Cumbria-based new music and sound art festival Full of Noises present two nights of performances by artists from their 2013 programme.
This year’s festival took a back-to-basics approach through a programme of work focusing on analogue and acoustic sound sources, archaic and obscure technologies and a series of talks focusing on the forerunners and pioneers of experimental and electronic music. Works included new commissions for handbells, EMS Synthi A and a tuba/trombone/organ 5.1 system alongside lectures on Pierre Schaeffer and Hugh Davies, a film portrait of Lol Coxhill and a giant black sub-bass-emitting bouncy castle.
Each of the two nights at Café Oto will feature three artists from this year’s programme alongside a short introduction from the festival curators. FON will also be taking up residence in the project space during the afternoons with performances, talks and short films from the festival archive.
Friday 30th January:
Ryoko Akama is a composer/sound artist, currently undertaking the second year of her PhD at the University of Huddersfield. She initiated her interest in electronics during a sound engineering course at SAE college in the late 90s. She enjoys DIY in order to realise compositions, sound installations and performance. An apprenticeship to Mrs. Yatotaka Kineie on Nagauta (a form of traditional Japanese music using the Shamisen, voice and percussion) since 2005 has influenced her artistic insight, from where she explores and researches Japanese ideology and the art forms of Noh, Teaism, Kabuki etc. The composition series `Tone of Orient`, presented at the FON festival, deals with the aesthetics of subtlety and delicate soundscapes of traditional instruments alongside electronics and objects.
Howlround: First coming to prominence with hugely-acclaimed LP The Ghosts Of Bush last year, Howlround have now expanded to a sextet (four machines, two people) and create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden. In an age where one can create all manner of electronic music with a simple swipe of a mouse, Howlround prove not only how much fun is to be had in making things complicated again, but conversely just how little effort is sometimes needed to create a genuinely uncanny and beguiling soundworld: the rough underbelly of our pristine, Pro-Tools universe. A second LP, Secret Songs Of Savamala, recorded almost entirely in a flooded basement in Serbia has just been released and has already been compared to the work of Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and even the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread’
http://robinthefog.com/howlround/
The Aleph: First ever live appearance by this newly formed North West based duo. ‘The Aleph take the threads of musical material and weave them with the threads of musical culture. Time collapses in on itself as music – from the distant past to the far future; known and unknown – is combined and recomposed into long-scale classical form to create a spectral, alternative present. “It’s in the cellar under the dining room.”
Sat 1st February
Lauren Redhead: Lauren Redhead is a composer from the North of England. Her music has been performed by, amongst others, Ian Pace, Rhodri Davies, rarescale, and the Nieuw Ensemble, and commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Yorkshire Forward, and Making Music and the PRSF for Music. She has recently been an artist in residence with Octopus Collective in Barrow, and is a composer in residence with BL!NDMAN ensemble in Belgium. Lauren will be presenting a version of her piece Entoptic Landscapes, composed for FON alongside other short pieces. http://laurenredhead.eu/
Gail Brand: Solo trombone performance. Described as “the most exciting trombone player for years” (The Wire), Gail has recorded and performed on the international jazz and improvising scene since the early 1990s with Billy Jenkins, Elton Dean, Evan Parker, Phil Minton, Pat Thomas, Lol Coxhill, Veryan Weston, Oren Marshall, Maggie Nicols, Georg Graewe, Martin Hathaway, Liam Noble and countless others. Recent work includes: work with comedian Stewart Lee and appearing in ‘Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’: a duo with US improvising vocalist Morgan Guberman; long standing duo with drummer Mark Sanders and Gail Brand; Gail Brand Sextet performing her pieces with edgy improvisation at the heart of the music. Gail has been an interviewer on BBC Radio 3’s Jazz on 3 programme, interviewing vocalist Maggie Nicols and more. http://www.gailbrand.com
ORE are Stuart Estell and Sam Underwood. ‘We play slow music using two tubas and amplification, informed (but not limited) by our enthusiasm for drones, doom metal, improvisation and minimalism. We are heavy, but our heaviness comes from the way our bass, contrabass, and subcontrabass sounds hang in the air and relate to their surroundings – natural echoes, natural silences.’
“…authentically unusual sounds from the deep, resonant depths of their instruments, almost pulsing at times as they generated a marvellous, foghorn-deep drone, punctuated by snatched breaths, like hissing gas or the wind’s whistle. The primordial noises were somehow more impressive for being organic in nature and all the more so when you consider that this was the duo’s first public performance.” – The Line Of Best Fit
“Dissonant tones rub together like giant battleships scraping along one another as the duo of Ore alternate between passages of static drone and slow groans of “riff”.” – ATTN:Magazine
“The music David Lynch would use if he was doing a Hovis advert.” – Mark Fell
