Thursday 21 April 2022, 8pm
Boundary Condition is a durational sonic immersion for the rabidly sentimental: investigating the parallelization between dark-jazz, hauntology, and music concrete as nostalgia-centric practices trickling from the persistence and antagonistic fragmentation of certain memories. BC collaborates with Phantom Limb for this special edition featuring Matchess’ Sonescent album launch.
Boundary Condition engulfs the collective mass longing for a past that never was, through studies in its sonic materialization stretching across the hyper-romantic limbo of post-Lynchian Darkjazz, the flickering scenarios and found sounds of Musique Concrète, and inert cyclicality of hauntological loops, projecting the residue of all that which could have been, as prosthetic sentiments. Via post instrument instrumentals, permutated compositions, site responsivity, missing fundamentals, severe interdependence, and retrograding structures.
In a hybrid of live-sets, TV installations and immersive projections, this episode includes CV-controlled turntables, generative & interdependent performance, synchronous oscillators & tuning forks, percussive electronics, vocal compositions, acoustics, and mud-drenched drone.
Whitney Johnson (b. 1981, Clearfield, Pennsylvania) is an artist who interprets the unknown with sound. She composes, improvises, and collaborates with the viola, as well as the organ, electronics, and vocalization. Her techniques reproduce meaning through a range of historical material processes, including reel-to-reel tape looping, cassette tape sampling, and field recording. Her latest release Sonescent (2022, Drag City) recreates the experience of 10 days of silent Vipassana meditation in Joshua Tree, CA where she heard “the last moments in the life of music.” Three recent works have engaged with skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on the body. Huizkol (premiered at Lampo), The Tuning of the Elements (curated by the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), and Fundamental 256 Hz (commissioned by Longform Editions), each considered the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique that uses binaural beats to induce a relaxed or energized mental state. In the Matchess Trilogy (2013-2018, Trouble in Mind Records), she used the limited palette of a 1960s Ace Tone Top-5 combo organ, an analog Rhythm Ace drum machine, viola, and voice to craft transient sound collages on beds of droning ambient noise. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018, writing a dissertation on the cultural value of embodied sensory perception, particularly in the discipline of sound art. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sound and Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a postdoctoral researcher on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Machinefabriek is the alter ego of Dutchman Rutger Zuydervelt. His vast output spans drone, noise, improv, electro-acoustic, ambient, field recordings. A seasoned collaborator, Rutger worked with Bruno Deplant, Jaap Blonk, Chantal Acda, Peter Broderick, Frans de Waard, Richard youngs, Steve Roden, Gareth Davis, Vasco Trilla, Dirk Serries, Dead Neanderthals, and many more, as well as scoring dance performances and films. With his improvised gigs, Machinefabriek’s has a hit-or-miss approach to live performing.
https://www.machinefabriek.nu/index.php/news/out_now
Cerpintxt is an electroacoustic post-ape progress report from the cosmic madhouse, through the medium of voice, auto-destruction, wind-guided experiments in protoconversation. Her work is concerned with generating an invented language of a particular strain of softness through phonetic entropy and augmented instrumentation. While the textural counterparts rely on broken turntablism, interdependent generative sampling, prepared Kacapi, seismic microphones and hydrophones. The hauntological element of her work explores a form of sonic activism against the weaponization of love in Egypt. She will be joined by Ruben Sonnoli on piano, where the duo improvises a noir-jazz loosely narrated thread of voices, tape machines and rogue acoustics.
https://soundcloud.com/alaayussry
Ruben is an Italian key and synth performer, trained as a jazz pianist but fascinated by electronic music, he combines harmonic and melodic material with electronic processing and samples
https://www.rubensonnoli.com/bio
Tom Richards is an artist, musician, DJ, researcher and instrument designer walking the line between sonic art, sculpture and music. For his PhD at Goldsmiths, Richards researched the work of Daphne Oram, culminating in a functional build of Mini Oramics, which the British electronic music pioneer conceptualised over 40 years ago but never realised during her lifetime: a machine that can translate drawings into sound and compositions. Richards' own output often features textured, evolving, polyrhythmic improvisations. He has performed and shown works throughout the UK – including CTM, Tate Britain and the Queen Elizabeth Hall – in the USA, Germany, Peru, Japan, and Sweden.
https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2021/programme/artists/t/tom-richards
[something’s happening] is the sound and text duo of poet and performer Iris Colomb and composer Daryl Worthington (Beachers). The project explores textual and sonic permutation through improvisation. Fragments of found text and gestural electro-acoustics weave through spectral guitar textures. Loops of sound and language collide.
Their first release, an album of single-take live improvisations recorded with a single mic in a practice room, ‘Something Like That’, was released in May 2022 by Sensory Leakage. Their second release, a recording of a live performance from October 2022 at Cafe Oto was released on the venue’s digital label Otoroku in 2023.
“...a lattice of in-betweens, tracing translucent forms in the mind’s eye, vessels awaiting colour and shape. They recur, or tumble into delays and glitches. Repetition only hardens the ambiguity.” Jack Chuter, ATTN Magazine
https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/shop/somethings-happening-121022/
https://somethingshappening.bandcamp.com/album/something-like-that
