IKLECTIK presents,
here.here | Social Virtuosity with Eddie Prévost & London Improvisation Workshop
Wednesday 26 April 2023 | Doors: 7pm | First Act: 7:30pm
Our Kiosk opens 1 hour before doors.
Ticket sales will go towards the finishing and launch of A BRIGHT NOWHERE – Journeying into Improvisation (more info below).
Tickets: General Admission – £11.50 Advance / £13 OTD | Student – £7 Advance / £8 OTD https://link.dice.fm/ia771cd6f02c
With Eddie Prevost (percussion) and from the Workshop group: Ross Lambert (guitar), Nathan Moore (guitar), Chris Hill (clarinet, objects), Crystal Ma (objects), Mirei Ya (trumpet, voice), Regan Bowering (percussion, objects), Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (voice, objects), David Grundy (melodica, electronics), Tom Mills (theremin), Jamie Coleman (trumpet), Ed Shipsey (voice, objects), Jordan Muscatello (double bass), Tony Hardie-Bick (electronics).
Compositional and improvisation freedoms, recurring themes in our series, tend to prioritise instrumental virtuosity over the socio-politico-environmental dynamics at play between all involved in a musical situation: composer, players, listeners, curators, tech team, funders.
‘Social virtuosity’, a term coined by legendary vocalist and founder of FIG (Feminist Improvising Group) Maggie Nicols to denote the capacity for effective interpersonal interaction through music making, is what we are focusing on for the three concerts of this 5 th season curated by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé. “FIG, an international free improvising avant-garde jazz and experimental music ensemble formed in London in 1977, was challenging at the time “technological elitism” and fixed notions of “musical competency” and this was often dismissed by male musicians” (Smith, J.D. 2004).
For this last here.here concert of the season, Eddie Prevost will be joined by some members of the seminal London Improvisation Workshop running since 1999 (every Friday, 8 to 10pm, in the basement of the Borough Welsh Chapel in Southwark, open to all). The 13 improvisers, some longstanding, represent a small cross-section of the 600 plus cohort who have attended so far.
The workshop is a small musical commons built around a weekly practice of personal agency and collective interdependence in and through sound. “The workshop suggests that rather than seeking models of musical expression that are derived from elsewhere, each musician is better served by examining the materials at their disposal (their instrumentation – no matter what form it takes), and their responses to the results of searching for sounds, together with the overall effects upon the general (ie the ensemble) situation they are in.”… Eddie Prevost in ‘Letters to Mirei 2022) a printed conversation with Mirei Yazawa (artist, musician and workshop attendee since 2009.
Programme:
Improvisation
A series of rolling or designated duos and trios.
A BRIGHT NOWHERE – Journeying into Improvisation extract (Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz, 2023 / current)
A special sneak preview of a feature-length film of a remarkable series of improvised music concerts at London’s Cafe OTO (July 2022) marking Eddie Prevost’s 80th anniversary. Featuring an impressive rollcall of 30 improvising musicians, newly filmed interviews, and the final public performance of seminal British improvising group AMM. “The phrase a ‘bright nowhere’ was gratefully borrowed from Seamus Heaney. It illuminates the positive optimism of our musical endeavour, while retaining an awareness of the fragility of our project… It also proves that there are important ways to develop cultural life other than the highly commodified complex that our ‘political masters’ would prefer. It is this sense of creative autonomy and social egalitarianism which I would most like the film to communicate” Eddie Prevost.
Followed by a discussion led by Nathan Moore and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé.
This is the 14 th iteration of the here.here concerts series after Social Virtuosity with Maggie Nicols & Maureen
Wolloshin (March 2023) Social Virtuosity with Eva-Maria Houben (Feb 2023), Concept ventriloquy | Cage, Ellis, Oliveros, Reage (May 2022), 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).
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 experience technology in text / music / film / performances. The project is supported by UCA research fund.
Performers:
Eddie Prevost
Regan Bowering
Jamie Coleman
Tony Hardie-Bick
Chris Hill
David Grundy
Ross Lambert
Crystal Ma
Tom Mills
Nathan Moore
Edward Shipsey
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Mirei Ya
Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz
Jordan Muscatello
Eddie Prevost
Eddie Prevost is a percussionist using all sorts of non-traditional percussion with his standard drum kit. He began as a jazz drummer before making his mark on the UK free improvisation community and internationally, as co-founder of AMM, of the Matchless Records label and of the weekly improvisation workshop, among other things. He is the author of 4 books on the aesthetic, social and political dimensions of improvised music: No Sound is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention (1995) and An Uncommon Music for the Common Man: a polemical memoir (2020). “Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Regan Bowering
Regan Bowering is a percussionist, improviser and sound artist based in London. Her solo work explores various combinations of objects and materials, drums and percussion, amps, speakers, and feedback. Collaborative projects include BLAKE/ SONG/ BOWERING, a trio with Li Song and Conal Blake who experiment with site-specific performance/ improvisations using snare drums, speakers, and found materials. She’s currently doing a practice-based PhD in Music at Goldsmiths, Uni of London.
