Matthew Atkins & Douglas Benford


IKLECTIK presents

Wednesday 24 October doors 7.30pm – 8pm music. £5 door donation

Matthew Atkins & Douglas Benford – Live improvisational recording event.

Matthew Atkins

MRM (Minimal Resource Manipulation) Recordings is a DIY label that Matthew set up in 2006 to release his own compositions digitally and as handmade CDrs  and cassettes. He considers himself a non-musician:
‘I don’t approach my art from an academic standpoint, having had no formal training. Instead the terms arranger, collector or curator might better describe my practice in sonic and visual art. Using an old computer running cracked software and without a mixing desk or any outboard gear my sonic explorations use sounds from field recordings I’ve made as the building blocks of these constructions’.

Under various guises (Platform, Seven Hour Germ, Shaded Monocle,Fertile Structure) he has produced all but two of the thirty releases on the label. The music deals in abstraction and loops, shifting textures and timbres, sometimes with beats, sometimes without. His more recent work leans more toward the practice of sound art, with fewer ‘musical’ elements. These pieces are sonic collages that twist the source material into disorienting new structures and forms.

He has also released music on other labels such as Midnight Circles (Germany), Epicene (US), Cryoworks (Ukraine), Escala (Spain), Smallfish and Suburbs of Hell (UK) and The Unexplained Sounds Group (Italy). He has been played on Zoviet France’s ‘A Duck in a Tree’ show on Resonance FM a number of times and the British Library have also recently added the MRM back catalogue to their sound archive. He also currently play drums in several London based bands; Crumbling Ghost, Newts, Smallgang, Slowgun, Splintered Man and Russell and the Wolf Choir and, in the 90’s, Huge Baby.
https://mrmrecordings.bandcamp.com/music

Douglas Benford

As a composer and sound artist, Douglas has been involved in various
audio genres since the late 1980s, performing at many institutions/venues in the UK (Bristol’s Arnolfini, London’s Science Museum, Cafe Oto, Tate Modern, The Roundhouse, ICA and Glasgow’s CCA), festivals worldwide (Mutek, Synch, Transmediale) and had installation work in numerous UK galleries (Inc. London, Swansea, Gloucestershire and Essex). After numerous electronica releases in his ‘si-cut.db’ guise, in the past decade he has focused on acoustic improvisation and
installations, using field recordings, classical instruments, vocals and children’s toys. As well as playing with the London Improvisers Orchestra and Confront Recordings / Mark Wastell’s The Seen collective, his regular collaborators include Blanca Regina, poet Tamar Yoseloff, Angharad Davies, Lina Lapelyte, Steve Beresford, Adam Bohman, Clive Bell, Sue Lynch, sculptor Rob Olins, as well as – in the past – pop group Saint Etienne, Jem Finer (The Pogues), Momus, Rod Thomas (Bright Light Bright Light), Scanner, Stephan Mathieu and Andrew Weatherall. He was also co-curator with Iris Garrelfs, established in 1996, of Sprawl audio events in London.
http://douglasbenford.org.uk