Artists
EX EASTER ISLAND HEAD / JULIA REIDY / MUN SING /
CRYS COLE / MICROCORPS / HARESS /
SLY & THE FAMILY DRONE / ECKA MORDECAI
ROBERT RIDLEY SHACKLETON / COMPETITION / PENELOPE TRAPPES / CORE OF THE COALMAN / LI YELI / JOAN BROWN ELEANOR CULLY BOEHRINGER / IVAN THE TOLERABLE / MATTERS / ROBIN FOSTER / DISTANT LISTENING
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EX EASTER ISLAND HEAD
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Ex Easter Island Head compose and perform music for Prepared Electric Guitar, Percussion + other instruments. Percussive, repetitious considered sounds.
Mechanical preparations and extended techniques // group interplay and melodic invention through purposely limited means.
"Churning pulses, alternate tunings and dense harmonic worlds...all the strings being heard at once" - New York Times
"Free flowing genius" - Guardian
https://exeasterislandhead.bandcamp.com/
JULIA REIDY
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Julia Reidy makes music for processed and acoustic instruments (mostly guitars). Their recent work can be described as a series of non-traditional song forms which combine unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative over stretched and episodic forms. Their recent records include In Real Life (Black Truffle, 2019), Vanish (Editions Mego, 2020) and World in World (Black Truffle, 2022), Their newest solo record Trances is set to be released via Shelter Press in October 2023.
Notable performances in the last couple of years include Tectonics Festival (Athens, Greece), Send/Receive Festival (Winnipeg, Canada), Berlin Jazz Festival (Berlin, Germany) and Angelica Festival (Bologna, Italy). For 2023, Rewire Festival (Den Haag, NL), Stanser Musiktage (Stans, CH) End of the Road Festival (UK), as well as shows at Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg) and Jazz em Agosto Festival (Lisbon, PT) have been confirmed.
‘Properly singular material that fuses Reidy's immense knowledge of American primitive folk music with microtonal experimentalism and abstract pop vocalizing. Decidedly uncool, and all the better for it - RIYL Bill Nace, Heather Leigh or Teresa Winter.’ - Boomkat, 2022
‘… Reidy’s music always seems to be pushing against its perimeters. That makes “Vanish” a highly evocative album worth revisiting.’ - Chris Richards, the Washington Post 2020
‘Listening to “Vanish” is a visceral experience. It’s music that finds just the right balance of unbridled catharsis and restraint.’ - Vanessa Ague, the Wire 2020
‘It’s a highly unusual disruption of classic Takoma/fingerstyle with electronic drone and found sounds, at different points reminding us of everything from Hope Sandoval to late period Talk Talk, Jim O’Rourke, Tashi Wada Group and of course John Fahey, while ultimately sounding like none of them.’ - Boomkat 2019
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MUN SING
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Mun Sing’s uncompromising ingenuity of sonic weaponry explores bone rattling, fragmented cyber grime and radioactive trap templates. An attack of fluctuating polyrhythms that pan from left to right creating a delirious effect. Amplified dissonant noise. Syncopated and visceral neo-EBM drum patterns that disintegrate, dissolve and accelerate then starkly shrink with an adrenaline fuelled industrial intensity.
Mun Sing is Wright’s tool to challenge the conventions and aesthetics of modern day club culture. To experiment with ideas of inclusivity and positivity, influenced by mainstream pop music by injecting pop’s marketing methods into the more serious, austere club world. Dance routines, obnoxious visuals and brash costumes all feature in the live show, where Mun Sing uses these elements as a means to highlight inclusivity, movement and fun.
His debut LP 'Inflatable Gravestone' will be released on Planet Mu in June 2023.
'Imagine Perc and The Bug slinging dubs at each other during a subterranean soundclash full of dry ice and strobes and you’re part of the way to what the five-track ‘Witness’ sounds like' — MIXMAG
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https://planet.mu/releases/inflatable-gravestone/
CRYS COLE
Crys Cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, improvised performance and sound installation. By generating subtle and imperfect sounds through simple gestures, she creates textural works that continuously retune the ear, delicately seeking to both reveal, and obscure the intricacy of seemingly mundane sounds and sources.
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MICROCORPS
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MICROCORPS is the new project by artist and musician Alex Tucker (Grumbling Fur, Alexander Tucker, Imbogodom) exploring electronics, cello and voice.
The debut release, XMIT - featuring collaborations with Gazelle Twin, Nik Colk Void, Simon Fisher Turner & Astrud Steehouder - is out now on ALTER.
Tucker’s ever-evolving soundworld continues to unfold with with harsh realms centred around processed electronic systems, strings and vocal manipulations. MICROCORPS employs altered voices, sound synthesis and atomised beat constructions.
Tracks are born from a balance between composition and improvisation within set parameters. At each stage audio is heavily processed and then reconfigured, setting up systems that are non-repeatable, where decisions can be premeditated and intuitive but never the same with each performance
https://microcorps.bandcamp.com/album/xmit
HARESS
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Haress are a collective of musicians based in the Shropshire Hills Their music is rooted in the feel and tradition of British folk but expands out of any genre boundaries through the use of improvisation, texture and amplification.
