Thursday 9 August 2018, 7.30pm
“There is no being taken on a conceptual journey, or losing yourself in these tracks. They overwhelm and punish your ears and synapses, disappearing before you get a chance to acclimatise yourself. Asymmetric guerrilla dancefloor bangers in effect.” – THE QUIETUS
Container is the stripped-down, beat-oriented electronic project of Ren Schofield, who sculpts vicious punk sonics into raw jackhammer rhythms. Schofield combines elements from his background in noise and cassette collage music with a new found interest in repetitive beats to create this raw and damaged rhythmic sound that groove in the most relentless, hypnotic, unstoppable and psychedelic ways currently working the grid.
This lo-fi mesh of maxed-out drum patterns, spiralling loops and mesmerising arrangements makes for live music of serious weight and function, capable of both rushing the high-end dancefloors of Unsound, Donau and Berghain, and banging the below-stairs basements of Europe into submission.
June sees the release of his fourth album on Spectrum Spools (simply titled LP, in keeping with the three previous albums on the label – all of which have also been called LP) which retains all of the “uber-mangled, saturated tape garble and headlong tempo macabre” of Container’s previous records, but with a “new refinement” and more attention on composition.
Opening possibilities of language and learning from below, XT bounce questions of the specific material conditions, histories and logics of the saxophone and drum kit in a flexible, manifold process of collaboration, augmentation, bifurcation, antagonism and technological and somatic feedback. Increasingly they plug in, using synthetic and amplified saxophone and drums to extend magnify and delay what they do.
The project explicitly folds together their overlapping interests in language, learning, politics and an investigative ethics of emancipation.
die Reihe is the moniker of New York City based composer and sound engineer Jack Callahan. Taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen, die Reihe, since 2013 he has been making mostly electronic works focusing on clinical deconstruction of contemporary music tropes such as Trap and House music. With this project he has toured the both the U.S. and Europe multiple times, been invited to many festivals and has released music with labels such as Anomia, Ascetic House and Salon. In 2014 he founded Bánh Mì Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. As a composer his music has been performed and recorded by ensembles such as the SEM Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble, the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra & the Dog Star Orchestra in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Zürich. As a sound engineer he has toured consistently with Thurston Moore and his projects since 2012 and has done numerous tours with him on no fewer than four continents.
