Monday 14 February 2022, 8pm
Pleased to welcome Australian performer-composer Sam Dunscombe to OTO following the release of "Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco" on Black Truffle in 2021. A virtuoso clarinettist who has performed in composed and improvised settings with artists such as Cat Lamb, Klaus Lang, Pierluigi Billone, and Taku Sugimoto, Sam’s practice also embraces computer music, lo-fi electronics and field recordings, in addition to her long-term commitment to archiving, studying and performing the work of Romanian spectralist composer Horatiu Radulescu.
This long-form work began with a chance encounter in a specific geographic location: exploring California’s Mojave desert with a friend, Sam made the unlikely discovery of a tangle of quarter-inch tape snared on a cactus. The digitised version of this tape, variously edited and processed, forms the structural core of this performance, together with Sam’s own transcription and embellished performance of some of its material on Hammond organ. To this, Sam adds synthesis both analogue and digital (employing a digital synthesis technique of her own devising, “mass plasma synthesis,” based on the theoretical writings of Horatiu Radulescu). Far from any kind of documentary approach, this composition rather poses an open commentary on the violent processes of mining, militarism, and manifest destiny the have moulded and scarred the deserts of Southern California over the past 150 years.
Sam Dunscombe is a performer-composer who works with clarinets, computers, and microphones. Sam is interested in work that explores the multi-dimensional perception of time, which has drawn her to areas including improvisation, the performance of complex-notated repertoire, field recording, audio engineering, and live electronic performance.
Sam has performed at major festivals and concert series around the world, including conducting the opening night concert of the 2019 MaerzMusik festival in Berlin, being an artist-in-residence at Ilan Volkov’s Tectonics Festival in Tel Aviv, presenting a three day performance and sound installation at the Tokyo Experimental Festival, and many others. Her 2021 release on Black Truffle, Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco, was critically well received, and featured in the July 2021 issue of The Wire. Sam also has albums available on Another Timbre (with Golden Fur and Klaus Lang), Ftarri (with Taku Sugimoto), and many others.
Sam is a founding member of the trio Golden Fur (with James Rushford and Judith Hamann), and the Harmonic Space Orchestra (with Cat Lamb, Marc Sabat, Rebecca Lane, and others). Sam has a Doctor of Musical Arts from UC San Diego, with a thesis exploring the clarinet works of French-Romanian composer Horatiu Radulescu. She now works as the archivist to Lucero Print and the Horatiu Radulescu archives, where she assists in the preservation and re-publication of his works.
OULAN is an emerging sonic act made of Loula Yorke (electronics) and Una Lee (vocals), co-recipients of the Oram Award 2020 which celebrates innovation in music technology by next generation of forward thinking women. This exciting collaboration inspires the two artists to bring their best element to the improvisational table: Lee's sublime vocal work navigates in real-time through her diverse musical languages, arriving in an eerie envelopment of Yorke's ephemeral, aleatoric electronics, producing a dynamic yet intimate; a serene yet colourful soundscape.
Loula Yorke is an award-winning composer, improviser and live performer working primarily with a modular synthesiser.
Yorke's dynamic and ever-fluid practice draws a line between music, activism and live art, incorporating participatory pieces, such as 2021's Atari Punk Girls, critically acclaimed recorded works, such as 2022's Florescence, and live modular synthesis performances that incorporate a kaleidoscope of melodic sequences, noise, and snatches of processed voice.
In January 2024, Yorke will be releasing Volta, an album that stands on the solid foundations of her previous releases – the errant experimental frequencies of ysmysmysm, the scratchy techno punk of LDOLS, the gravitational mass of Florescence – but nonetheless marks a complete departure for her in process. Here Yorke steps into a zone of self-imposed order, setting aside the unpredictability of live improvisation. Within the luminous sonic tessellations of Volta, synth lines are programmed rather than randomly generated, refined through hours of listening, thinking and tweaking at her modular sequencer … until a wormhole opens and we tumble in. Revolving and rotating, swelling and contracting, waxing and waning. The loop is the symbol of infinity, a connection between human pattern-making and cosmic cycles unknown. And just as a tilt in Earth’s axis gives us the seasons, the smallest shift in a sequence can expand one sound into a musical universe.
Una Lee is an artist working with sounds, stories and sensations, in pursuit of alternative storytelling. She seeks a contemporary marriage of performance and poetry through her ever-evolving eclectic practice blending music, performance art, theatre practice, creative writing and digital technology. She has performed and exhibited across the Northern hemisphere including Sonorities Festival (Belfast), International Summer Music Festival Darmstadt, Nowy Teatr (Warsaw), Espace Niemeyer (Paris), Osaka Electroacoustic Music Festival, Dotolim (Seoul), apex art (NYC). She holds PhD in Music and Sonic Arts from Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast at which she currently serves as a visiting scholar.
