Friday 23 January 2015, 8pm
In 2015, the great Australian label Room40 celebrates 15 years of activities with a series of curated evenings across the globe. Tonight sees three artists from the label, with American ambient artist Rafael Anton Irisarri, modular synthesist John Chantler, and Room40 label founder and composer Lawrence English.
Lawrence English is composer, media artist and curator based in Australia. Working across an array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work explores the politics of perception and prompts questions of field, perception and memory. English utilises a variety of approaches including visceral live performance and installation to create works that ask audiences to consider the relationship to space, place and experiential embodiment.
Over the past decade, English’s sonic investigations have traversed a divergent path through which musical languages and environmental sources are granted equal focus. His work calls into question the established relationships of sound, harmony, distortion and structure. His sound work is evocative and invites the listener to explore their own narratives and impressions informed by personal histories and experiences. Published widely on respected imprints including Important Records, Touch, 12K, Taiga, and Winds Measure, English’s work is sculpted, colliding overwhelmingly intricacy with roaring waves of low vibration. His latest solo album Wilderness Of Mirrors revels in ‘extreme dynamics and densities’ and resolves into an ‘overriding aesthetic of harmonic distortion’. He is one half of Slow Walkers with musician Liz Harris and enjoys ongoing collaborations with John Chantler (as Holy Family), Jamie Stewart, Stephen Vitiello, Werner Dafeldecker, David Toop, Akio Suzuki and others.
"Irisarri embodies the hybrid genre…the new kind of composer, who exists in an undifferentiated welter of pop, techno, and classical." - Pitchfork (USA)
Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, electronic music producer, interdisciplinary artist and curator. Predominantly associated with ambient, drone, post-minimalist, and modern classical music, Irisarri’s recorded output captures an essential vision of floating tones, deep pulsing bass and textural electronics. His use of ostinato phrases taps into minimalist ideals while atmospheric layers of effects suggests a more cinematic quality in his productions. In all, Irisarri’s compositions are deeply emotive and epic to the point of being symphonic.
John Chantler is a musician and organiser living in Stockholm, Sweden. He mostly works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge distorted washes of masses harmonics.
Originally from Australia he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden where he directs a small annual festival for 'other music' in Stockholm called Edition. The 'Fifth Edition' is provisionally scheduled for early August 2020.
Chantler has performed in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, North America and across Europe including appearances at Akousma, Montreal; Madeira Dig; +90db Festival, Rome; Issue Project Room, NYC; and London’s Southbank Centre.
His work has been commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway; Organ for the Senses, San Diego, USA; ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany and Tectonics, Glasgow, UK. Chantler has also been artist-in-residence at the ZKM centre for media arts in Karlsruhe, Germany and NOTAM in Oslo, Norway.
