Langham Research Centre - Britain’s leading musique concrète performing group - perform a selection of John Cage's works with pianist Ian Pace, including Music of Changes and Music for Piano.

And they give the UK premiere of their new work, “Muffled Ciphers”, a response to Ballard's 1970 novel The Atrocity Exhibition, described as “an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology”.

The programme will include:

John Cage:
Selections from Music of Changes
Selections from Music for Piano

Langham Research Centre:
Muffled Ciphers (2014)




LANGHAM RESEARCH CENTRE

Langham Research Centre formed in 2003, as producers at BBC Radio 3, based in London’s Langham Place. These were the last days that open-reel tape was used for broadcast. We loved the rich sound of tape, and the tangible personalities and imperfections of tape machines.

We wanted to keep working with tape, and recapture the spirit of the Radiophonic Workshop by making Radio 3 programmes featuring our tape experiments. An early example was Gateshead Multistorey Carpark, entirely made out of the sounds of the infamous Get Carter carpark, processed on tape.

Much like an Early Music group, but working instead with 20th century classic electronic repertoire, LRC specialise in performing works by John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Earle Browne and others, particularly repertoire which can only be performed with reel-to-reel tape and other now-obsolete devices.

We create new music from vintage analogue devices: open-reel tape, sine wave oscillators, phonograph cartridges and other discarded technology.

In 2014 we released John Cage Early Electronic And Tape Music on Sub Rosa, featuring previously unreleased John Cage repertoire.

langhamresearch.co.uk

MUFFLED CIPHERS

For this new piece Langham Research Centre have sieved descriptions of sounds from J.G.Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, to use as sonic building blocks. The piece's structure is suggested by the collage of discontinuous moments in the novel.

Prompted by the hugely blown-up images of tiny details in the book, sounds are vastly magnified in this performance, using contact microphones and vintage gramophone cartridges. Sounds are also degraded and fragmented, echoing the decay of Ballard's dystopian vision.

¼” tape machines are used in the composition to process sounds, revealing their hidden grain. Interwoven are archive recordings from 1970, including Ballard himself. The piece is a visceral celebration of Ballard and his most avant-garde creation. Originally commissioned by nyMusikk Norway.


IAN PACE

Fiery passion combined with incisive intellect mark the playing of pianist Ian Pace. His vast repertoire, stretching from complexity to simplicity, focuses in particular upon the works of contemporary British, German and Italian composers as well as the 'classics' of modern music by composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Nono and Cage. Equally adept as a chamber music and ensemble player, Ian Pace frequently performs with other soloists and groups, most notably pianist Mikhail Rudy and the Arditti Quartet.

Ian Pace has given the world premières of over 100 works for solo piano including Brian Ferneyhough's long awaited Opus Contra Naturam, Michael Finnissy's monumental 5½ hour work History of Photography in Sound and James Dillon's sparkling Book of Elements, Part 3.