They intertwine dark and repetitive electric guitar figures to create a hypnotic, mantra-like state, the playing working on a kind of unspoken telepathy until it’s impossible for the onlooker to work out which player is responsible for which sound amid the warm, enveloping hum of valve amps.
Current album Ghosts is out on Wrongspeed Records.
https://haress.bandcamp.com/music
SLY AND THE FAMILY DRONE
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A group creating loud noise rock, while embracing free playing music involving jazz, percussion, tape loops and manipulated vocals.
Fans of scronked electronics, bulging noise blasts, wailing sax & Kalashnikov drums will find a lot to love here.
https://familydrone.bandcamp.com/
ECKA MORDECAI
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Ecka Mordecai is a British artist based in London.
Situated between sonic, performative and olfactory disciplines, her work is driven by sensation: entwining cello, horsehair harp, voice, eggflute, scent and improvisation into time-based objects expressive of emotional complexity.
Both intimate and exacting, this body-driven practice defies formal constraints, undoing the limits of genre and allowing for works such as Aequill Sound, a line of niche perfumes inspired by elements of the East London soundscape, or Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), the album in which Ecka explores myriad internal states using the compositional device of a creaking door hinge (or charniére).
Performing since 2010, Ecka has appeared alongside the likes of David Toop, Malvern Brume, Thurston Moore, Keeley Forsyth, Ilan Volkov, Ex-Easter Island Head, Greta Buitkute, Dave Birchall and Kate Armitage. She has played at Cafe OTO, BBC Glasgow, Islington Mill and inside a Berlin wasserturm, amongst others.
She has projects with Revox tape performer Valerio Tricoli in the duo Mordecoli (The Addiction, Hedione 2022), and in the trio Circæa with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (The Bridge of Dreams, Faraway Press, 2019).
ROBERT RIDLEY SHACKLETON
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RRS The Cardboard Prince has been a long serving staple of the underground playing in pub back rooms, Big Poo's fight club and Madison Square Gardens.
But finally the original corrugated mango is coming to the big brassy Boundaries festival.
“Robert Ridley-Shackleton launches into the wonky elecro-funk of “Suzy”. The songs grinding synth bass and shunting beats are a platform for inspired ad-libs about Christmas presents and swan punching, punctuated by falsetto yelps and howls. Taking requests, he sings snatches of Black Sabbath and Queen while scrunching plastic packaging and rattling a Tupperware box. He shimmies, he shakes, he drops to his knees. The Cardboard Prince is here 4 U.” - Wire magazine.
RRS runs Cardboard Club a label of fine corrugation from fine artists.
COMPETITION
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Competition aka Craig Pollard makes (mild) pop music and performs with a sampler and voice. the work is interested in ideas of efficiency, intimacy, repetition and sharedness as they exist within practices of popular music.
Competition is the music making moniker of Craig Pollard. Based in Newcastle (UK), Craig makes experimental pop music that plays with sparseness and vulnerability, pitched down samples and orchestral programming, crafting songs that build hooks from within their limited materials. He has performed across the UK with artists like Ana Roxanne, Julia Reidy, caroline, Rattle and No Age, and releases have came out via Slip, Oob and Bleak Spring. He publishes writing on music and art making, with a collection of writing on Glasgow’s Tgigitffy, and hosts a monthly radio show on Slack’s.
https://healthy-competition.bandcamp.com/
PENELOPE TRAPPES
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Composed of mostly percussion less, haunting atmospherics and space, Australian Penelope Trappes makes minimalist shadowy music focusing on darker themes. She has been reworked by uncompromising artists, including Cosey Fanni Tutti, Félicia Atkinson and Nik Colk Void, she has shared the stage with William Basinsky, Mary Lattimore, and The London Contemporary Orchestra and toured the UK, Australia, and parts of Europe over the last 5 years. Trappes’s fourth album, Heavenly Spheres, released in April 2023 on her own Nite Hive imprint, was composed using just piano, voice and an old reel-to-reel tape deck during a 2 week artist residency. The Wire said it is “…a striking work of evolution and deconstruction” while Bandcamp said “...the album is starkly intimate and surreal—like watching yourself mourn intense tragedy from an outsider’s vantage point.”. Highly regarded previous releases include the trilogy of Penelope One, Two and Three, Eel Drip, and Mother’s Blood on Houndstooth and Optimo.
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"...Meticulous with fine detail, and trusting of the supernatural forces that elevate it." - Wire
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“Summoning the great ghosts of vintage 4AD and Kranky, the Australian singer and producer makes inky dream pop that’s as heavy and welcoming as a weighted blanket.” - Philip Sherburne (Pitchfork)
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https://penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com/album/heavenly-spheres
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Photo: Agnes Haus
CORE OF THE COALMAN
Core of the Coalman, continuous contingency, vicissitudes of self as solo performer: when that self performing itself is Californian Jorge Boehringer performing itself. Performances currently comprise spectral, spatialised, macro/micro-compositions and improvisations, performed with a variety of electronic and acoustic instruments, some homemade.
