Wednesday 8 February 2017, 7.30pm
Very pleased to welcome back Chicago-based composer and sound artist, Olivia Block – her first OTO show since 2011 – following on from new album, Dissolution, on Jason Lescalleet's Glistening Examples label.
“Ms. Block deployed her implements — hand-held microcassette recorders and walkie-talkies, a contact microphone brushed through her hair, a cathode light that flashed in time with pattering electronic pulsations — with an elegantly choreographed efficiency. The graceful, deliberate physicality of her gestures enhanced the ebb and flow of her aural assemblage, endowing what might have sounded abstract and cerebral with palpable sensations of volition and emotional involvement.” – New York Times
Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. Her body of work includes sound recordings, audio-visual installations, performances, sound design for cinema, and scores for orchestra and chamber music concerts.
Over the last twenty years, Block has pioneered the utilization of audio field recordings and found materials in the realms of music and sound art. She combines field recordings, chamber instruments and electronic textures, resulting in mysterious and vivid electroacoustic sound pieces including Pure Gaze, Mobius Fuse, Karren, and others. Block creates multimedia installations and performances utilizing found sounds from micro cassette tapes, field recordings, video, and curated 35mm slides.
Block’s work reflects her interests in site specificity, ethnographic sound, architectural sound, and found/archival materials from the 1950's-1990's
Her work with expanded cinema and film artists has led to interests related to cinema sound, and visual phenomena like shadows and reflections...(more)
Luciano Maggiore is a Palermo-born, London-based musician whose work is characterised by the use of speakers and analogue/digital devices (samplers, CD players, Walkmans, tape recorders) and which addresses the performativity of the musical act, the perception of it, and the obscurity that emanates from it. His interests include mechanisms of sound diffusion, performance, repetition, endurance, non-human animal languages, dance and folklore. With Louie Rice, he started NO-PA/PA-ON, a project that deals with performing score-based works, both acoustic and amplified.
https://lucianomaggiore.blogspot.com/
Kostis Kilymis is a Bristol-based artist. He performs electronic and noise music based on live synthesis, rhythm and found sound. His work focuses on immersive environments, feedback systems and the notion of representation. He has been an improviser, performer and collaborator – his encounters including Lucio Capece, Nikos Veliotis, Greg Pope, Leif Elggren, Sarah Hughes, Stephen Cornford and Phil Julian amongst others. He has published work on labels such as Rekem, I Dischi del Barone, Strange Rules and Coherent States.
Ute Kanngießer is a London based cellist and composer from Germany. Over the years, she has carefully deconstructed her classical roots and almost exclusively performs unscripted, improvised music. Much of her work has evolved in relationship with other art forms such as film, poetry, dance and site specific work. She is interested in the vast expressive possibilities of her instrument in relation to body, space, and others, always looking to rediscover or redefine what is musical/lyrical in this moment in time.
Recent releases include Blue Monday - a collaboration with writer Zara Joan Miller - on New York label Reading Group.
