Sunday 8 January 2023, 2pm
Recently debuting as a duo in late 2022 after many years of collaboration, Charbin & Prevost return to Café OTO for an improvised performance. Also on the bill, NO Moore, presents pre-prepared music (prepared air) with live guitar improvisation.
Marjolaine Charbin plays piano with an ever mutating mix of keyboard technique and various inside-piano techniques using hands, objects, voice and contact microphones. Her sound sometimes evokes electronic music. Recent collaborations include Eddie Prevost, Jennifer Allum, Ute Kanngiesser, Angharad Davies, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dominic Lash, Ed Lucas and Ken Ikeda.
https://www.marjolainecharbin.com
https://www.instagram.com/marjolainecharbin/
https://marjolainecharbin.bandcamp.com
Eddie Prévost began his life in music as a jazz drummer. A recurring interest in this form has been maintained, although always with an experimental ethos. Along the way he has maintained his fifty-year plus experimental credentials with AMM and numerous other improvisation projects, including his now twenty-year long weekly workshop. But drumming has generally been backgrounded to his experimental percussion work. More though, is to be expected of his drumming in 2020 on forthcoming multi-CD album: The Unexpected Alchemy. A part of this Krakow festival recording features the drums and saxophone trio of Ken Vandermark, Hamid Drake, and Eddie Prévost. His most recent released recordings include AMM’s: An Unintended Legacy, and a duo with John Butcher - Visionary Fantasies, both on Matchless Recordings. Also, a solo percussion LP on the Earshots label called Matching Mix. Later, in 2020 he meets with Jason Yarde and Nathan Moore, while in March concerts and recording will hear him drumming with US guitarist Henry Kaiser and saxophonist Binker Golding.
And, early 2020 should see the publication of his fourth book: An Uncommon Music for the Common Man: a polemical memoir.
“Prévost's free drumming flows superbly making use of his formidable technique. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or Max Roach.” - Melody Maker
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Pre-prepared music (prepared air) with live guitar improvisation.
This piece is inspired by the films of Peter Tscherkassky, particularly Outer Space (1999) and Dream Work (2001). My aim is not to create a point-to-point resemblance or musical equivalent, nor to apply Tscherkassky’s production techniques to music but, rather, to simply produce an affect analogous to the films in a different medium. Through this, to further the development of my own musical vocabulary and responsiveness, in a personal drive towards the universal.
Pertinent issues: limits and affordances of the medium; free will and identity in their relation to materiality; signal to noise ratios; displacement and condensation.
Why use prepared air? Admittedly, I don’t read music notation. Obviously, notation is a memorialisation by the composer and a communication to the performer: therefore, a question of memory and practice. Prepared air allows for a more imprecise memory and better miscommunications. Consequently, a different type of performance/practice has to be developed in the moment (i.e. improvised). Prepared air encourages a disclosed composition, or decomposition (rather than an enclosed improvisation), to take place. The interesting possibility is that this gives access to a point where entropy and negentropy (what breaks down and what (self) organises) become indistinct.
NO Moore can be heard on recent releases Traktor (Shrike Records, with Iris Ederer and Eddie Prévost) and Under the Sun (Matchless Recordings, with Rachel Musson, Olie Brice, and Eddie Prévost).
