Three Things is a new full-length album of pieces conceived, performed and recorded by long-term collaborators Luciano Maggiore and Louie Rice. The pair are known for multi-pronged activities as artists and organisers which have quietly but surely informed the shape of the United Kingdom's experimental audio underground for many years. Under the guise of NOPAON, they developed a series of events and performances in which they realised scores by Alvin Lucier, Robert Bozzi, Ken Friedman, Emmet Williams, Walter Marchetti and of their own creation. These outputs, described by the duo as 'unrewarding task-based actions' or simply 'two people in a room, doing something’ have resulted in an ongoing performance practice based on prompts actions and scenarios which they continue to explore.
A persistent quality in Maggiore and Rice's work is a wilful embrace of humour and the acknowledgement of their performances as a basis for absurdity. This element runs throughout Three Things, starting with Hissing for White Shoes (#6), where an otherwise unremarkable recording of a drive around London is punctuated by loud hissing whenever their vehicle passes an unwitting participant in the street, their footwear acting as a prompt for the vocal intervention. The same sense of humour looms large in Pocket Fascinator (#7) where audio derived from EMS Stockholm's Buchla synth is played back and re-recorded via mobile phone speakers in the duo's pockets as they attempt to walk in sync with its pulses. Phone Work, the first piece realised outside of the project's typical real-time approach, is a sequence of voice recordings exchanged via WhatsApp where they mimic each other's contributions until all memory of the original has been lost. The results are set to synthesiser in a nod to the duo's long-standing interests in electronic music as solo artists.
Like everything Maggiore and Rice turn their hands to, the maddening audacity of Three Things is fundamentally driven by sincere observations of the historic avant-garde. At the heart of these recordings lurk conceptual strategies recalling the core methodological projects of Fluxus, classical sound poetry, field recording, electronic music, movement-based performance and contemporary composition. Their willingness to direct such methods toward nakedly silly outcomes whilst poking subtle fun at the emergent tropes of these cultures reinforces an entirely serious inquiry into the modern-day application of avant-garde technique in sound creation. When accepted in full, Three Things is a challenging, amusing assertion of genuine commitment to experimentation and aesthetic stress-testing.
