HERE.HERE: CONCEPT VENTRILOQUY | CAGE, ELLIS, OLIVEROS, REAGE
Thu 5 May 2022 8:00 PM - 11:30 PM BST
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, SE1 7LG
Description
IKLECTIK presents,
here.here: | Concept ventriloquy | Cage, Ellis, Oliveros, Reage
With Seamus Cater, Marjolaine Charbin, John Eyles, Ed Shipsey, Artur Vidal and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Thursday 5 May 2022 | 8pm [7:30pm doors]
Tickets: £10 Advance / Students £6 | £12 otd / £8 Students
This is the 11 th iteration of the here.here concerts series after Space ventriloquy | Mike McEvoy,
Plangency, Sea of Cables (March 2022), Seamus Cater & Alexander J. Ellis (February 2022),
Parkinson Saunders (May 2021), Voice & Electronics with Sadd, Moore, Waeckerlé and Ziv (April
2021), Greg Caffrey (IE, March 2021), Marie Cécile Reber (CH, Feb 2020), Gildas Quartet (UK, Oct
2019), Marcus Kaiser (DE, May 2019), Stefan Thut (CH, April 2019), Jessica Aslan and Emma Lloyd
(UK, March 2019).
Programme
Teach Yourself to Fly (Pauline Oliveros,1970)
A length of time (John Cage,1960)
Checking (Seamus Cater, 2021)
O(nly) (Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, 2017)
For the three concerts of this 4 th season, we have chosen works that rely upon the voice and
other sonic events coming from elsewhere literally, metaphorically or through technology.
Works that operates a certain kind of ventriloquy of text, of space and of concept, but also a
metaphorical severing of the hegemony of the master (score, text, composer) over its (voice,
instrument, performer) puppet.
We started with the premiere of Seamus Cater’s new song cycle, giving voice to the words of
English mathematician and amateur concertina player Alexander J. Ellis, accompanied by a
1926 Wheatstone concertina in a tuning suggested by Ellis (skhismic). For the second
concert in March, Space ventriloquy | Mike McEvoy, Plangency, Sea of Cables, the
corelation between an environmental space and the sounds and music that resonate it were
expanded through time and space.
For this last concert Concept ventriloquy | Cage, Ellis, Oliveros, Reage, we are going
back to Seamus Cater and his resounding of Alexander J. Ellis that prompted our theme,
alongside three other works (Cage, Oliveros, Reage) that also tend to give agency to their
performers. The scores don’t tell us what sounds to play, proposing instead something for us
to practice, ways to create together what we hear that can only be different each time.
Teach Yourself to Fly (Pauline Oliveros, 1970).
With Marjolaine Charbin, Seamus Cater, John Eyles, Ed Shipsey, Artur Vidal, Emmanuelle
Waeckerlé
“When breath flies the nest (body) and becomes sound”. This is Pauline Oliveros’ first Sonic
Meditation (1974), part of a series of text scores intended for group work to reach
heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness. Here we are invited to play
with thresholds of gravity and attention awareness.
A length of time (John Cage,1960)
Marjolaine Charbin (piano), Artur Vidal (Saxophone) Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice)
“Just attention to the activity of sounds”. This seminal work provides a framework for
listening to our environment instead of adding sound to it. The score indicates that “the work
may be performed by any instrumentalist or combination of instrumentalists and last any
length of time”. The duration will be determined with a throw of dice before we begin. In the
3 rd and final version (Tacet,1961) Cage describes David Tudor first performance of it, 4’33”
(Woodstock, N.Y 1952), making it the definitive version mostly replicated ever since.
Checking (Seamus Cater, 2021)
fixed media recording of double bass (Koen Nutters), skhismic concertina, 20 tuning forks.
“…Ellis might have used a double bass to check each ‘A’ he encountered, to compare them
to his own ‘A’ string”. A (re)sounding of historical ‘A’ tunings gathered by Alexander J. Ellis
and presented to the Royal Society in 1880 as A History of Musical Pitch. Ellis listed 223 A’s
ranging between F# and C#, cataloguing details, locations, anecdotes, instruments, and
pitch collectors. 17 measures of a pitch history are presented, checked at length by double
bass or concertina in a way that Ellis might have checked their tone himself. An inversion of
his more common habit of checking instruments with tuning forks.
