Overview

This event is now sold out.

An evening of experimental sounds with a live performance by Russell Haswell, new music from Jim O’Rourke, a rare screening on 16mm of Marc Hurtado’s (Étant Donnés) film Bleu, followed by an exclusive live vocal improvisation by Hurtado. 

Premiere playback of newly commissioned work by former Sonic Youth member and musical polymath Jim O’Rourke. 

A new electronics/tape piece has been specially commissioned, composed and recorded by O’Rourke for this evening. The artist himself will not be performing in person, having lived in a self-imposed ‘exile’ in Tokyo since 2005, but he has requested the presence of a motorised mirrorball, a recurring motif in his record artwork. Born in Chicago in 1969, O’Rourke has been hailed as one of the greatest living composers of electronic music, and is known both for his more mainstream achievements (namely Joanna Newsom’s Ys and working with American Primitive guitarist John Fahey) as well as his avant-garde explorations of tape and synthesiser works.

Live electronics by Russell Haswell with large-scale oscilloscope projections in the SLG’s main gallery space.

Born in 1970 in Coventry, Haswell is a cult noise artist who has been operating at the margins of the UK’s electronic music scene since 1997. Documented in part via his ‘live salvage’ series for Editions Mego, Haswell’s solo free improvisations for electronics are a heady, immersive experience intensified by the recent addition of phase scope projections that render his sounds as images. Haswell also has a long running duo with Florian Hecker including works with Iannis Xenakis' graphic-input 'UPIC Music Composing System'. www.haswellstudio.com 

Rare 16mm film screening of Bleu, 1994, by Marc Hurtado (Étant Donnés), 8mm transferred to 16mm film, France, colour, 36’. Hurtado also performs an exclusive live vocal improvisation.

Born in Morocco in 1962, Marc Hurtado is a poet, musician, painter, performer and film-maker who co-founded the cult experimental multimedia group Étant Donnés in 1977, named after Duchamp’s masterwork. Étant Donnés' sound-works were constructed through the manipulation of natural recordings to create a “symphonic cacophony of disorganised found sounds, using magical rhythms only directed by cosmic rules”. The trilogy of albums by Étant Donnés entitled Aurore, Royaume and Bleu, released on Touch Music and Staalplaat between 1990 and 1994, utilised sounds sourced from a series of field recordings, conducted as part of a performance ritual by the brothers. The amplified natural sounds, reduced to their essence, sensationalise the film's images and render them almost tactile.

Organised in collaboration with Café Oto. 

Booking essential.

This event is now sold out.