An afternoon of improvised music featuring Jennifer Allum, Lina Lapelyte, Aleks Kolkowski, Adam Bohman and Douglas Benford.
Entry £5 / donations
Jennifer Allum is a violinist who improvises and plays experimental music. While she was a post graduate student at Goldsmiths, London in 2005 she began to attend Eddie Prevost’s weekly improvisation workshops and to work with composers such as Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Michael Pisaro and Michael Parsons. She has three recordings available from Matchless Recordings, the latest of which is a duo cd with the cellist Ute Kanngiesser, which was recorded in Hackney’s historic bell tower.
Artist, composer, musician and performer, Lina Lapelyte says of her practice, ‘it can be placed ‘in-between’; in-between classical and experimental, music and fine art, composing and improvising.’ Initially trained as a classical violinist in Lithuania, Lina showed an interest in experimental music from early on. Her experience playing with the likes of David Toop, John Butcher and Anton Lukoszevieze within the London improvised music scene in 2006 radically changed her way of composing, her pieces becoming frameworks for improvisations rather than finished compositions. Questioning the importance of musical training became another strand in her work leading her to incorporate untrained performers in unorthodox ways. Her opera Have a Good Day! which examined issues of displacement, otherness and beauty through piano, electronics and text involved using actual cashiers from local supermarkets for the vocal strand of the piece. Her work Candy Shop reworked the games of power embedded in rap songs, making them into lullabies while narrating a story about beauty, gender and the mundane. The piece was performed at The New Experimentalists night at the QEH in January 2014. Her other collaborators include Nouria Bah, Anat Ben David, Angharad Davies, Sharron Gal, Heidi Heidelberg, and Rebecca La Horrox.
Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades. Working with home-built instruments, found objects, tape cut-ups, collages, ink drawings and graphic scores. Favouring acoustic sounds over electronics, he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments and objects. He is a member of British experimental groups, Morphogenesis, The Bohman Brothers, Secluded Bronte, and The London Improvisers Orchestra. Adam’s music is unique and experimental, incorporating Fluxus japery, musique concrete, sound poetry and free improvisation.
Aleksander Kolkowski is a violinist, musical sawyer and sound artist who commonly uses historical sound recording and reproduction apparatus and obsolete media to make contemporary mechanical-acoustic music. His work invites us to listen to the present through the audio technologies of the past, through recordings, installations and live historical re-enactments. His numerous international projects in this field have combined wax cylinder phonographs, wind-up gramophones and antique disc recording machines together with live musicians and even singing canaries. A major project to date has been his archive of contemporary musicians, artists and writers recorded exclusively on wax cylinders. Begun in 2006 and continuing, the entire Phonographies collection may be accessed online. In 2012, Aleks was appointed as the first sound artist-in-resident at the Science Museum, London, and he has since held research associateships at the Science Museum and the Royal College of Music. His large-scale installation, In Search of Perfect Sound, featured a giant, newly reconstructed exponential horn loudspeaker from the 1930s in an exhibition and event series at the Science Museum’s Media Space in 2014.
Douglas Benford, composer and sound artist, has been involved in various audio genres since the late 1980s, performing at institutions in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), festivals worldwide (Mutek, Synch, Transmediale) and has had installation work in numerous UK galleries (London, Swansea, Stroud and Essex). After numerous electronica releases in his ‘si-cut.db’ guise, in the past few years he has focused on acoustic improvisation and installations, using field recordings, classical instruments, vocals and children’s toys. His collaborators include Blanca Regina, poet Tamar Yoseloff, Angharad Davies, Lina Lapelyte, Steve Beresford, sculptor Rob Olins, as well as – in the past – pop group Saint Etienne, Jem Finer (The Pogues), Momus, Rod Thomas (Bright Light Bright Light), Scanner, Stephan Mathieu and DJ Andrew Weatherall. He is also co-curator with Iris Garrelfs since 1996, of Sprawl audio events in London.