‘The word for world is forest´
Saturday 7th January
IKLECTIK. Doors 7.30 pm
This event presents a series of performances and a site-specific installation that reflect on the natural environment through listening, seeing, and making. Sound, film, and the body are used to express human and non-human perception in an attempt to bridge the barrier between culture and nature.
Expect new and unseen performances, following previous groupings or introducing new ones. There will be also an outdoor
site-specific installation.
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- 7.30 pm and running throughout the evening – in a site-specific outdoor installation by Pierre Bouvier Patron
- 8.30 to 8.50 pm – Forest Song Expanded by Karel Doing, Benedict Taylor and guest artists – Film Performance with live soundtrack
- 9.00 to 9.40 pm – Concert by David Toop and Ecka Mordecai
- 10.00 to 10.40 pm – Audiovisual performance by Peter Cusack and Blanca Regina
- 11 pm – End
Forest Song Expanded
A visual journey that starts on an overgrown tropical car graveyard, taking the viewer deep into the rainforest to witness a powerful ritual. The overwhelming presence of life is balanced by looming death and decay. An expanded version of Karel Doing’s film Forest Song, a collaboration with the Surinam artist collective Totomboti.
Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic processes, experiment and co-creation. Doing’s work has been shown worldwide in micro-cinemas, on stage and in galleries. In 2017, he received a PhD from the University of the Arts London. During his research, he developed ‘phytography’ a technique that combines plants and photochemical emulsion. He has employed this technique to investigate how culture and meaning can be shared between the human and the vegetal realm. In his thesis, he proposes new forms of humility, doubt and listening to be advanced in today’s overconfident and exploitative human culture. His work has been shown worldwide at festivals, in cinemas, on stage and in galleries. In 2012 he received a FOCAL award for his film Liquidator. He regularly gives workshops in analogue film practice and is currently a lecturer in contextual studies at Ravensbourne University London. He has published several articles and produced a number of films by fellow artists such as Barbara Meter and Marco Pando.
Benedict Taylor is a solo violist, violinist & composer, working in new music & improvisation. He has released 10 solo albums for viola and violin, and featured on over 40 ensemble recordings. As a composer he’s written the music for numerous feature films, TV series and theatre works, alongside a number of his own works for performance.
He collaborates frequently, in a number of long established groups as well as spontaneous ensembles, working with; Keith Tippett, Evan Parker, Lauren Kinsella, Naren Chandavarkar, Lawrence Upton, Alex Ward, Cath Roberts, Tom Jackson, Adrian Northover, Renee Baker, Sue Lynch, Blanca Regina, Paul Dunmall, Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, Neil Metcalfe, Martina Verhoeven, Philip Gibbs, Dirk Serries, Steve Beresford, Douglas Benford, Angharad Davies, Neil Luck, John Edwards, Ivor Kallin, Anton Mobin, Andrew Lisle, Hannah Marshall, David Leahy, Graham Dunning, Marcio Mattos, SJ Fowler, Adam de la Cour, Chris Cundy, Daniel Thompson, Kit Downes, Colin Webster, Yves Charuest, Alexander Hawkins, Tom Challenger, Miya, Jost Drasler, Erika Sofia Sollo, Stephen Crowe, Marcello Magliocchi amongst many others.
Festival, venue and radio appearances include; Spontaneous Music Festival Poland, BBC Radio 3, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Jazz en Nord Festival France, Late Junction, Cafe Oto, The Vortex, London Contemporary Music Festival, Spitalfields Festival, Kings Place, Ronnie Scott’s, Aldeburgh Festival, Galway Jazz Festival, Southbank Centre, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Royal Court Theatre, Trafalgar Studios, Resonance FM, Radio Libertaire Paris, Rotterdam Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Berlinale, Palm Springs Film Festival, London Film Festival.
Ecka Mordecai is an artist working with sound, performance and scent.
Cello, horsehair harp and wordless vocals. Singing with traffic. Bricks thrown at a studio floor scraped into dust. Melodic incantations dredge wells of emotional problem-solving followed by something sweet and nice and delicate and lovely.
Ecka Mordecai works solo (Otoroku, 2022), in a duo with Revox tape machine player Valerio Tricoli (as Mordecoli, Hedione, 2022), in a trio with Andrew Chalk and Tom James Scott (as CIRCAEA, Faraway Press, 2019), as well as performing improvised sounds with David Toop, Lia Mazzari, Kate Armitage, Rory Salter (Malvern Brume).
During a 2-year residency with perfume house Aequill, she developed an inter-sensory recording technique she calls ‘the emotional language of sound and scent’ whereby listening practice is transposed into perfume. The final iteration of this project was released via Aequill as a range of commercially available in Niche perfume. She currently has a day job working as a sound art technician at a university.
