Wednesday 29 March 2023, 8pm
Sarah Angliss
A Wren in the Cathedral
Bird imitation by humans - and human imitation by birds - is the focus of Sarah’s set, drawing on her research into human-bird communication over time and the deep connections between birdsong and the sound recording age. Recorders, theremin and carillon bring wrens, blackbirds, crows and nightingales into the room. Centre stage is the Ealing Feeder, Sarah's robotic carillon which she’ll be using to transport us to an Estonian dawn chorus. The chorus was transcribed automatically by bioacoustician Dan Stowell for species counting and identification purposes. Sarah’s own algorithms adapt it and replay it as a haze of metallic bell music.
Sharon Gal
An Ode to Ghost Birds
A performance for voice, electronics, field & found recordings, objects and bells.
Inspired by the lore of birds, myths, symbolism and the occult, it juxtaposes bird calls and songs by species which do not necessarily interact or share the same environment; bringing together the sounds of living birds and the ghosts of mythical legends, to conjure up an imaginary, magical world.
Kathy Hinde
Twittering Machines
A record player spins a vinyl recording of John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ translated into Morse Code. Software listens in, live, and translates the morse code back into text. Other sounds start to interfere with the translation, interrupting the Keats poem. The blips and beeps of the morse code meld with music boxes, bird imitation toys, singing bowls and other objects, all sampled and manipulated live.
Twittering Machines is a poetic reflection on the delicate state of bird populations, as suitable habitat becomes rarer and climate change confuses the seasons.
In 2020, Kathy Hinde was awarded an Ivor Novello Composer Award for Twittering Machines.
Devised and performed by Kathy Hinde.
Software programmed by Matthew Olden.
Music and Other Living Creatures is a series at Cafe OTO (curated by OTO Projects) dedicated to music about, with, or by other living creatures. Birds, tigers, chickens, insects and many other living creatures are explored through sound-walks, listening sessions, commissioned performances, live responses and discussions.
EnCOUnTERs is a series of inter-disciplinary events that reside at the intersection between inter- and intra-species encounter and the sonic imagination. Events direct attention to curiosity, the speculative as well as the scientific, and to notions of multiplicity of being, experience and philosophy surveying creative and research-based practices that reference aspects of ecology, ethology and other creature-ologies, bioart and bioacoustics, sound/scape studies, zoömusicology, ethnobotany, critical plant studies, and related fields.
EnCOUnTERs is curated by Helen Frosi (SoundFjord).
Sarah Angliss is a composer, performer and automatist who works internationally, creating work for film, theatre, galleries and the live concert stage. Her highly unusual soundworld combines baroque and renaissance instruments with her own hand-built music machines. She augments the sounds of voices and instruments with DIY electronic effects to create compelling, forward thinking music that echoes the sonorities of the past. Sarah’s terse, vocal score for Romola Garai’s horror Amulet featured at Sundance 2020. Her original sound and music for Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist play ‘The Hairy Ape’ played at the Old Vic, London, and Park Avenue Armory, New York. Her new opera Giant, with a libretto by Ross Sutherland, opens Aldeburgh Festival in June 2023. In 2021 she received an Ivor Novello Award (category: The Visionary Award) for her body of work. “Nightmarishly beautiful - a stunning score” Dan Schweiger, Film Music Magazine. “The most inventive album I’ve heard in a long while”, Simon Reynolds, Four Columns.
Sharon Gal is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, vocalist and composer, specialising in free improvisation, experimental music and collaborative, participatory large group compositions. She works with voice, electronics, extended techniques, field recordings, found audio, video and collage; exploring presence, listening, embodiment, and the relationship between people, sound and space. Sharon performs solo and in collaborations with: David Toop, John Butcher, John Edwards, Sue Lynch, Andie Brown, Yoni Silver, Steve Beresford, Phil Minton, Charles Hayward, Anat Ben David and Lina Lapelyte.
Since 2007 she has directed a series of site specific, large group compositions, inviting musicians and non-musicians to take part. She curated music concerts, including the series Sound Matter, at Café OTO, and concerts at Iklectik arts lab. Her music was released by many labels, including five solo albums and various collaborations.
Past performances include The V&A, ICA, The Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern & Tate Britain, MACBA, and Colour Out Of Space, Borealis, Supernormal, Supersonic, TUSK and Tectonics festivals.
Etudes by Sharon Gal, a collection of text & colour scores, presented as a deck of 78 cards, was supported by Sound and Music and published in 2021. Her project, Healing Choir, ran @ the Kilburn Tin Tabernacle between August-October 2024.
https://www.sharon-gal.com/
https://sharongal.bandcamp.com
Kathy Hinde is an interdisciplinary artist who creates installations, performances and site specific experiences aiming to nurture a deeper and more embodied connection to the more-than-human world. Composed of hand-made objects, electronics and a blend of digital and analogue systems, her work represents a cross between kinetic sound sculptures and newly invented musical instruments. She creates pieces in response to specific locations and frequently works in collaboration with other practitioners and scientists and often actively involves the audience in the creative process.
Kathy has toured work across Europe, USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Colombia, Australia and New Zealand. Awards include an Ivor Novello Award, an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica, a British Composer Award, an ORAM award and a Scottish Award for New Music. Kathy received an Honorary Doctorate in music from Bath Spa University and is a member of Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF).
Website: kathyhinde.co.uk
Instagram: @kathyhinde
Kathy will be performing Twittering Machines
Twittering Machines begins with a study of the nightingale, a bird that sings at night, and of the disrupted environmental cycles that may threaten its future. Sonically and thematically, Twittering Machines is no pastorale. In it, John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale, translated into morse code, taps out a shifting rhythm; perhaps a persistent distress call. Attempts to manipulate the blips and beeps to simulate birdsong renders the morse code indecipherable, and Keats’ poem slowly disintegrating into a swirl of non-verbal chirps and noises. As the composition evolves, elements are drawn from music boxes, bird imitation toys, singing bowls, gongs, synth, field recordings, as well as the voices of distinguished British ornithologist Peter Holden MBE and Bavarian bird imitator Helmut Wolfertstetter, cut onto dubplate. These multiple sound sources are sampled and manipulated live using a turntable, electronics and bespoke software, constellating in shifting, dreamlike patterns.
Twittering Machines won an Ivor Novello Award in 2020 and was released on limited edition Vinyl with screen prints in 2024 by Bristol Label TBC Editions.
https://kathyhinde.co.uk/work/twittering-machines-live-av/
