Saturday 6 May 2023, 2pm
Excited to host a very special, first-time trio performance from three incredible improvising musicians in the form of Thurston Moore, Phill Niblock and Rie Nakajima. Not to be missed!
Rie Nakajima is a sculptor living in London. She creates sounds using a combination of motorised devices and everyday objects in the context of installations and performances.
Her art exists on the borderline of sculpture and music, open to chance and the influence of others. Improvisation is at the heart of her work.
The first major solo exhibition was held at IKON Gallery in Birmingham in 2018. She has also worked with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Annely Juda Gallery (London), Association de Le Cyclop (Milly la Forêt), ShugoArts (Tokyo), Donaueschinger Music Festival (Donaueschinger), Festival Météo (Mulhouse), Music for the Eyes Festival (Varmlands), Deep Time Festival (Edinburgh), Punkt Festival (Kristiansand), All Ears Festival (Oslo), Festival Archipel (Geneva), Cafe OTO (London) and many others. Collaboration is an essential part of her practice with frequent collaborators, Pierre Berthet, Angharad Davies, David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Max Eastley, Miki Yui, hans.w.koch, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop and Akira Sakata.
Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you. He says: "What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly." Niblock's performances are almost always accompanied by his films - painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O'Rourke.
Thurston Moore started Sonic Youth in 1980 and has been at the forefront of the alternative rock scene since that particular sobriquet was first used to signify any music that challenged and defied the mainstream standard. With Sonic Youth, Moore turned on an entire generation to the value of experimentation in rock n roll – from its inspiration on a nascent Nirvana, to Sonic Youth’s own Daydream Nation album being chosen by the US Library of Congress for historical preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2006. Thurston records and performs in a cavalcade of disciplines ranging from free improvisation to acoustic composition to black/white metal/noise disruption. He has worked with Yoko Ono, John Zorn, David Toop, Cecil Taylor, Faust, Glenn Branca and many others. His residency at the Louvre in Paris included collaborations with Irmin Schmidt of CAN. Alongside his various activities in the musical world, he is involved with publishing and poetry, and teaches writing at Naropa University, Boulder CO, a school founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Thurston also teaches music at The Rhythmic Music Conservatory (Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium) in Copenhagen. Presently he performs and records solo, with various ensembles and in his own band, The Thurston Moore Group.
