Release concert of a limited edition album on 12 unique wax cylinders
“the music of tomorrow performed by the people of today, recorded using the technology of yesterday inside a retro-futuristic dream of the world the day after tomorrow”
‘It is fantastic doing this, creating this madness…’ Tom Service, BBC Radio 3
Vicious Circus is a duo of composer-improvisers Elo Masing (violin, cello, electric guitar) and Dave Maric (synth/electronics) who released their debut album “Troglodytes Troglodytes” on the squib-box label in 2014 to critical acclaim and have now completed their second and much more unconventional recording project.
The duo have worked with visual artists since the very beginning of their musical meanderings and have taken interdisciplinary concepts onto a new level in a collaboration with historic recording technologies specialist Aleks Kolkowski and visual artist Julie Pickard. In an exclusive live event for a very limited audience and live streaming at Futuro House, temporarily rebuilt on the roof of Matt’s Gallery, Aleks Kolkowski recorded twelve unique improvisations of two minutes each on wax cylinders, while Julie Pickard drew the musicians in the process of performance, her drawings becoming the cover art for the recordings. The cylinders, the remaining traces of this happening, can be seen as the meeting place of music and conceptual art: these “obsolete” carriers of sound with very limited possibilities for playback thus become objects of visual and intellectual contemplation.
In a live release event, Vicious Circus and Aleks Kolkowski now give an opportunity to experience the time-warping resonances created through coupling the curiosity of the “ancient” recording technology with Vicious Circus’s futurism-alluding music, resulting in beautiful objects that contain these miniature pieces of made-in-the-moment music and sound-art, by playing the cylinders back to an audience with the distinct characteristics of the medium imposed upon the music, while the duo improvise a live layer to accompany and complement the recordings. In addition, visual artist Simon Tyszko, who documented the recording of the cylinders, will show films inspired by the music and the making-of process.
The Vicious Circus welcome young London-based improvisation duo “360 noscope lol noob 1v1 me faget” (David Stockard, Massimo Magee) to open the afternoon of music and visuals.
The recording of Hand Written Tweets was supported by The Cultural Endowment of Estonia (Eesti Kultuurkapital) and Estonian Authors’ Society (EAÜ).
handwrittentweets.viciouscircus.space
