Tuesday 20 March 2018, 7.30pm
Strange Umbrellas began in 2013, promoting nights of experimental music, free improvisation, film and art in London and elsewhere. It was founded by artist & curator Blanca Regina and free improviser & composer Steve Beresford. They were later joined by experimental musician & musicologist Jack Goldstein and film curator & visual artist Pierre Bouvier Patron.
This will be the first time xname and Blanca Regina will have performed together. The artists will play spontaneously, responding to each other and creating a unique atmosphere with lights, images and sounds from disparate sources. The space will be transformed and the audience transported by this ritual of sound and light.
Xname is a solo project by Eleonora Oreggia, a London based conceptual electronic artist from Milan. She makes performances and interactive installations. Her live compositions transform light and other electromagnetic frequencies in sound waves through self-built synthesizers and complex, semi-chaotic machines. She is also the founder of Nebularosa, a record label promoting music that challenges the established modes of music production.
Blanca Regina is an artist, teacher and curator based in London. Her research and practice is heterogeneous and encompasses expanded cinema, free improvisation, graphic and moving image, photography and performance art. She has performed with various artists, including Terry Day, Leafcutter John, Steve Beresford and Matthias Kispert, and has curated a number of events and installations in London and internationally. Her last exhibition: ‘Expanded and Ephemera Audiovisual’ was presented at MUPO, Oaxaca, México in November 2015.
Emmaalouise is a filmmaker and photographer living in Norwich. She has a background of working in a range of visual areas of the industry, lived in London for a number of years before moving to Norfolk. Previous work includes short films, music videos, portraiture, animation, curation and live projections.
"And yet, they still look to the sky..." is a short experimental film by British film-maker Emmaalouise Smith. Delving into the philosophy of personal memory and reminiscence, Emmaalouise projects her narrative through a mixed medium landscape made up from 16mm handmade animation and Super 8. The audio and visual projections collide, focussing on the leading lady ('Princess Julia', a renound London DJ and Fashion blogger) leaving a raw and otherworldy atmosphere reflecting the baron celluloid on-screen. Like looking into a long, lost photograph album, "And yet," aims to explore the meaning of lonliness and personal belonging in society.
Shot on Super 8mm and 16mm Film. Starring Princess Julia, and shot with an all-female cast and crew Featuring an analogue soundtrack and hand-made animation sequences
Anla (or Alan) Courtis is a Buenos Aires-born experimental composer, musician and founder member of cult Argentinian group, Reynols. He has several hundred releases to his name as well as a dizzying array of collaborations with the likes of Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke, Merzbow, and Otomo Yoshihide.
His music always has strong experimental sense and is usually based on high-skilled techniques of prepared sound, tape manipulations, processing of field recordings, live electronics, objects, cymbals, synthesizers, and computer tools.He plays traditional instruments as well as self-built, strange and unusual instruments, like the unstringed guitar.
Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades, working with home-built instruments, found objects, tape cut-ups, collages, ink drawings, found texts and graphic scores. Favouring acoustic sounds over electronics, he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments and objects. He is a member of British experimental groups The Bohman Brothers, Secluded Bronte, and The London Improvisers Orchestra. Adam's music is unique and experimental, incorporating Fluxus japery, musique concrete, sound poetry and free improvisation.
Bea Haut is an artist who works primarily with 16mm film in an expanded form. This manifests and behaves as sculpture, installations, projections and photography. Multi-dimensional in media as well as often being site responsive, these works allude to perceptions of inter-related moments, spaces, and actions in between. Regarding the mutating dialogue between the self and her surroundings, the artist also uses the stuff of the everyday as material and subject of these works.
‘Drag’ 2017- 16mm, B&W, Optical Sound, 5 mins - Poetic Theater of the Overlooked. Inspired by a dejected sofa left in the street, ‘Drag’ became a comic interruption of the rule of the road. A road test of materials, bylaws and nerve.
The trio will perform for the first time together. They will involve 16mm projection, slide photography, sound and music.
Karel Doing has been working independently, creating experimental films, documentaries and performative pieces focusing on sensorial, semiotic, post-colonial and environmental topics. Doing's work has been shown worldwide in cinemas, on festivals, in galleries, museums and on stage. He continues to make and show new work in a variety of contexts and has given workshops and lectures internationally at Willem de Kooning Academy, Piet Zwart Institute, KABK, Nordland Kunst og Filmfagskole, FAMU, University of East London, Ravensbourne College. Pierre Bouvier Patron is a visual artist based in London. He is currently working with different media such as digital video and film, exploring the boundaries between them and creating moving image works, performances and installations. He has developed skills in various areas such as experimental film, documentary films and music videos. Pierre has been involved in video screenings and video performances, in solo and in collaboration with musicians such as Syd Kemp, Neil’s Children and artist Blanca Regina. His work has been shown in France, Spain, the UK and Germany. Jack Goldstein makes Experimental Lo-fi Power Pop/Emo. His latest record, entitled 'Sandwiches',is a Brian Wilson-esque song-cycle set in an imagined interzone near the Oxford that Goldstein grew up in. His previous record, 'Tonic Of Wilderness', was described as "a quiet triumph; a….collage of sound taking in so many moods, emotions and samples that it’s hard to keep track". He is also a musicologist and academic at Goldsmiths University and was awarded the Bob Gilmore Prize for Outstanding Work in Musicology for his dissertation on the influence of politics and brass bands. He has also written on pop, experimental and improvised music.
http://kareldoing.net
https://pierrebouvierpatron.tumblr.com
https://jackgoldstein.bandcamp.com
Violinist Satoko Fukuda and piano player Steve Beresford have been playing duos for quite a while now, but usually their performances happen three or four times in a year. Despite that, they seem to have developed a way to play which 'mesmerised' a well-known music writer.
Steve has been a central figure in the British improvising scene for over forty years, working with the likes of Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Christian Marclay and Alterations. Among many other recordings, Steve played with Rachel Musson and drummer Mike Caratti on a recent CD called 'Hesitantly Pleasant' and with David Toop’s group on the LP ‘Dirty Songs’. Satoko has performed worldwide as a classical violinist and also a free improviser. She’s on a beautiful CD by The Trio of Uncertainty, with Hannah Marshall and Veryan Weston, and regularly plays in another trio with Henry Lowther and John Russell. Moving fluidly beyond classical music, she is a regular guest performer at events such as the London Fashion Show, and the London Jazz Festival.