O(nly) (E.Waeckerlé, 2017)
Seamus Cater, John Eyles, Ed Shipsey, Artur Vidal (voices), Marjolaine Charbin (piano)
“Echoes of O, unbound for moment, of O, of you”
One of four Ode (owed) to O works (Wandelweiser editions, 2017) based on minimal
narration and musical translation of Pauline Reage’s infamous erotic novel Story of O
(1954). Here O, the character, is released vocally from her fatal story while instruments are
invited to read her as a note or chords on a stave of words.
Performers
Marjolaine Charbin is a pianist. She uses the keyboard, strings and frame, a range of objects, contact
microphones, hands and voice. Improvisation is at the heart of her practice, but she also engages
with various forms of open compositions. Recent collaborators include; Dominic Lash, Chris Cundy,
Eddie Prevost, Ute Kanngiesser, Angharad Davies, John Butcher, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Ken
Ikeda, Edward Lucas, Douglas Benford, Grundik Kasiansky. Her work is currently supported by Arts
Council England and she focuses on developing her language for solo performance.
Seamus Cater is a British musician based in Amsterdam. His music is, usually, a combination of song
writing and acoustic instrumental composition. Playing the duet concertina, sometimes tuned in Just
Intonation, as accompaniment for voice, he searches for resonant connections between these
sources. The songs are noted for conceptual narratives, often reinforced by musical parallels. 2019
saw the release of Secrets, a three-year collaboration with Berlin clarinettist Kai Fagaschinski. Cater’s
2016 album, The Three Things You Can Hear, released on the Lebanese imprint Annihaya Records
(CD), and Nearly Not There Records (LP), referenced revivalist folk music and 60s minimalism,
drawing lyrical subject matter from the history of labour. Seamus continues to organise DNK Days as
a founding member of DNK-Amsterdam.
John Eyles has played saxophone since being mesmerised by an alto in a Kilburn music shop
window. He started writing about music when a friend asked him to be TODAY newspaper’s jazz
columnist. Since TODAY folded in 1995, he has written for many print and web media. He currently
writes for All About Jazz and The Squid’s Ear. Since 2010, he has regularly attended Eddie Prevost’s
Friday workshop. He is a member of Rick Jensen’s Apocalypse Jazz Unit, as well as the London
Improvisers Orchestra. He was a founder member of the Mopomoso Workshop and the London
Experimental Ensemble, with whom he has recorded several albums.
Edward Shipsey is an improvising musician based in London. He works often collaboratively using a
myriad of different instruments and voice. He also has been increasingly developing more composed
approaches. He has also curated the event series Hard Work (with Paul Ingram) and the event series
different people doing different things together. Both of these try to bring different artistic mediums
(music, poetry and performance) together.
Artur Vidal is a London based and Spanish-born saxophone player who grew up in Paris where he
studied music, philosophy and history of art. His work involves field recordings, sound walks, dance
and improvisation. He has been doing academic research on improvised music and environmental
sounds and has become a certified teacher of Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening practice. He has
published two collections of text scores: The Hum in the Valley (2021) and Friendly Algorithms (2018).
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé is a London based multidisciplinary artist, composer, curator and free
improviser working with the materiality and musicality of language. Her practice emerges between
image text and performance, between poetic scores and occasions for their activation
(installations, concerts, workshops). Her scores and music are distributed by Edition
Wandelweiser Records, Ode (owed) to O (2017), a direction out there (June 2021). She is a
Reader at UCA Farnham, co-curator of here.here concert series a and host of the house concert
series, Cosy Nook.
here.here concert series
A collaboration between bookRoom and the Audio Research Cluster at UCA Farnham, curated by
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and Harry Whalley, around their common research in extended, textual,
visual, gestural and object scores and ways to integrate or experience technology in text / music / film
/ performances. The project is supported by UCA research fund.
https://www.audio-research.com
www.thebookroom.net
https://iklectikartlab.com
https://www.uca.ac.uk
“Sound system powered by AMOENUS, an art organisation that facilitates, educated, curates and
promotes immersive art centred around 3D sound”.
https://amoenus.co.uk
Location
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, SE1 7LG