Tuesday 1 December 2015, 8pm
PROGRAMME
Philippe Daerendinger – “Whitewash”
Andrew Hamilton – “Music for Losers”
Oliver Coates
Jessie Marino – “Endless Shrimp”
“Ritual I”
“Guillaume de Saint Cloud”
“Butter Mania”
Jessie Marino and We Spoke Oliver Coates & Lawrence Lek – “Unreal Estate”
The cellist and the video artist present “Unreal Estate – Live” (winner of the Dazed x Converse Emerging Artists Award). Plus “Music for Losers” for solo cello by Andrew Hamilton.
“Helicopters swoop on the penthouse helipad of a vast neoclassical complex. In the grounds, Anish Kapoor sculptures glint with dancing shards of light from a swimming pool lit by neon LEDs… The Royal Academy’s high-vaulted ceilings, ornate plasterwork and Corinthian columns standing sentry over wide, empty porticos are a shared architecture of the super-rich. It is this reality Lawrence Lek would have us enter as he keenly observes the vulnerable position these attractive features place the institution in, its design and prestigious art-world credentials exploited as sales tactics. The RA itself is on a rental contract, and set against the backdrop of London’s current housing crisis, Lek leverages this crack in the façade of dominance and timelessness associated with the nation’s most revered art establishment.”–Susanna Davies-Crook
“Unreal Estate” uses video-game software to imagine a future in which the Royal Academy of Arts has been sold off as a privately owned luxury estate. Join us for a tour of this dystopian world led by the artist Lawrence Lek, with a live soundtrack by Oliver Coates and voiceover of a found text from Russian “Tatler” magazine, translated into Mandarin by Joni Zhu. Tonight is the launch of Coates’ soundtrack for “Unreal Estate”, released digitally on Slip. Coates will also perform the UK premiere of “Music for Losers” by Andrew Hamilton.
Oliver Coates is a cellist, composer and producer based in London. He has performed solo shows in China, Russia, Brazil, Egypt and Australia, and made his New York debut at Le Poisson Rouge. He was the winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2011 and is an Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre. Two major commissions premiered in 2017: HELIOTONES, for girls' choir, flutes, cello and electronics, for Borealis Festival, and Shorelines, for string quartet and electronics, for Cryptic at Operadagen Rotterdam.
In 2016 Coates released a solo record, Upstepping, on PRAH, and a collaborative record, Remain Calm, with Mica Levi on Slip. He works closely with Levi, London Contemporary Orchestra, Elysia Crampton, Jonny Greenwood and the visual artist Lawrence Lek, for whom he has scored the award-winning video pieces Unreal Estate and QE3. He has conceived and programmed the Southbank Centre’s long-running Harmonic Series and its first DEEP∞MINIMALISM festival in 2016, which featured Pauline Oliveros’ last public Tuning Meditation.
Lawrence Lek 陆明龙 is a London-based artist working with moving image, performance, video games, and installation. He draws from a background in architecture and electronic music to build virtual worlds through a process of collage that combines narrative and material environments. Blurring distinctions between film and game, his works are known for their portrayal of nomadic characters within technological landscapes, and for exploring themes of identity, memory, control, and agency.
Andrew Hamilton was born in Dublin in 1977. He studied in Ireland, England and the Netherlands, and his composition teachers included Kevin Volans, Anthony Gilbert and Louis Andriessen. His work has been performed internationally and at many festivals including Gaudeamus. Ultraschall Berlin, ISCM World Music Days, Dublin Fringe Theatre Festival, Sommer in Stuttgart, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and the MATA Festival New York. Recently he has worked on new pieces with Juliet Fraser/Maxime Echardour, Crash Ensemble, Isabelle O'Connell, Ensemble Klang, CHROMA, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Ives Ensemble, EXAUDI, Endymion Ensemble, TILT Brass and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. In 2012 he was an artist in residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and Civitella Ranieri, Umbria. Currently he is a visiting tutor in composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire.
The artist presents her recent encounters with video, performance, radio and the internet.
Jessie Marino is a composer/performer/media artist from New York. Her current work explores the virtuosity inside common activities, ritualistic absurdities, and the archeology of personal technologies. Her pieces rigorously score out sound, video, physical movements, lighting and staging which are then placed within organised temporal structures and musical frameworks. Jessie is the co-founder and director of the experimental performance collective On Structure and is co-artistic director, composer and cellist for Ensemble Pamplemousse. This performance will be a presentation of an archival collection of poly-memes, internet video hybrids and performative audio theatres.
We Spoke is a contemporary music company based in Switzerland and London. We Spoke : merges ‘we speak’ with ‘bespoke’ and explores the huge stylistic range of contemporary art music. Each production features a major artistic collaboration – with a composer, dancer, visual artist, choreographer, or other creative practictioner - and focuses on one theme , coupling original musical interpretation with virtuosic live performance.
We Spoke has performed extensively in Switzerland, the UK and South America in cities including Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Zurich, London, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Lima. Following over twenty performances in 2012, 2013 concerts include fondation suisse in Paris, Unerhörte Musik in Berlin, KammerKlang in London, Florence international contemporary music festival and a new residency at the Lima Contemporary Music festival as well as the new production 'Song' to be toured in Switzerland and the UK.
Philippe Daerendinger’s “Whitewash” was originally designed for an installation in collaboration with the artists Tarik Hayward and Guy Meldem, and was projected onto a screen made of tied-up wood and projected mud. For its UK premiere, the film will be screened in an equally innovative format. Daerendinger graduated from the ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2007 and from the Royal College of Art in 2015. He has recently showed at the Centre d’art de Neuchâtel, Nuits des images at the Musée de l'Elysée and 3236IRLS in Peckham, and curated a show with Sam Tierney at the Camden Arts Centre. Daerendinger works with found objects and cheap, common materials like wood, paper and chalk to obtain arrangements in which textures and combinations convey narrative and political potential.