David Toop (born 1949) plays bone conduction, resonators and buzzers, strings, paper, magnetism, archival memories, flutes, electricity and other materials. He has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016), Flutter Echo, a memoir first published in Japan in 2017 (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021) on ROOM40. His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto and a revived Alterations, the iconoclastic improvising quartet with Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack and Terry Day first formed in 1977. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed as an Aldeburgh Faster Than Sound project in 2012. His most recent record releases include Garden of Shadows and Light, a duo with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Breathing Spirit Forms with Akio Suzuki and Lawrence English and Until the Night Melts Away with John Butcher and Sharon Gal.
Peter Cusack is a field recordist, musician and sound artist with a long interest in the sound environment. He is based in Berlin and London.
In 1998 he started the Favourite Sounds Project in London which explores what people find positive about the sounds of the places where they live. The project has since taken place in Beijing, Chicago, Prague, Birmingham, Southend on Sea, Berlin, Hull and continues today. His long-term project Sounds from Dangerous Places (sonic journalism) investigates soundscapes at sites of major environmental damage including the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Caspian oil fields, the Aral Sea (Kazakhstan), the Bialowieza Forest (Poland) and North Bohemia’s vast opencast brown coal mining industry.
Between 2001/07 he produced more than 50 shows of the environmental sound program ‘Vermilion Sounds’ for ResonanceFM Radio, London. During 2011/12 he was DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin, where he instigated ‘Berlin Sonic Places’ a broad collaborative project on urban soundscapes and city development. A small book – Berlin Sonic Places: A Brief Guide – was published in November 2017. Work on sonic urbanism continues with real/virtual soundwalks, audio streaming, digital sound-mapping and field recording workshops, often collaboratively with Sam Auinger, katrinem, Udo Noll (radio aporee) and the online platform radio.earth.
From 1998/2021 he was a lecturer/researcher in sound arts at LCC, the University of the Arts, London and a Crisap (Creative Research into Sounds Arts Practice) member. He teaches an annual field recording workshop for Sonic Studies, Universität der Kunste, Berlin.
Musically he plays the guitar and uses field recordings and photographs in performance. He has played many concerts worldwide, solo, and with many internationally known musicians including, Clive Bell, Nic Collins, Alterations (with David Toop, Steve Beresford, Terry Day), Max Eastley, Viv Corringham, Annette Krebs, Michael Thieke, Blanca Regina.
Releases include “Where is the Green Parrot?” (ReR PC1 – solo CD); “A Host of Golden Daffodils” (Platelunch) with Nic Collins; “Your Favourite London Sounds” (Resonance); “Operet” (Rere121) with Viv Corringham; “Day For Night” (Paradigm) with Max Eastley; “Baikal Ice” (ReR PC2); “Favourite Beijing Sounds” (KwanYin 022); Sound from Dangerous Places (ReR PC3&4); Favourite Berlin Sounds (ReR PC5); Void Transactions by Alterations (Unpredictable); Aral Sea Stories & the River Naryn (Corvo core017).
Blanca Regina is an interdisciplinary artist, tutor, and independent curator who works with spontaneous composition systems creating multimedia landscapes using voice, objects, electronics, and visuals. She is also looking at book arts, immersive media, and design. Following her research postgraduate fellowship at UAL ( circa 2013), she co-founded Unpredictable Series with Steve Beresford, looking at spontaneous music and experimentation in visual arts and curating a number of events and DIY publications. With Unpredictable Series she produced three albums with Beresford, mixed and mastered by Dave Hunt in London, ‘What Blue’ (2020) Duets with Steve Beresford; ‘Duets with Blanca Regina, Spontaneous Music’ featuring duets with Leafcutter John, Jack Goldstein, John Butcher, Benedict Taylor, Matthias Kispert, Aneek Thapar, Steve Beresford, Sharon Gal, and Hyelim Kim and and ‘Art of Improvisers’ (2017) a collection album with several artists concentrating in women improvisers. With longtime collaborator and artist Leafcutter John capturing their live performances in 2017 they created ‘Miga’ a limited edition pendrive and digital release.
Her work and presentations include in London – Cafe Oto, Turner Contemporary, Barbican, Tate Modern – in Madrid – PhotoEspaña, La Casa Encendida, Cruce – in Mexico – Fundación Pedro Meyer, Biblioteca Henestrosa, El Faro de Oriente, Terraza Mounstruo- in Berlin – HKW, Sowieso
She has provided guest lectures and workshops in the UK and internationally including at the University of the Arts London, Goldsmiths University, Guildhall, Ravensbourne University…Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, Sound & Music, BMC, Amexcid, Photo-España, and Garage Cube.