Kill Your Timid Notion 04
Equal parts love music, avant garde cinema and visual art, KYTN is a celebration of artists whose vision transgresses traditional boundaries of media or genre.
Equal parts live music, avant-garde cinema and visual art, KYTN is a celebration of artists whose vision transgresses traditional boundaries of media or genre; be that cinematic auteurs with notions of synaesthesic noise or free folk hipsters with a penchant for radical moving imagery, KYTN offers a unique insight into some of the most exciting experiments in performance and cinema today.
ReadThe second edition of the KYTN festival offered up a celebration of risk taking and adventure from some of the boldest pioneers of the past 40 years, melding avant garde and underground forms of music and moving image to create new experiments and experiences in sight and sound. The live programme this year included AMM and Malcolm Le Grice, Mirror (with a film by Bill Morrison), Thuja and Keith Evans, Perlonex and Ulrike Flaig, Text of Light (with Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Ulrich Krieger and Tim Barnes) performing to the films of Stan Brakhage, Tower Recordings (with Matt Valentine, Erika Elder, Samara Lubelski, S Freyer Esq., Tim Barnes, Nemo & Dean Roberts), La Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine, Jürgen Reble and Thomas Köner performing Tabula Smaragdina and Sachiko M performing to a specially devised expanded film screening of Light Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall.
6 Programmes of experimental films included screenings by Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Tscherkassky, Martin Arnold, Emily Richardson, Bruce Conner, Kurt Kren, Rob Gawthrop, Bruce Baillie, Ryszard Wasko, Chris Garratt, Jud Yalkut, Thom Andersen, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, Beverly and Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Pat O’Neill, Joost Rekveld and Stan Vanderbeek.
In addition there was an exhibition by Grönlund-Nisunen that followed on from the festival, curated by Katrina Brown at DCA. The exhibition displayed four installations in four different exhibition spaces. “The Music Box”, “Radiation Sensitive Sound Installation”, “3D-led installation” were versions of old works adapted to DCA. “Pneumatic Lanscape” was a new work made for the show.
KTYN 04 was reviewed by Neil Cooper for The List here and by Brian Morton for the Wire here
Programme Events
The Music Box (2004)
Petteri Nisunen Tommi Grönlund
Finnish duo Grönlund Nisunen are known for their extraordinary work fusing incredible sounds with stunning objects in large scale sculptural installations.
AMM & Malcolm Le Grice
Malcolm Le Grice AMM
One of the most influential groups in improvised music, with the collective understanding that comes from listening keenly to each other for decades
Mirror with a film by Bill Morrison
Bill Morrison Mirror
Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann return with their diaphanous, impressionistic drone duo; their slowly evolving and enthralling works flutter and quiver with elegantly restrained, miniature sound events.
Thuja & Keith Evans
Keith Evans Thuja
Thuja specialise in a unique and abstract folk music, a devoutly organic tapestry deeply rooted in the sway and bow of nature.
Film Programme 1: Charlemagne Palestine
Charlemagne Palestine
This programme is a celebration of Charlemagne Palestine; passionate, extravagant, visceral. Including two sections from Ritual dans le Vide, an extension of his ‘running camera’ works of the 70’s and Pip Chodorov’s vibrant workout of a live version of Strumming Music.
Film Programme 2: Celluloid
Bill Morrison Guy Sherwin Jürgen Reble Thomas Köner Various Artists William Basinski
Each film in this programme celebrates process; the decay of emulsion, the properties of dust and dirt, the manipulation of time. Post the dawn of the digital age, we reflect on our love of the film form, celluloid as an object, a medium and a physical entity.
Film Programme 3: Place
Various Artists Benedict Drew
Each of these films addresses place, landscape or location and the personal reaction to their magical or concrete properties. Watch out for Kren’s structural, throbbing investigation of a forest and Baillie’s intimate and humble essay on a blind guitarist and the relationship between songs of Mexican revolutionaries and the people and places they looked to inspire.
Perlonex & Ulrike Flaig
Burkhard Beins Ignaz Schick Joerg Maria Zeger Ulrike Flaig
Real-time video feedback loops submerged in laminal sheets of sound soaked in gauzy timbral detail and multi-valenced, buzzing overtones.
Text of Light and Films by Stan Brakhage
Alan Licht Lee Ranaldo Stan Brakhage Tim Barnes Ulrich Krieger
As opposed to suggesting soundtrack’s to Brakhage’s works [which are almost entirely silent] Text of Light use his works to stimulate improvisation, enveloping them into the structure of the group much like an additional musician.
Tower Recordings
Tower Recordings
The Tower performance at KYTN throws into that mix the 70’s fluxus light shows and films of Jeff Perkins and other filmic interventions tuned to their unique frequency.
Film Programme 4: Pop
Various Artists
A riot of 60’s psychedelia, magick, ritual and tight black leather, this programme highlights underground innovators who use and subvert pop music for their own experimental ends; and be warned, in Anger, there’s real darkness.
Film Programme 5: Form
Thomas Köner Tony Conrad Various Artists alva.noto
Reveling in the geometric, mathematical and perceptual relationship between sound and form, this programme features a landmark work of experimental film in Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer; a complex, enduring and expressive of structuralist or flicker films.
Film Programme 6: Perception
Malcolm Le Grice Paul Sharits Various Artists
Psychedelic and intense, and featuring some of the most visually stunning, mesmerizing and transcendent experiences you can imagine, batten down the hatches for some of the boldest, most immersive and abrasive works in experimental cinema.
La Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine
Metamkine
Adamantly analogue, inspiring and frequently chaotic in performance, Metamkine draw no distinction between image and sound; during their intuitively improvised performances music and images are created simultaneously and equitably.
Tabula Smaragdina
Jürgen Reble Thomas Köner
Dual projections of pulsating shards of film, treated in crystallized salts and dyes merge with the whirring of projectors, distilled into particles of sound.
Sachiko M & Anthony McCall
Anthony McCall Sachiko M
Film and sound stripped of ‘content’ and experienced spatially, to be looked at not on the screen but in the space of the gallery