Sunday 10 September 2023, 8pm
Another great line-up from the Infant Tree label, featuring Banana - aka the duo of Australian sound artist and musicians, Alexandra Spence and MP Hopkins, a solo from cellist Ute Kanngiesser plus a duo of London-based artists Ecka Mordecai and Rory Salter.
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Through her practice Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions.
Alex has presented her art and music in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America including BBC Radio; Ausland, Berlin; Café Oto, London; EMS, Stockholm; Punkt Festival, Kristiansand; Standards Studio, Milan; AB Salon, Brussels; Radiophrenia Festival, Glasgow; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; MONO, Brisbane; The Substation, Melbourne; Soft Centre, and Liveworks Festival, with Liquid Architecture, Sydney.
She regularly collaborates with MP Hopkins as Banana and has released her music with labels Room40, Longform editions, Mappa, More Mars (Banana) and Canti Magnetici.
(She holds the belief that electricity might actually be magic)
MP Hopkins is a sound artist and musician working on Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. He uses voice, feedback, recording/playback devices, and text scores within different acoustic environments, which are deconstructed and presented to the listener in delicate and degraded ways.
He has released recordings with Penultimate Press, Canti Magnetici, Tahalamos, Regional Bears, and Nice Music. He has performed locally at events organised by the NOW now, Liquid Architecture, Avantwhatever, Performance Space, Humming Grotto, and Omniversal Hum. International appearances include Café Oto, London; LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore; Les Ateliers Claus, Brussels; TUSK Festival, Newcastle Upon Tyne; and Colour Out of Space Festival, Brighton.
In 2018 MP participated in Sounding Paths; a site-specific residency for sound & intermedia projects in the Old Jesuit Monastery, Ano Syros, Greece. In 2020 Double Goocher Shop and Federico collaborated on una grammatica dell’ornamento; an outdoor text, sound, and object installation produced for the Unlocked Sounds program as part of the Tempo Reale Festival held at Villa Strozzi, Florence, Italy. Forthcoming in September 2023, Hopkins will present a live-to-air commission for Radiophrenia at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.
Hopkins also works with Alexandra Spence in the duo Banana, with Renato Grieco as Double Goocher Shop, and plays in the band Warm Currency with Mary MacDougall.
Ecka Mordecai is a London based artist working with sound, scent and performance.
Her mode is improvisational and driven by a desire to explore the feel of things, be it through touch: making and preparing instruments (cello, horsehair harp, psaltery, eggflute, Bluetooth speakers), or emotionally: exploring the way different sounds, scents and gestures feel and produce feeling.
Notable projects include her solo album Promise & Illusion (Otoroku, 2022), Sound perfumes (Aequill, 2022), soundtrack and voiceover for filmmaker Kamila Kuc’s I was there (plus a written passage in accompanying book published 2025, Delere Press), and musical composition for Voyage Through the Diamond Realm (De Beers at Frieze Art Fair, 2025/2026).
Her viral Instagram project Cable Queen is an ongoing spite-piece inspired by the grind of her job working as a sound technician in a male-dominated industry/world, in which she silently coils audio cables whilst looking into the camera. The comments, written by strangers, expose the conditions of her labour.
She has performed and released music with David Toop & Christian Kobi, Valerio Tricoli (as Mordecoli), Andrew Chalk & Tom James Scott (as Circaea), and as a cellist with Vanishing, Thurston Moore and Alexander Tucker. She has performed the works of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Antoine Beuger, Yoni Silver and Taku Sugimoto.
Rory Salter is based in London, working mostly with sound and performance, as a musician and sound technician. Recordings are available via Index Clean, TEETH, Research Laboratories, Zoomin' Night & others. A new album 'a sky cold as clay' is out now on Infant Tree.
Ute Kanngießer is a London based cellist and composer from Germany. Over the years, she has carefully deconstructed her classical roots and almost exclusively performs unscripted, improvised music - solo and in collaboration with others. Much of her work has evolved in relationship with other art forms such as film, poetry, and site specific work. She is interested in the vast expressive possibilities of her instrument in relation to body, space, and others, always looking to rediscover or redefine what is musical/lyrical in this moment in time.
Recent collaborations have been with Paul Abbott, Tom Wheatley, Theodora Laird, Nik Colk Void, Okkyung Lee, Caius Williams, Bo-Sung Kim, Steve Noble, Kenichi Iwasa, and Phil Minton. She has also performed alongside poets Denise Riley, Nathaniel Mackey, Evie Ward, and Zara Joan Miller.
