Wednesday 31 May 2023, 8pm
February of 2021 marked an eventful month for visionary Western Massachusetts electro-acoustic percussionist Jake Meginsky: the birth of his daughter Luce, the death of his friend and mentor (and the subject of his celebrated 2018 documentary, Full Mantis) Milford Graves, and the creation of Trinities. A four-piece suite heavily inspired by Graves’ notion of the primacy of threes as “a fundamental pattern in the universe - and the lowest, strongest and most generative structure in rhythm” the album showcases Meginsky’s adventurous vein of pointillist minimalism: stark, oblique, cerebral, fluid. It’s free music in both form and function, liberated from rhythm, pattern, or expectation. Abrupt flurries of metallic reverberations ping and echo against charged silences like avant-garde morse code. Textures clang and hang in low-lit air. Presence and absence commingling in elusive ballets of resonance and negative space.
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.
Conal Blake is a musician from Glasgow. He currently plays solo and improvises with Li Song and Regan Bowering, using electronics and percussion. He also runs the Feedback Moves label.
Regan Bowering is a percussionist, improviser and sound artist based in London. Her solo work explores various combinations of objects and materials, drums and percussion, amps, speakers, and feedback. Her debut album Solos for _ _ _ _ spaces (Dec 2023, Bezirk Tapes) captures this process across a variety of settings, from cavernous concert halls to studios and micro-edits on a laptop. According to the Quietus, Solos is “a play of contrasts, contradicting voluminous expressions with confined phrases, taming resounding feedback with faint percussive flutters, but one that feels driven by the desire to craft electrifying drama rather than pure autotelic dissonance.” Bowering is one third of a trio with Li Song and Conal Blake, whose tape Music for Snare Drums and Portable Speakers was released on Infant Tree in May 2023. She’s currently doing a practice-based PhD in Music at Goldsmiths.
Li Song is a London-based musician and computer programmer. He performs improvised music with his computer and composes music using electronics and acoustic instruments. His collaborative project with Zhu Wenbo, No Performance, focuses on compositions using environment sounds, acoustic instruments, computer algorithms, and random sequence. He is also a member of computer network music ensemble and research group, [ _ _ _ ], focusing on algorithmic collaboration. Recent works include Two Snare Drums (Infant Tree 2022), [ _ _ _ ] (with Jia Liu and Shuoxin Tan, SUPERPANG 2022) and Text (with Zhu Wenbo, Zoomin' Night 2021).
