Wednesday 15 June 2022, 8pm
Delighted to present a very special residency with cellist and composer, Lucy Railton, performing with collaborators old and new across two nights.
"Lucy Railton is one of the days most spellbinding cellists, and her prolific string of releases throughout the past few years is ample evidence to convince any newcomer. Her work is mesmerizingly sculptural: there is a tactile violence to every stroke and pluck but her every motion is in service of a vision for the overarching shape and mood of the resulting piece.” - Wire
For the second night of the residency, Lucy and US composer and violist, Catherine Lamb perform a work in progress for cello, viola and voice? based on Catherine's piece The Additive Arrow (2021) (originally written for Conrad Tao and Jay Campbell). In recent years the pair have played together in various configurations that focus on rational intonation, and regularly collaborate within the framework of the Berlin based Harmonic Space Orchestra. Alongside this, the night includes a moment of audio and video collaboration between Lucy and video artist Rebecca Salvadori, and for the final part of the night Lucy joins the established duo of Steve Noble (drums) and Farida Amadou (bass) for an improvised set.
PROGRAMME
15 JUNE
- Catherine Lamb / Lucy Railton
- Rebecca Salvadori / Lucy Railton
- Farida Amadou / John Edwards / Lucy Railton
LUCY RAILTON is a cellist based in Berlin who works in composition, improvisation and electronic music, releasing her own work on Modern Love, Editions Mego - GRM Portraits, PAN (with Peter Zinovieff), Takuroku and SN Variations (with Kit Downes). She has recently performed with Rebecca Salvadori, Farida Amadou, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone, Khyam Allami and Stephen O’Malley and Max Eilbacher. She is also involved in the presentation of works by Maryanne Amacher, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman and music using Just Intonation; her engagement with this repertoire has occasioned extensive explorations of resonance, rational intonation and psychoacoustics, preoccupations that are ever present in her own work. Lucy established the Kammer Klang series at Cafe OTO, which ran for 10 years, and co-founded and co-directed the London Contemporary Music Festival from 2013-2016.
Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Wa, U.S.), is a composer exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room. She has been studying and composing music since a young age. In 2003 she turned away from the conservatory in an attempt to understand the structures and intonations within Hindustani Classical Music, later finding Mani Kaul in 2006 who was directly connected to Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and whose philosophical approach to sound became important to her. She studied (experimental) composition at the California Institute of the Arts (2004-2006) under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, who were both integral influences. It was there also that she began her work into the area of Just Intonation, which became a clear way to investigate the interaction of tones and ever-fluctuating shades, where these interactions in and of them-selves became structural elements in her work. Since then she has written various ensemble pieces (at times with liminal electronic portions) and continues to go further into elemental territories, through various kinds of research, collaboration, and practice (herself as a violist). She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2012 and is currently residing in Berlin, Germany.
John Edwards is a true virtuoso whose staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke and many others.
"I think John Edwards is absolutely remarkable: there’s never been anything like him before, anywhere in jazz." - Richard Williams, The Blue Moment
FARIDA AMADOU is a self-taught bass player based in Brussels, Belgium. The electric bass has been her main instrument since 2011. In 2013, she has started to play a lot of different musical genres, including blues, jazz and hip-hop; soon she started to dive into improvised music, and was rapidly identified by local collectives and musicians. After a year (2017) as bass player in Belgian punk band Cocaine Piss, Farida decided to focus on her solo improvisation practice and collaborations with musicians such as Steve Noble, Thurston Moore, Peter Brötzmann, Terrie Ex, Lukas Koening, Pat Thomas and Julien Desprez, among others, occasionally also featuring with groups such as Jerusalem in My Heart and Moor Mother.
London-based video artist with a long experience of filming environments following a non-hierarchical/chronological layering and sequencing of audio to footage. Her film work, including ambiguous short documentaries, artists’ portraits, music videos and AV sets, is both highly personal and wilfully elusive. Throughout the years, Salvadori has accumulated an extensive video archive from which she creates assemblages. This acts as the basis for filmic portraits of moments, people and environments. Her work has been shown at venues and festivals including Videodrome Paris (FR), III Point Festival Miami (US), Club to Club (IT), Macro Museum of Contemporary Art (IT), Barbican Art Center (UK), Festival of Film and Animation Olomouc (CZ), Festival IMAGES (CH), Crosstalk Video Art Festival (HU), David Lynch’s Silencio (FR), SCHNUCK Glaspalais (NL), Sophiensaele Theatre (DE).
