Hi:
if any of you are interested, i'd like to offer you all 2 for 1 deals on tickets to Instal 02. just call up the box office and quote 'ambit'. details below [apologies in advance for the length of the copy]
best: barry
instal02
the arches
01|12|02: 4pm -12am
09010 220 300
www.thearches.co.uk
artists appearing:
Ryoji Ikeda: Formula [ver 1.1]
When +/- was released in 1996 it signalled a new era in electronic music: nobody before had operated in such a precise and spartan digital landscape. Since then artists like Autechre and Pan Sonic have made maths foxy with electro kids but Ryoji keeps innovating. This, his first UK gig for 3 years is a breathtaking interplay between punk sinewave aggression, high-speed video sequences and stroboscopic lighting: it should be quite overwhelming [and loud].
alva.noto.
Carsten Nicolai has been responsible for some of the most innovative and ground-breaking electronica of the last few years, both as a solo artist and as one of the founders of the Raster-Noton record label. His sound can be heard in the microhouse of isolee or the Germanic electro of to rococo rot and much in between: but it's never matched. He's an originator and his performance at Instal, with his patented 60 cycle hums, static pops, and terse electron pinpricks mutated into perfect, post-techno grooves and synaesthesic video, is only his second ever in the UK.
Stephan Mathieu:
In its essence, Stephan's work is obsessed with the process of recording, the abstraction of an original sound and how it is always distorted and augmented upon playback. His work focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore. In doing so he creates some of the most beautiful electronica you are likely to hear, warm and gently swelling, subtle and emotive: there's beautiful obsession in his theory and if you like the minor key work of the Warp stable then you really should know about this guy.
Phill Niblock
What impresses you most about Phill's music is the monumental yet human scale and sheer volume of his pieces: slowly evolving ultra-subtle harmonics and multi-tracked, otherworldly drones that only reveal their true power at high volume. Distrustful of vinyl, he's not released much over his 20+ year career, but is making up for it now: his latest work is a dizzying array ever changing harmonics, overtones and beats generated by the closely pitched guitar playing of Lee Ronaldo, Thurston Moore and Rafeal Toral amongst others. His live performances feature his beautifully shot images of people working, mesmerically ebbing and toiling in time to his music.
Francisco Lopez.
Lopez is an enigmatic presence on the experimental music scene: the first thing that strikes is his utter dedication to the purity of sound, the next that he chooses to express this purity by working with extremely complex and un-pure sounds: field recordings of forest and factory, sampled black metal. Live, the results are both ominous and serene, presenting deliberately blurred droning, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound [we're gonna need you to wear blindfolds: seriously]
Hanayo & Ilpo Vaisainen:
Over her last few releases, the childlike voice of Japanese avant-chanteuse Hanayo has been paired up and set against a staggering role-call of who's who in experimental electronica: from the digital hardcore of Merzbow to the Wagnerian electronica of Panacea and all points between. This one-off collaboration promises to be the best yet, coupling her with the moving and wistful electro-acoustic collages of Vaisainen, one half of analogue phase shifting techno pioneers Pan Sonic, whose random noise generators and antique '80s drum machines have for the last decade pushed back boundaries in techno minimalism.
John Wall:
John is just about the most exacting and heroically meticulous composer you could imagine. Huge swathes of CD's are scoured or long improv sessions recorded so that he can capture the tiny fragments of sound that are then used to build up his compositions. In just about the most painstaking process I can imaging [averaging about 1 min a month], these fragments are recombined and woven into spare and precise, violent yet beautiful pieces that in their final form, could in equal parts be mistaken for onkyo electronica or the more spartan work of Evan Parker. John is a truly unique artist.
Koji Asano & The Paragon Ensemble: "Eclipse Of the moon from the backyard"
Koji Asano is a young, exciting and increasingly renowned Japanese composer and sound-artist. With a score of releases across many genre he's difficult to pin down: if anything you detect a predilection and beautiful ear for the willfully naive and brutally complex. This work, written for cello, percussion, contra bassoon and cherbulum has been commissioned specifically for Instal in collaboration with Paragon, one of the most consistently interesting and championing ensembles working in the UK.
Mirror
This is an extremely rare chance to hear the breathtakingly beautiful collaboration between Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann.
Everybody I know who has had already that chance is enchanted by their ever shifting, glassine drones, mercurial tonalities and the delicate interplay that exists between them, it's just that that number is so few. With runs of at best 1000 copies, theirs is about as close as you get to a cult following within the already specialised arena of experimental music. Their tenderly evolving improvisations and tranquil pieces of evocative ambience deserve attention
