SERIES 2014
#01

SIMON WHETHAM / XENIA PESTOVA / JOE SNAPE / FIRE

FRIDAY 23 MAY / VIVID PROJECTS, DIGBETH / 7.30PM

Tickets £5 advance.

Opening SOUNDkitchen’s season is an evening of electronic music from local and national artists.

SIMON WHETHAM AND XENIA PESTOVA

The first SOUNDkitchen collaboration is between sound artist Simon Whetham and pianist Xenia Pestova. This will be the first time the two artists have performed together and is specially commissioned by SOUNDkitchen as part of our collaborative series.

Over the past eight years Simon Whetham has developed a practice of working with sound recordings as a raw material for composition. These are often environmental sounds he has captured employing a variety of methods and techniques, in order to obtain discreet or obscured sonic phenomena.

Simon work published by Touch Music, Cronica, Dragon’s Eye, Monochrome Vision and Entr’acte; has performed extensively internationally; collaborated with artists from musicians to performance artists, painters to video artists, dancers to poets; has run listening and field recording workshops in UK, Estonia, Colombia, Chile and Australia; and received a large number of commissions and awards for projects and installations – notably for his own project ‘Active Crossover’.

Xenia Pestova is a concert pianist with an unusual and colourful profile. As a dedicated promoter of music by living composers, she has commissioned, premiered, recorded and broadcast numerous new works, and is a frequent collaborator on the creation of interdisciplinary projects with new technologies. She is also currently the Head of Performance at the Bangor University School of Music in North Wales.

Xenia has appeared at international festivals including Archipel (Geneva), Christchurch Arts Festival (New Zealand), Musica (Strasbourg), MusiMars (Montreal), Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, Rainy Days (Luxembourg), Royaumont (France), Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music (Belfast) and Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts (Minneapolis). As a concerto and ensemble soloist, she has performed with ECM+ (Montreal), Stroma (New Zealand), United Instruments of Lucilin (Luxembourg) and the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra amongst others.

In addition to her love for the piano, she enjoys performing on other keyboard instruments and interfaces, including her growing collection of toy pianos. She is a Schoenhut Toy Piano Concert Artist.

JOE SNAPE

Snape will be perfoming Lärmlicht #5  – a piece that probes the expressive potential of incandescent light in a sonic context. Slow yellows and white-hot glares play out against pitch dark, superposed with their own, amplified sounds. Set against a broader palette of celeste, tam-tam and vibraphone, every bulb’s flicker and bloom is individually and manually programmed, painstaking in a way not unlike an early Len Lye film.

Joe Snape makes things with sound. These are always for listening to, and often also for looking at. Whether with text and homemade electronics or analogue A/V with incandescent light, his work is immersive and strangely narrative.

Recently engagements have included residencies and performances
at De Melkweg, Amsterdam; ACUD Theater, Berlin; Café Oto, London; Wonder Site, Tokyo; and The Kitchen, New York City, among others. Joe studied music at the Institute of Sonology in Holland, and at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and California, Berkeley.

FIRE 

An improvised session of live-coded, beat-based, algo-rave music.

FIRE (all-female interface research ensemble) is a Birmingham-based laptop ensemble formed in 2013 by Norah Lorway, Edie Pearce and Brenna Cantwell, that conducts musical interface research through live performance. FIRE specializes in live-coded, beat-based dance music, using a variety of software platforms, as well as gestural controllers.

All three members are postgraduate students at the University of Birmingham, studying electroacoustic/computer music, and are active SuperCollider programmers as well as members of BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre). FIRE has presented at the 2014 INTER/actions symposium, and will be presenting and performing at NIME 2014. They currently record with the netlabel Xylem Records.