Monday 13 June 2022, 8pm
An evening with performative gymnastics sauced by sound. Organic, synthetic and robotic.
With Coolhaven (nl), Lore Lixenberg (uk), Duncan Harrison (uk)
Coolhaven is one of the subway stations in the most modern town of The Netherlands -Roffa. These aspects (underground, modern, Dutch) reflects themselves in the work and attitude of this mid career trio. Experimental, interdisciplinary and critical. Not as a genre, but as an ethic thanks to Liquid Architecture.
Coolhaven looks like a band based on the principle of diabetics. Their music might be inspired by the disturbance of balance between centrifugal and centripetal energies. The first and last thing Coolhaven has is some kind of concept or idea about how the noises they make should sound. They think about the idea that making ‘good' music is kind of obsolete, and they still havent figured that out yet.
Their UK Tour 2022 is the start of their first performances since Covid 19 hit the breaks. Their latest project concentrates on forgotten Rotterdam based composers and they will perform a potpourri of these works in combination with stretching pieces and avant garde strip-gestures from earlier projects such as Stromboli, Anna, Stromblocque Phantasien, HAAR and the like. Coolhaven can be considered as the godfathers of Roffa underground, but of course the Roffa undergound doesnt think so. But with their regular projects since 1999 they implemented a lot of good and healthy meat into the Rotterdam scene, like fake news (long before Trump), fashion shows, moustache-wearing (long before hipsters) and gabberpunk (long after the 90ties). Coolhaven made a whole lot of records, check their site (no FB or Insta please); coolhaven.org
Lore Lixenberg is the leader of The Voice Party (an opera & political party you cannot join, it joins you) standing in the 2019 UK elections. In 2021 she won the Phonurgia Nova soundart prize for ’theVoicePartyOperaBotFarm[myFuryIsMyMuse] and was nominated for the Centre Pompidou Prix Heidsieck for her participatory voice pieces, ‘Pret a Chanter’ ‘PANIC ROOM - the singterviews’ film ‘The Fool', and BIRD!
Working with code, her explorations into participatory & digital practices continue with her extended voice dating app(ERA) SINGLR, taking place in 2022 and her voice currency VOXXCOIN, exploring the dramatic potential of encoded voice and dramatic exchange.
Her career began performing in physical theatre with Complicite, working with Simon Mcburney on Out of a House Walked a Man for the National Theatre that used texts by the Soviet writer Daniil Harms. Following this, her work has spanned performances on concert platforms and opera scenes to installations and vocal performances with composers, experimental visual and sound artists (STELARC, Bruce Mclean, ORLAN, David Toop, Imogen Sidworthy, Georgina Starr, Sam Belinfante)
She has played with Stewart Lee, Richard Thomas & Simon Munnery appearing in BBC2 Attention Scum and The Kombat Operas that won the Rose D'Or prize for comedy. Performing regularly the music of Frederic Acquaviva (with whom she founded & ran the Berlin-based Artspace www.laplaquetournante.org) she is in his piece 'SEMINAL' alongside Joan La Barbara, Vinko Globokar, Wills Morgan and Jacques Lizene for DeutschlandFunkKultur 2022. her first artist book, Memory Maps was published by Editions AcquAvivA, and her first monographic CD, The afternoon of a phone is on £@ß. Her vinyl NancarrowKaraoke (vocal transcriptions +performances of the piano rolls of Nancarrow) is out now on the NL label De Player. and her new Isou recording will be out next year.
Since January 17, 2018, Lixenberg has declared that everything she does is an extension of her voice and singing practice and is therefore to be considered an extended vocal.
Duncan Harrison, poet and sound maker, is one of the strong holders within the South English Weird Noise scene. His music displays a broad array of cut-up sound poetry, improvisational strategies and audio collages with sonic left-overs abstracted from daily environments. No surprise he regularly collaborates with the likes of Dylan Nyoukis, Karen Constance, Pascal Nichols, Ali Robertson and many more.
