Monday 9 April 2018, 7.30pm
“The elements are all in constant motion, rarely droning for very long and often shuffling around the place manically. Were a footwork remix of Phill Niblock’s deepest tones called into existence, it wouldn’t be far off sounding something like this.” – Tristan Bath, The Quietus, review of Jake Meginsky's ‘Seven Psychotropic Sinewave Palindromes’
Composer/filmmaker Jake Meginsky, a New Music USA award winner and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in both music and film, has collaborated and performed with an extraordinary range of musicians including Milford Graves, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Kim Gordon, Vic Rawlings, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Paul Flaherty, John Truscinski, Arthur Brooks, and Bill Nace.
Meginsky has been reviewed extensively in leading contemporary music, art and culture publications worldwide. In 2018 Artforum Magazine wrote, "On recent releases, Meginsky juggles off-kilter patterns of undulating bass, prickly sine pulses, and shards of white noise to build rhythmic worlds of dizzying density, depth, and textural variety." Art In America Magazine says, “Meginsky’s digital concrète takes percussion to outer extremes.” David Keenan called Meginsky’s 2014 solo record, L’appel Du Vide, “a hallucinatory electro percussion masterpiece”. Meginsky's debut solo album, L’appel Du Vide, was included in the WIRE Magazine's Top 10 Records of the Year for Outer Limits and his third release, Seven Psychotropic Sinewave Palindromes, was listed in FACT Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of 2016.
Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing.
Recent and ongoing collaborations include: XT with Seymour Wright; XT+Pat Thomas; XT+Anne Gillis; X Ray Hex Tet; F.R.David, very good* & Rosmarie with Will Holder; film sound for Keira Greene; Rian Treanor Duo; RP Boo Trio with XT; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey; yPLO with Micheal Speers and performances with Cara Tolmie.
Paul has performed at venues and festivals internationally. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics, and SAM resident artist at Cafe OTO 2015. In 2022 he completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Florian Hecker and Nikki Moran. He is currently undertaking research at Royal Conservatoire/Academy Fine Arts Antwerp.
Recent releases include: solos Nsular, Ductus; XT+Pat Thomas “Akisakila” / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees); XT Deorlaf X, Palina’Tufa; Creaking Breeze Ensemble & Nathaniel Mackey Fugitive Equation; F.R.David very good*; RP Boo Trio 31.12.18.
Patrick Ward is an artist working within moving image, sound and music in various modes of exhibition, performance and installation. In their music the environment of the sound source, the materiality of recording devices, and the apparatus through which music is shared and heard feature as active sonic figurations. Using iPhone recordings, low-res YouTube rips, warped mixtapes and weak wifi signals Ward embraces the technical limitations of the everyday. Grounded in the sonic explorations of their youth in Sheffield – where they learned to mix jungle records on old belt-drive turntables, obsessively rewatched Fantazia and Rave Nation on static riven VHS tape, and sampled pirate radio using cheap Tandy cassette players – their approach to musique concrète evades the strictures of its institutional heritage by embracing the socio-technics of bass music and sound system culture.
Ward’s music is part of a wider audio-visual practice that explores the human relation to technology. Operating between the gallery, auditorium, stage and club, the work is reassembled and reconstructed: often transcribing audio compositions into visual forms, condensing multi-channel gallery installations to single-screen live performances, or presenting audio works by withholding the image-track of a film. Ward’s recent work focuses on the object and formation of the screen itself as a sonic register through which its more opaque qualities might be articulated. Screens appear as thresholds, frames that mark and delineate space; they capture overlapping and contesting states between waking and sleeping, interior and exterior, attention and distraction.
Ward’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Museum Of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal; and Hollybush Gardens, London. Their music has been published by Café Oto as Taku Roku and Otoroku releases and their self-released album Enthusiasm (2020) was described by filmmaker Mike Hoolboom as "like nothing else on Bandcamp. Filled with meticulously detailed cinematic scenes that are forever shifting, it rewards close attention.”
www.patrickward.art
https://patrickward.bandcamp.com
