Sunday 12 November 2023, 2pm
Since 2020 Shakeeb Abu Hamdan (Beirut/Paris) and Sholto Dobie (Vilnius) have worked together on remote and live collaborations. Their work centers around the use of drums, hurdy gurdy, self-made organ, collected metals, bells, cymbals which they augment and amplify with surface transducers, microphones, pitch and rhythmic modulation effects, cheap looping megaphones and other lo-tech electronics.
Their remote collaboration It’s Worse was released by TakuRoku in 2020 and issued as a cassette by Steep Gloss in 2021.
Shakeeb Abu Hamdan is an artist, musician and recording engineer living in Beirut, Lebanon. His visual work takes the form of publications and print/drawing installations in which he uses found images and texts alongside his own writings and drawings to examine the strange ways that historical narrative is constructed. His book A Life Like Mine, That’s Impossible was published by Samandal Comics in 2021. His sound recordings and live performances are mainly focused on the use of drums, metal objects, bells, and cymbals augmented and amplified with surface transducers, microphones, pitch and modulation effects, cheap looping megaphones and other lo-tech electronics. He has also worked on sound design and music for performance and film. Shakeeb Abu Hamdan live at Ashkal Alwan
Sholto Dobie was born in Edinburgh and lives in Vilnius. He uses loose structures and an array of sound-sources including home-made organs and hurdy gurdy. His performances are personal and intuitive, often coming across as delicate, evocative, and absurd.
He has recorded and performed with artists and musicians including Rie Nakajima, Judith Hamann, Lia Mazzari, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Mark Harwood, Marja Ahti & Niko Mahti Ahti, Antonina Nowacka, Malvern Brume, Lucia Nimcova and in the group Lo Escucho Lo Pinto.
He has released solo and collaborative music with labels such as Mappa, All Night Flight, Kashual Plastik, Infant Tree, Takuroku, Penultimate Press and Thanet Tape Centre and has toured widely, presenting performances at Cafe Oto (London), Fylkingen (Stockholm), KM28 (Berlin), Himera Festival (Turku), Kraak Festival (Antwerp), Organ Sound Art Festival (Copenhagen), Les Atelier Claus (Brussels), C3 (Milan), Jauna Muzika Festival (Vilnius), Braille Satellite (Lithuania), Counterflows Festival (Glasgow) and Glasgow International.
Ute Kanngießer is a London based cellist and composer from Germany. Over the years, she has carefully deconstructed her classical roots and almost exclusively performs unscripted, improvised music. Much of her work has evolved in relationship with other art forms such as film, poetry, dance and site specific work. She is interested in the vast expressive possibilities of her instrument in relation to body, space, and others, always looking to rediscover or redefine what is musical/lyrical in this moment in time.
Recent releases include Blue Monday - a collaboration with writer Zara Joan Miller - on New York label Reading Group.
Zara Joan Miller is a British/Iranian artist and author of poetry collection BLUE MONDAY (JOAN Publishing, 2022). She works across film, performance and print – often playing with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm. Her work has recently been presented at the Barbican Centre, Horse Hospital, No.9 Cork St., Ann Arbor Film Festival, Lausanne Underground Film Festival and has appeared in Fieldnotes journal, Hotel, MAP, Another Gaze and Worms Magazine. Zara has a record with Ute Kanngießer forthcoming on Reading Group.
