EVENT SERIES: All Hail the New Reductionism! John Bowers, Tim Shaw, Ben Freeth et al

Over the last week, researchers from Culture Lab, Newcastle University, DMU and Tongji University (Shanghai) have devoted themselves to a program of quick and dirty thinking, making and performing guided by an aesthetic that seeks to reduce electronic music technology to the rawest elements of sound creation and manipulation. One knob to rule them all!

“We problematise the relationship between the analogue and the digital, ideas of control and expressivity, virtuosity and artlessness. We explore alternative senses of instrument and interface, the places of musical potentiality of/on/in the gendered/animal/mineral/incapacitated body, and the neglected materiality of our simplest electronic musical tools.”

The concert will consist of a series of performances based on ideas investigated in the exchange and devices made collectively, in short order, extending an improvisational principle into making and thinking. Cheap as chips and fresh as a daisy. Work by John Bowers, Tim Shaw, Ben Freeth, Will Edmondes, Lee Ray, John Richards, Jim Frize, Samantha Topley, Steve Jones, Neal Spowage, Amit Patel and Marinos Giannoukakis.

LLEAPP Symposium, March 4-6th 2015

PACE, Phoenix Café Bar & Leicester Hackspace 

LLEAPP (Laboratory for Laptop and Electronic Audio Performance Practice) is a collective of musician-researchers based in Edinburgh. It is run on the basis of a 3-day practice-led symposium, discussing tactics and strategies for collaborative play, a series of open rehearsals, and finishes with a performance each day.

LLEAPP started in 2009 at the University of Edinburgh, has since been held at different universities across the UK, and is being hosted this year by De Montfort University, Leicester.

Among featured guests will be Hong Kong-based Takuro Lippit (aka DJ Sniff), a turntablist working in the field of improvised and experimental music; cellist and string arranger Audrey Riley whose work ranges from The Smiths to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company; Swedish noise artist Max Wainwright; mobile artist Steranko; and John Richards with members of the Dirty Electronics Ensemble.

Dirty Electronics Sonar 20th Anniversary Synth

John Richards and MTI post-graduate Jim Frize have created a hand-held synth for Sonar International Festival of Advanced Music and New Media Art. The Dirty Electronics Sonar 20th Anniversary Synth is an ultra minimal pocket-sized synth, black finished with silver-plated etched Sonar logo. The synth is a analogue digital hybrid that comes with pre-written sequenced patterns that can be either listened to in their own right or ‘played’ (mashed-up, parts of the sequence looped, tempo changed, noise and feedback added, etc.). The synth is played by running fingers across the letters of the Sonar logo. Bit bashing meets analogue noise and crumpled grooves.

Workshops were held over a weekend at the new Sonar by Day venue where over a hundred people took part in building the synth with large audiences watching and listening to the results. Sonar saw a record breaking number of 120,000 attendees at the Festival along with a headline performance from Kraftwerk.