“Lurk … elegantly draws attention to this world of burgeoning activity in enchanting language; humanising the creative use of machine instructions, reminding us that with software code, as with any other human tool, it’s what you do with it that counts.” Ollie Bown, RealTime Arts magazine

Lurk is back in for Summer 2013, with four diverse performances at Dalston’s Cafe Oto. Making software to make music to drink beer to...

lurk.org

LEAFCUTTER JOHN

Leafcutter John is a songwriter and improviser based in London, known for spinning stories and constructing soundscapes from his handmade instruments which include software, magnets, light sensors, and a guitar. His solo albums are on Planet Mu and Staubgold, and he’s also a member of Polar Bear, who are working on their next album.



PAUL HESSION AND ALEX MCLEAN

Paul Hession and Alex McLean are a new duo from Yorkshire, fusing improvised percussion with live code, exploring rhythm at the boundaries. Paul has played with many of the great free improvisers, including Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann, Joe McPhee and Lol Coxhill as well as musicians from other spheres, such as Paul Woolford and Squarepusher. Alex has rocked crowds with his code at festivals across Europe as one third of the band Slub since the year 2000, humanising abstraction as co-founder of TOPLAP, Algorave and Chordpunch.



ROGER DEAN

Roger Dean joins us from Sydney to bring together live algorithms with the acoustic piano, celebrating unpredictability between musical relations with people and machines. Improvisation is core to his work, and ranges from free (e.g. with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker) to more heavily pre-structured (e.g. with Graham Collier and austraLYSIS).



XNAME

xname is a multimedia artist born in Milan and currently based in London. Her sound performances are developed through the use of artificial lights and home-made micro-oscillators which generate sound waves. The light, transformed into electrical current, passes through the circuit and exits in the shape of a sonic frequency, while the sound, modulated by manipulating the light sources, becomes tactile and synaesthetic. The result is an hypnotic spectacle dominated by stroboscopy and industrial and noise-techno frequencies. Recently she has been experimenting with the effects of network lag and time delay on amplified sounds that, streamed to different servers, feed back to the speakers after travelling through the Internet.