Monday 6 June 2016, 8pm
Great to have Phill back at OTO after nearly two years. Tonight he performs with Mezzo Soprano Lore Lixenberg and and Guy De Bievre on lap steel guitar. Preceding the performance will be a special screening of ‘The Movement of Phill Niblock’ – a film by Belgian filmmaker and visual artist, Maurits Wouters.
Phill Niblock will also be performing at Close-Up on Sunday 5 June.
Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you. He says: "What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly." Niblock's performances are almost always accompanied by his films - painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O'Rourke.
Lore Lixenberg has evolved a practice based on voice, that has three major features. Firstly, exploring extended vocal techniques and hyper-extensions of the voice (‘BIRD’ and ‘THE BIRD STUDIES’, pieces, that explore language and syntax through birdsong) Secondly, drawing on socially engaged practices (PRET A CHANTER, THE VOICE PARTY) and thirdly, exploring digital technologies and apps for their operatic dramatic potential creating a new form - the APP-ERA, (SINGLR, VOXCOIN, IDENTITY THEFT). Incorporating comedy into her compositions applying bel canto singing into physical theatre, comedy and free-improvisation she works with Simon Munnery, Richard Thomas, Stewart Lee and Complicite (McBurney). She has performed internationally on concert platforms and galleries, opera houses, in operas and has collaborated on experimental installations and vocal performances with experimental composers visual and sound artists like Acquaviva, STELARC, Bruce Mclean, ORLAN, Georgina Starr, Imogen Sidworthy and David Toop. Her stuff has been shown at at The Hamburger Bahnhof , Galerie Nord Berlin, Ikon Gallery UK, The Armory NY, Emily Harvey Foundation NY among others. She published an artist book ‚Memory Maps’, monographic CD ‘The afternoon of a phone’ (£@B). She started THE VOICE PARTY standing in British election of 2019 and will satnd again in 2024. Her vinyl release NANCARROW KARAOKE, a record of Nancarrow piano rolls she transcribed for her own voice multi-tracked is on the De Player label.
Guy De Bièvre is a composer, musician, arranger, sound designer, sound art curator, theorist, and sound engineer. As a composer/performer he focuses on experiments, which combine computer, live electronics, acoustics and standard arrangement formats. He had works commissioned and/or performed by musicians such as Guy Klucevsek, Seth Josel, Anne La Berge, The Bozza Mansion Project, Annette Sachs, Zivatar Trio, and various local and international organizations.
As a performer (performing internationally in Europe, the USA and Japan) next to his own works, he collaborated with various composers and musicians such as Phill Niblock, Anne La Berge, Tom Hamilton, Ensemble Champ d’Action, and Peter Zummo.
Maurits Wouters (°1986 Turnhout, Belgium)
Filmmaker and visual artist.
He graduated as narrative filmmaker at the RITS in 2009. He then concluded a Master in Film & Theatre Studies at the University of Antwerp in 2011. From October 2013 onwards he has been doing doctoral research financed by the FWO (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek/Fund for Scientific Research).
In spite of his training in narrative film his artistic field of action has evolved towards the plastic arts. In this he does not limit himself to film. Also photography and installations have more and more become part of his artistic path. The films of Wouters were shown, among other venues, at the International Short Film Festival in Louvain and Experimental Intermedia in New York.
