Chicks On Speed

Globetrotting performance, art, music, fashion and new-media provocateurs, Chicks on Speed (Alex Murray-Leslie and Melissa Logan) are multidisciplinary workers in the field of culture. Their songs lie at the cutting edges of activism and media-pop-art, where the digital world embraces the handmade, rough and spontaneous, interlacing the programmed, the multilayered and delicious data scapes, where sloganeering leads us through to time rippling via a stop in their self-made utopia and the strobe light stays on. The writer Douglas Coupland describes them as living in a post-Koonsian world with a curated 21st-century lifestyle, where everything is art and everyone can be an artist and even non-art is art by default: a readymade!

For this performance, they are collaborating with UK artists in a performance with freshly written music and movement-controlled sonic devices. The collective collect and build layers of sound and beats, making performance part of the composition process.

Dress code: dancing shoes.

Aisha Orazbayeva and Joseph Houston

Aisha Orazbayeva and Joseph Houston came together in 2015 to play music by Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and John Cage in a series of concerts across the UK, Europe and the US. They have since commissioned a new work by Wolff, with whom they worked at Orpheus Institute Ghent, Belgium. Tonight they will perform new and old music by Wolff, including the world premiere of his new work Wade in the Water.

Aisha Orazbayeva is a Kazakh-born violinist renowned for her interpretations of contemporary music and her radical approach to old violin repertoire. She has released two critically acclaimed solo albums on Nonclassical and Prah Recordings, and has performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Joseph Houston is a pianist based in London and Berlin. He made his Southbank Centre debut at the Purcell Room as part of the Park Lane Group Young Artist Series in 2013, and in the same year was a recipient of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund’s Emerging Excellence Award and won second prize in the British Contemporary Piano Competition. His playing has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and he has given world premiere performances of numerous works by composers such as Charlotte Bray, Christian Mason, Martin Suckling, Michael Zev Gordon and Colin Matthews.

Christian Wolff

Christian Wolff emerged in the 1950s on the New York experimental music scene and became a prominent champion of the aesthetics of musical indeterminism. His works, which became increasingly explicit in their political content as his career progressed, stress choice, artistic co-operation and interdependence, and an accommodating attitude toward the potential relationships between music, sound and silence. Wolff studied classics and comparative literature at Harvard University. Though active as a pianist and electric guitarist throughout his career, he was largely self-taught as a composer, and from the beginning his works relied more on careful aesthetic design than compositional “craft” in the traditional sense. Although his works of the 1950s already conveyed a decidedly “democratic” subtext, with their reliance on freedom and reaction (“parliamentary participation”), they did so through traditional notation and sometimes invoked, however obscurely, traditional forms. The flexibility of their realisations owed to Cage’s influence, while their sparse surfaces recalled Webern, and in some cases resonated with La Monte Young’s early works. His compositions from the late 1950s and 1960s placed increased effort on real-time cooperation between performers, who worked somewhat freely, within certain set parameters (set durations with unspecified pitches, for example), but were required to alter their performative decisions consequent to each other’s actions. Later works turned inwards to more specifically musical topics, perhaps due in part to Wolff’s somewhat self-effacing assessment of the composer’s role. As he observed in a 1991 interview: “Most political music, paradoxically enough, is for the converted; it’s an instrument of cohesion for a group that already knows what it wants.” – Jeremy Grimshaw, Allmusic