Pieces are layered upon, next to, betwixt, or within one another to form situations that vibrate like stripes of complementary colours or circumstances melting into each other like strata in a landscape or romantics beneath the full moon. Whatever it is, its music if you but bend an ear.
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noises with textures:
https://coreofthecoalman.bandcamp.com/
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digital ghosts and real shadows: https://ongrowthandform.bandcamp.com
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LI YILEI & JOAN LOW ( AAACP )
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AAACP is a sound and performance project by Li Yilei and Joan Low. Their work manipulates and experiments with spoken word, found samples, domestic appliances, and synthesizers.
The name of this project refers to Arts Administration and Cultural Policy, inspired by the postgraduate degree read by Joan. This is an ongoing exploration of the numbness of repetition and routine within the administrative nature of the banal.
IG: aaacp_____
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LI YELI is a Chinese artist and composer working and living in London.
With a background in fine art and sound art, Li’s body of work sought to investigate alternative modes of listening, reflecting upon the tacitness and transience of existential occurrences.
Li’s work often incorporates with sound, performance, found materials, text, events, daily objects and broken/damaged instruments. Exemplifying serendipitous encounters between beings and their environment, the muted state, the unheard, the disabled and untrained voices.
IG: @li_yi_lei_
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JOAN LOW is an interdisciplinary artist based in London, whose work present tangents of the mechanics of the abject, untrained bodies, voyeurism, power, and failure. She has a background in fine art, cultural policy, and culinary arts.
IG: @Joanfromadmin
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ELEANOR CULLY BOEHRINGER
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Eleanor Cully Boehringer is an artist and composer from Norwich, based in Newcastle. She makes performances, compositions, installations and music. Eleanor has written for various artists and has had her own work broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has worked collaboratively with choirs, ensembles, visual artists, community groups, young people, and galleries towards new installations and composition projects. Envisaging the relationship between her work and its surroundings, Eleanor often seeks ways of framing and enhancing the listening environment in iterations of her work.
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Photo: Francisco Gomez
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IVAN THE TOLERABLE QUARTET
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Ivan The Tolerable is the super prolific alias of one Oli Heffernan.
Sometimes solo/sometimes with band/sometimes loud/sometimes quiet.
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Oli Heffernan / Neil Turpin / Ben Hopkinson / Robbie Major
Oli Heffernan and his revolving pool of musicians have managed to drop at least 4-5 LPs of skronky repeato astral jazz every year for the last decade for the likes of Stolen Body Records, Library Of The Occult, Up In Her Room, Echodelick, Cruel Nature and more…
The new LP - Ritual In Transfigured Time - is out on Aug 3rd via Echodelick (USA), Worst Bassist Records (EU) and We Here & Now (CAN) and will be followed by another new LP in November plus the start of an extensive reissue program of earlier out of print albums throughout 2023-24, as well as three more LPs of new material.
Latest track;
Ritual In The Hall - taken from forthcoming LP
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MUSIC : https://ivanthetolerable.bandcamp.com/
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MATTERS
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MATTERS are an electronic audio visual duo from Birmingham, England.
Since 2015, Brid Rose & Stuart Lee Tovey of Matters have weaved a dark, driving, all-encompassing sound; shifting seamlessly from film score to basement nightclub to industrial noise.
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Taking a DIY approach, they produce intoxicating live shows with self-made animated visuals and immersive lighting designs.
Their current project ‘ECHOLOCATIONS’ is inspired by the aesthetic of liminal spaces
and reimagines venues as underground soviet metro stations in which to transport audiences to otherworldly realms.
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Echolocations is out now on Supersonic Records.
https://mattersband.bandcamp.com/
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ROBIN FOSTER
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PLAY A VIBRATION IN THE RHYTHM OF THE UNIVERSE.
Robin Foster is an artist and performer from Bristol, UK. His current work is centred around Rummaging, an intense, physical performance practice he developed with Henry Collins in 2014 that uses scavenged objects to create acoustic noise.
Taking a cue from Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism, Foster’s work is site-specific in nature, exploring our relationship with the things that we surround ourself with and the musicality inherent within them, the rhythm of the universe.
Recent work has included performances at Cafe OTO, London and Ochai-Soup, Tokyo.
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https://fractalmeat.bandcamp.com/album/junkpolitik
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DISTANT LISTENING
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Best known as one half of the krautrock/blizzard wave duo Warm Digits, Andrew Hodson has also released four solo albums: Map Music (2004), Matinee Orchestra (2006), Dance Music (2007) and In Your Heart You Will Find Your Dreams (2009).
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During lockdown, Andrew became lonely when he was unable to meet up with Steve (the guitarist in Warm Digits) to rehearse. In his frustration, he decided to build a replacement Steve: a bespoke synthesizer that is triggered by his drum kit and follows and responds to his playing, developing a growing soundscape with hissing, shoegaze textures. The synthesizer is built around a Yamaha DX7 as its heart, with a granular synthesizer adding sparkle. The sound is reminiscent of free jazz, Boards of Canada, and Autechre with a live drummer.
Part engineering feat, part new music invention, Andrew thought that this venture would take three months to develop.
Three years later, his vision has been realized and Andrew is unveiling his replacement Steve to the world. He has called this project "Distant Listening".
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