Friday 2 October 2015, 8pm
Laura Naukkarinen, aka Lau Nau is one of the most interesting names in the Finnish music scene – a singer-songwriter, producer and film music composer. Her songs are imbued with a cinematic breadth of vision and her idiosyncratic, finely honed soundworld builds on fragile, spectral otherness. Her fourth album ”HEM. Någonstans” (Fonal records 2015) takes us to the fleeting borderline between contemporary classical and experimental music.
“[Lau Nau is] credited with 23 different instruments (including beer cans and colourful juice glasses), but her music is simple and uncluttered. Lone acoustic plucks, simple violin drones and sparse percussion rattles seem like vast universes when placed in Naukkarinen's divine hands.” – Marc Masters, The WIRE, review of ‘Kuuthartha’
LAU NAU, aka Laura Naukkarinen, is one of the most interesting names in the contemporary music scene in Finland. Her songs are imbued with a cinematic breadth of vision and her idiosyncratic, finely honed sound world builds on fragile, spectral otherness. She works using both acoustic and electronic instruments, from field recordings to analogue synthesizers, from vocals and traditional instruments to musique concrete and found objects.
O YAMA O is with Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, Keiko Yamamoto, and Rie Nakajima
“How often are we in such intimate closeness to the materials of sound, the physicality of a naked voice, without chairs, microphones, distance, so conscious of light, climate, atmosphere, the nearness of other bodies, the permeability of a structure that is outside as much as in?” - David Toop
Formed of artist Rie Nakajima, artist Keiko Yamamoto, percussionist and photographer Marie Roux and violin player Billy Steiger, O Yama O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. They move between pop and the philosophical, defined by the overall space afforded to texture and movement. In small, delicate sound an intimate musical climate is established that reflects on life, telling stories of improvised clockwork, whispered dreams, small movements of the hand and the rhythm to be found in the shuffle of a deck of cards.
The group have performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, allEars Festival, Empty Gallery, Novas Frequencias, LCMF, Hybrida, Somerset House, Hombroich raketenfestival, Vostell Museum, reiheM and many more.
https://www.rienakajima.com/_work/_collaborationsetc/OYAMAO.html
@oyamaoooo
Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.
Active/upcoming solo projects include:
- a proposed (re)history of technology, using the vibrating string as framing mechanism.
- an album of modified pipe organ recordings, to be released by OtoRoku in 2027.
- an ongoing investigation into audio compression algorithms and the artefacts and loss inherent to digital/analogue boundary states.
Active group projects include:
- O Yama O (w/ Keiko Yamamoto, Rie Nakajima, Marie Roux)
- X-Ray Hex Tet (w/ Paul Abbott, Edward George, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright)
- Portraits (w/ Daniel Blumberg, Seymour Wright)
Completed(?) solo projects include:
- composing and recording the score for Stacy Martin's short film Amaretti
- Box (for EKM) for piano and string quartet, premiered by Apartment House in 2024
- Loud Object, a 2023 violin record.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
