IKLECTIK and The Wire present,
The Wire 40: Round Up The Usual Suspects
Friday 15 & Saturday 16 July 2022
Tickets: £12/day – £20 2-day pass https://buytickets.at/iklectik/711941
2022 marks 40 years since The Wire launched its first issue in July 1982. To celebrate, the magazine is running The Wire 40, a special series of events across the country and abroad throughout July including Round Up The Usual Suspects – two days of concerts, talks and a film screening inspired by Biba Kopf’s column of the same name. Published between 1986–1990, Round Up The Usual Suspects patrolled the darkside waterfront monitoring industrial, noise, downer and outsider words and music by the likes of Band Of Holy Joy – who featured in the very first column – William S Burroughs, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten, :zoviet*france:, and many more.
Programme
Friday 15 July | 8:30pm – 11:30pm
Round Up The Usual Suspects DJ set by Biba Kopf
zoviet*france (Live Performance)
UnicaZürn (Live Performance)
Saturday 16 July | 3:30pm–11:30pm
Film: Language Is A Virus From Outer Space, a documentary of an event celebrating the life and work of William S Burroughs featuring its co-producer Richard Strange, who’ll be introducing the film alongside its director Neville Farmer
Panel discussion: Life Is A Cabaret…
The revival/reinvention of Weimar-style cabaret discussed by Richard Strange, founder of Cabaret Futura, and Band Of Holy Joy’s Johny Brown
break DJ set
Blectum From Blechdom
FM Einheit
:zoviet*france:
Presently consisting of co-founder Ben Ponton and Mark Warren, :zoviet*france: are a music group from Newcastle upon Tyne. While often dissonant and made of industrial textures, their music also falls into the ambient category. Formed in 1980, their discography runs to more than 60 releases across all formats, often in unconventional packaging involving materials such as hessian and tar paper. :zoviet*france: are also responsible for a weekly broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM, also available as a podcast. Called A Duck In A Tree, “it is a weekly radio programme created by :zoviet*france: and broadcast by Resonance FM in London; by CJMP in Powell River, British Columbia; and by Colaboradio in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany. Each programme is a 59 minute continuous mix of some of the best genre-refusing, zero BPM, hypnatropic and maximinalist recordings that have grabbed our attention.”
zovietfrance.podbean.com
UnicaZürn
UnicaZürn are David Knight (guitar, synthesizers) and Stephen Thrower (reeds, keyboards). Tonight they will be performing as four piece also including David J Smith and Sam Warren.
UnicaZürn emerged in 2009 from the belly of a live-improv beast called The Amal Gamal Ensemble. Knight and Thrower have worked with the Ensemble since its inception in 2001. UnicaZürn music also has its roots in free improvisation, but the results are then burnished and restructured with intensive studio sculpting.
During the 1980s Knight was guitarist and co-songwriter with Danielle Dax, and contributed rock guitars to the poetry of Karl Blake in Shock Headed Peters. He also works as Arkkon, a solo project concentrating on brooding electro-minimalist music. Thrower’s credits include eight years in Coil, with whom he recorded the seminal albums Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Love’s Secret Domain. He is currently one half of electro-psychedelic duo Cyclobe, with Ossian Brown. His solo credits include original electronic film scores for Hell’s Ground (2007) and Down Terrace (2009).
unicazurn.com
Richard Strange
Writer, musician, composer, curator and actor Richard Strange was born in London in 1951. He formed the proto punk group Doctors Of Madness in 1975. After they broke up he devised and presented the darkly comic political satire The Phenomenal Rise Of Richard Strange. Also, Inspired by happenings witnessed at performance spaces such as Kitchen in New York in 1980, upon his return to London he devised, curated and presented Cabaret Futura, a new form of Weimar style cabaret involving song, satire, music, comedy and performance art by the likes of RIchard Jobson (covering Marguerita Duras!), The Event Group, Keith Allen, and many more during the early 1980s. Strange revived Cabaret Futura from 2010–17.
Directed by Neville Farmer, Language Is A Virus From Outer Space is a documentary centred on a 2014 event devised by Strange and Gavin Bryars celebrating the life and work of William S Burroughs. Strange says: “It was Burroughs’s centennial year and I wanted to celebrate his colossal influence and his importance across all artistic disciplines. We are celebrating his life and work in a multi-media theatrical performance, featuring new music, new writing and performance.
“Key elements of Burroughs’s life are referenced in the event, including his lifelong battle with drugs, his obsession with firearms, his invention of The Dream Machine, and his distaste for all forms of officialdom and state control.”
richardstrange.com
Neville Farmer
Neville Farmer is a music, television and film producer, composer, performer and writer. His published materials include articles, scripts, books, films, plays, songs, events and visual arts. He has written for Billboard, Music Week, FX, Studio among others. He has produced and directed for Channel 4, ITN, The History Channel, BBC2, Sundance Channel, Discovery and consulted on movies such as The Railway Station Man and Backbeat. He has collaborated with Sir George Martin, Peter Gabriel, Andy Partridge, Robert Plant, Karl Wallinger, Loreena McKennitt and, of course, Richard Strange, with whom he co-produced and directed ‘Language is a Virus from Outer Space.
Johny Brown
Vocalist, songwriter, playwright and performer Johny Brown is the founder of Band Of Holy Joy and presenter of the Resonance 104.4FM radio show Bad Punk.
bandofholyjoy.co.uk
Blectum From Blechdom
“Kevin Blechdom + Blevin Blectum make a parlour trick of whisking listeners away on a psychedelic organic-electronic ride filled with chaotic Snauses and fractal Mallards. Kevin (Kristin Erickson) + Blevin (Bevin Kelley) are intertwined in a serious generative long-form game for the future. Their monstrous walls of well-executed sound and piles of visionary questing sonic antics first spawned within their minefieldmeld deep in the illicit sound spaces of San Francisco in its glory wormhole days circa 1998. Over the years they have accumulated a pile of treasures and trophies that now lie beneath a sleeping fiendish dragon-basilisk.”
FM Einheit
Born in Dortmund in 1958, FM Einheit has been a towering presence in German underground music since the late 1970s. A tireless innovator and performer in the Hamburg punk and new wave scenes, he was a key member of Abwärts and, briefly, Palais Schaumburg, before joining West Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten, with whom he toured the world until his departure in the mid-1990s. Since then he has gone out as a solo artist as well as working in various duos and groups, all the time specialising in drawing the most uncanny noises and sounds from ungiving materials such as stone, springs and metal. His many collaborations include recordings with Diamanda Galás, Mona Mur, guitarist Caspar Brötzmann, Phil Minton, Ulrike Haage, Hans Joachim Irmler, Gry, and, most regularly, Andreas Ammer, with whom he has created countless hörspiele for German radio, many of them documented on CD. His more recent works include L’Exposition D’un Rêve for Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and Radar Angels, a song cycle created from AI generated lyrics by UK digital artist and code hacker David Link.
fmeinheit.org
“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
