An evening with two of the leading lights of contemporary electronic music. Sheffield's Mark Fell has been a long-standing presence in UK electronic music via his duo SND and has also created some of the most arresting and singular electronic music in the last 18 months with releases on Raster-Noton and Editions Mego. Ben Vida has been a vital part of Chicago's music scene for the last decade, first rising to prominence with his group Town & Country and now exploring the 'patchwork' possibilities of automatic, self-generating compositions via his hybrid analog/digital modular synth set-up. This concert follows a split release with Keith Fullerton Whitman on Amish records and a residency at Stockholm's EMS electronic music studio.
Ben Vida (b. 1974) is a composer, improviser and sound artist. His
works include pieces for analog/digital hybrid synthesizing systems,
acoustic compositions written for his group Town and Country and
multi-channel sound/video installations.
Ben has worked in collaboration with artists Siebren Versteeg, Deborah
Johnson, Hisham Bharoocha, Nadia Hironaka and Mathew Suib and with
filmmaker Tim Kinsella. As an improviser he has performed with Milo
Fine, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Taku Sugimoto, Kevin Drumm, Yamatsuka Eye,
Jim O’Rourke, Michael Zerang, Josh Abrams, and Jeb Bishop among other
as well as playing in ensembles led by Tony Conrad, Rhys Chattam, and
Werner Dafeldecker. Ben has released over twenty records on such
labels as Thrill Jockey, Drag City, Amish, Bottrop-Boy, Hapna and
Kranky.
Recent forays into electronic composition have seen the release of a
series of automatic self-generating compositions utilizing a modular
hybrid analog/digital synthesizer. In collaboration with Keith
Fullerton Whitman and Greg Davis, Ben has begun to explore cross
control voltage integrated improvisation and real time automatic group
composition.
MARK FELL
Mark Fell's work - ranging from minimal electronic music, to sound installations and
audio-visual works - has placed him at the forefront of a rapidly expanding area of extreme
and independent computer music.
He was half of the duo SND with Mat Steel releasing the minimal electronic classics Makesnd Cassette (1998), Stdio (2000) and Tenderlove (Mille Plateaux, 2002), an LP that simultaneously erased and celebrated minimal techno, hip hop, glitch and dub.
SND returned in 2008 with 4,5 6 - a triple LP collection of the work they'd made in the last 6 years - and followed it with Atavism in 2009.
However, in the last year Fell's solo work has taken priority with no less than 3 stunning records in the last 12 months issued via Raster-Noton (Multistability) and Editions Mego (UL8, manitutshu*).
"If Mark Fell had been the technical consultant for synth-pop bands like The Human League, popular music of the early 1980s woulda taken a radically different turn and the pages of the NME would have been virtually empty during those crucial years. Incredible, inhuman and impossible music..." THE SOUND PROJECTOR
"Mark Fell likened his music’s logical gameplan in The Wire 293 to playing chess without a chessboard. Without strategic moves there could, of course, be no game, but Fell’s pattern-generating algorithms keep the rules forever openended, meaning a pawn can usurp a kingly gesture without anyone flinching. ... Fell’s techniques set up forms and harmonic overlays from outside the realm of subjective compositional control, putting intriguing distance between the composer and his visceral beats. Throughout the first track, arithmetically rudimentary patterns accrue deep complexities; later, “Manitutshu… First Algorithm Test” counterpoints simple pawn beats with elaborate harmonic spectra that have something of the knight about them." Philip Clark, THE WIRE.
