Saturday 7 January 2023, 7pm
As above, so below. The Mountain rises above The Garden. As you set out, the way appears to the crown, where heaven meets earth. Your journey is accompanied by the sounds of The Mountain. The universe listens to us as we listen to it.
Ignota hosts an evening of sonic exploration, ambient resonance and abyssal sounds with. The Universe Listens to Us As We Listen to It is part of Ignota’s QUANTUM LISTENING season of events inspired by Pauline Oliveros that explore the roots and legacies of Deep Listening® with a broad curiosity toward vibration, resonance and altered states.
The evening will unfold through listening sessions, meditative performances, hypnotic journeys and expanded consciousness with special guests: Anna Wall and Susanna Davies-Crook collaborate on a hypnotic journey; Bones Tan Jones makes a vocal offering; Lawrence Lek presents an interdimensional journey through Nepenthe and the voices of artificial others; Lia Mice performs the Chaos Bells, with more performances and offerings by Maxwell Sterling and Ignota friends and family.
Anna Wall presents a brand new track continuing the ambient exploration of her Dream Theory label, which focuses on healing sonics, ambient and experimental music. Here she collaborates with Ignota’s Susanna Davies-Crook on a hypnotic journey.
Bones Tan Jones will make a vocal offering.
Lia Mice will perform the Chaos Bells, her self-designed instrument that features twenty gesturally performed pendulums. Chaos Bells is named after its unique sound design in which bell sounds can drone and become chaotic is how it gained its name.
Lawrence Lek opens a portal to his virtual worlds of listening and disembodied wanderings. He presents an interdimensional journey through Nepenthe, and grants us access to his ongoing series of sonic and visual landscapes, each centred around the voice of an artificial other.
The Universe Listens to Us As We Listen to It celebrates the launch of Ignota’s new membership portal The Mountain: a platform for aural exploration and sonic content including poetry, music, weird tech, ritual and practice.
Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros (Ignota, 2022) is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world.
Anna Wall is a DJ and producer based in London.
Bones Tan Jones (b. 1993, Liverpool) is a London-based artist, musician and performer. Bones’s work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Bones weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthrall and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Bones sanctifies these mediums as tool's in their craft.
Susanna Davies-Crook is Head of Growth at Ignota. She has worked as an editor and curator on exhibitions including Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder at 180 Strand. She is the recipient of an Arts Council DYCP 2021 grant to develop her creative and critical writing practice on Nervous Systems and complete her first novel. She is also a hypnotherapist and yoga teacher.
Lawrence Lek 陆明龙 is a London-based artist working with moving image, performance, video games, and installation. He draws from a background in architecture and electronic music to build virtual worlds through a process of collage that combines narrative and material environments. Blurring distinctions between film and game, his works are known for their portrayal of nomadic characters within technological landscapes, and for exploring themes of identity, memory, control, and agency.
Oram Award winner and artist Lia Mice’s live performances incorporate beat-driven experimental pop, live vocal harmonies and Lia’s self-designed oversized musical instruments. The inventor-producer-performer has performed her large instruments at the ICA, the V&A, Deliaphonic Festival and Islington Assembly Hall. At Cafe Oto, Lia will perform material sample-heavy experimental-pop tracks from her latest album Sweat Like Caramel (Objects Ltd), joined onstage by percussionist Andrew Booker who will perform Lia's latest large instrument - a new eco-friendly development that builds on her design for Guthman-award finalist instrument Chaos Bells.
www.liamice.com
www.liamice.bandcamp.com
Maxwell Sterling is a composer, producer, musician and artist, originally from Manchester. Maxwell’s debut record Hollywood Medieval (Death of Rave, 2016) set out his fascination with the glitches between the traditions of acoustic and synthesized music. His album Turn of Phrase (AD93, 2021) takes inspiration from both Gregorian chants and hyper-modern digital processing and synthesis. Most recently in early 2022, his EP with Martha Skye Murphy, Distance on Ground (American Dreams, 2022) was released; a tape comprised of two long tracks focusing on the immediacy of musical communication.
