Saturday 5 July 2014, 8pm
ROOM40 presents this double bill with a rare appearance from New Zealander Dean Roberts - an artist whose mercurial presence has manifested across the full spectrum of avant-praxis from his early NZ rock-informed improv/drone group Thela (Ecstatic Peace) and work under the White Winged Moth alias to his later group Autistic Daughters (with Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Valerio Tricoli producing), various recordings of cracked electronics and a lengthy stint as a member of the Tower Recordings in between all that. John Chantler will open the evening launching his new LP of modular electronics for the label 'Even Clean Hands Damage The Work'.
Dean Roberts is an artist whose mercurial presence has manifested across the full spectrum of avant-praxis kicking off with his early NZ rock-informed improv/drone group Thela (Ecstatic Peace) and work under the White Winged Moth alias. He performed and recorded regularly as a member of Tower Recordings (with Matt Valentine Erica Elder, Tim Barnes, PG Six and others) during a lengthy illicit stay in NYC. His later group Autistic Daughters (with Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Valerio Tricoli producing) are majestic examples of the possibility of detourned songform and rock dynamics. He has since continued those explorations whilst also making music for dance and installations.
"Be Mine Tonight is also Dean's first set of "songs", although these are slow, ached, bloodied documents. It's the long-awaited final record in the trilogy begun by Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and followed through by Bark Psychosis' Hex. If Laughing Stock made emotion rich and resonant, and Hex stripped away some of Laughing Stock's crescendos to reveal a burnt-out grotto, a map of urban decay and sonority that ultimately trades its surface dissent for a complete view of the compassion of the human spirit, Be Mine Tonight adumbrates a position somewhere between loss and stress, a skeletal remnant of Hex's helix. Be Mine Tonight attempts to both refine and resolve the implicit tension between structure and freedom; it turns songs into spectral and sepulchral things, and reinvests the song with a heart both unsteady and brave. Be Mine Tonight is rock music, caught somewhere between twilit world and everyday processional, drawn like curtain fabric so most of the cracks and tears in the cloth show." - Jon Dale (Dusted Magazine)
John Chantler is a musician and organiser living in Stockholm, Sweden. He mostly works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge distorted washes of masses harmonics.
Originally from Australia he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden where he directs a small annual festival for 'other music' in Stockholm called Edition. The 'Fifth Edition' is provisionally scheduled for early August 2020.
Chantler has performed in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, North America and across Europe including appearances at Akousma, Montreal; Madeira Dig; +90db Festival, Rome; Issue Project Room, NYC; and London’s Southbank Centre.
His work has been commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway; Organ for the Senses, San Diego, USA; ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany and Tectonics, Glasgow, UK. Chantler has also been artist-in-residence at the ZKM centre for media arts in Karlsruhe, Germany and NOTAM in Oslo, Norway.
