Music Lover’s Field Companion 05
Taking our festivals south of the border to The Sage Gateshead we set out to offer a few cardinal pointers in the vast array of experimental music practices.
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Taking our festivals south of the border to The Sage Gateshead we set out to offer a few cardinal pointers in the vast array of experimental music practices.
A series of badly felted lock-ups and garages + multiple locations within the Megastructure – a purpose built town centre in one building, comprising (in the 50’s at least) of housing (never occupied), shops, apartments, a hotel, ice rink, police station and other amenities
Perhaps the paradigm of America’s covert musical subculture, Sun City Girls operate just over the border of raucous delirium.
Some of the most breathtaking, delicate and smoke filled guitar playing this side of Loren Connors or the quieter sides of Keiji Haino.
What would a world and an ethics look like free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind?
In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
A programme that looks at how sound and image can be treated as variants in a collection of ordered objects; at how to create meaning from the similar, and to notice difference.
Three workshops lead up to an open invitation to improvise with the festival as concert. The last four hours of the Sunday 14 at Instal 10 were devoted to presentations devised during the three workshops. The material conditions (time, space, facilities…) were the instruments. From there anything could happen.
One-shot sonic portraits of 4 houses, their inhabitants and their relationship to sound, from 2 of the most deep-thinking field-recording artists around.
An utterly deep introspection told in aching, weeping guitar lines; melodic, simple, always minimal but somehow entirely epic.
The first INSTAL festival (programmed by Barry Esson of Arika and Tiernan Kelly) featured a line-up including Robert Lippock, Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Paragon Ensemble, Icebreaker International, Defaalt and Rhomboi.