartet ABRA Ensemble, together with those groups she released four albums and performed in international festivals such as the Marseille Jazz des Cinqs Continents (FR), Tri-C Jazz (US), Safaricom Jazz (KE), Filter4Voices (CH) and Red Sea Jazz (IL).
www.yifeatziv.com
Lia Su’s work frequently deals with the relationship between listening, voice, body, time and space. Working across live performances, sound, music, and installation to explore ideas surrounding cross-cultural, gender, and post-digital identity.
With works that consider her Eastern philosophy and contemporary art, in particular, the intersection between I Ching and the nature of sound - the invisible and the itinerant. This research and practice examine constructions of “nothing” and “change” by combining and utilising new objects, the piano and Guqin.
Lia has performed, exhibited, and presented projects within the China and UK including 798 Art Zone, Beijing; National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing; IKLECTIK, London; 5th Base Gallery, London.
Daniela Cascella (Italy/UK) writes through sound, literature, and art. Her work is driven by a longstanding interest in listening, reading, writing, recording. Writing in English as a second language, writing as a stranger in a language, she is drawn to unstable and uncomfortable forms of writing-as-sounding, and in the transmissions and interferences of knowledge across cultures and languages. These have informed her three books in English: Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After The Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books, 2015) and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2012).
www.danielacascella.com
josie sparrow is a philosopher and writer. Her interests coalesce around the revolutionary intersections of the poetic and the political, with a particular emphasis on process, relationality, ecologies, ethics, time, and gentleness. She is a contributing editor at New Socialist. Her future plans include dismantling colonialism-capitalism and co-creating a more beautiful world, with and for others.