Reganbowering.com
Jamie Coleman
Jamie Coleman is a trumpeter primarily interested in the freedom, interaction, collaboration and potential of improvised music. He has played with many musicians associated with Eddie Prevost’s workshop – Ross Lambert, Seymour Wright, Sebastian Lexer, as well as Ute Kangiesser, John Edwards, John Butcher and the London Improvisers Orchestra.
Tony Hardie-Bick
Tony Hardie-Bick is a musician and entrepreneur whose interests in electronics and music overlap significantly. An early musical epiphany while touring with legendary punk band Sham 69 inspired him to design and build a series of digital musical instruments, followed by commercial success with the world’s first touch screen that works by listening to the sound of touch. Tony’s recent return to musical instrument design has seen his distorting filter algorithms licensed to Ableton in 2022, followed by the construction of apparatus for listening
to the sound of cities, live, in real time, anywhere in the world.
http://www.entity.net/
Chris Hill
Chris Hill is a performer and sound artist – a regular at Eddie Prévost’s Friday Workshop he also plays with the London Improvisers Orchestra, Anthony Donovan’s Murmurists Project and Phil Morton’s 50:50 initiative. As a sound artist under the name DiscountGnostic he explores the psychic boundaries between childhood and memory, place and space, and exploits improvisation to investigate occulted mental states. His published compositions have been aired on Resonance FM, Mouth in Foot Records and more recently with Ed Shipsey as Egg & Crisp (MRM Records) and Matt Atkins (Moonside Tapes).
discountgnostic.bandcamp.com
David Grundy
David Grundy is a poet and scholar living in London. He co-runs the poetry press and reading series Materials/Materialien and is the author of Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022) and A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury, 2019), and is currently working on critical books on poetry and music.
http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIeWy0REneg
Ross Lambert
Ross Lambert is a free improvisation guitarist and ‘magnetic and vibrating sources’ player. Also a Visual artist, writer and designer. “I must prepare to be open, an open book that absorbs and transmits as much as it speaks. In the same way that instrumental practice removes the lag of the circuit-board that is arms, hands and fingers, allowing the ear to connect directly to projection device and its receiver in that information-rich feedback loop. I am a process as much as a thing.”
http://rosslambert.net
Crystal Ma
Crystal Ma plays the broken plate, bike and tape recorder. She is also a ceramicist and indo-persian miniature painter. Sometimes she mixes Jungle and DnB VGM. She is trying to read more.
www.instagram.com/djjfuxx
Tom Mills
Tom Mills is an electronic musician based in London. In addition to his solo work he plays Theremin in the group Bobhowler with Alicia Gardener-Trejo and Andrew Woodhead and also played on the album ‘Improvisers Inside Electronics’ alongside Antonio Acunzo, Tony Hardie-Bick and N.O Moore. Latest release is Material Structure (Earshots Recordings 2023).
Nathan Moore
Guitarist interested in electronic sound, and use of guitar as material for processing. Has played/recorded with Eddie Prevost, Henry Kaiser, Rachel Musson, etc.
https://dxdyrecordings.com/
Edward Shipsey
Edward Shipsey is an improvising musician based in London. He works, often collaboratively, using a range of different instruments and voice. He also sometimes uses more composed approaches and is currently spending lots of time trying to make dance music. He has curated the event series Hard Work (with Paul Ingram) and the event series Different People Doing Different Things Together, trying to bring different artistic mediums (music, poetry, dance and performance) into contact.
https://www.youtube.com/user/edshipsey
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé is an artist, academic, composer and improviser. Her practice and research explore the materiality and musicality of language, evolving across multiple interconnected work zones – conceptual writing, performance, new musical composition, artist-publishing, curating (here.here, Cosy Nook). Her music and scores are distributed by Wandelweiser editions. She is Reader in Fine Art and Relational Practices and director of bookRoom at UCA Farnham.
www.ewaeckerle.com
www.thebookroom.net
Mirei Ya
Mirei Ya is a Butoh trained artist and performer who works with body movement, physical sensation and improvisation to explore how we construct and share our reality.
http://ierim.net
Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz
Stewart Morgan Hajdukiewicz is a documentary filmmaker and photographer who has produced a body of work since 2013 which often foregrounds experimental and peripheral music and musicians, in addition to focussing on social and environmental conditions in his adopted home of south-east London.
https://vimeo.com/hajdukino
Jordan Muscatello
Jordan Muscatello is a London-based bass player operating mainly within improvised and experimental music. He regularly performs with Apocalypse Jazz Unit, The London Experimental Ensemble and many other London improvisors. He has in the past performed as part of Improvizone and with Darkroom, he also plays bass with death/thrash metallers The Bleeding.
“Sound system powered by AMOENUS. AMOENUS is an art organisation that facilitates, educates, curates and promotes immersive art centred around 3D sound”.
https://amoenus.co.uk
