Monday 6 June 2016, 8pm
Great to have Phill back at OTO after nearly two years. Tonight he performs with Mezzo Soprano Lore Lixenberg and and Guy De Bievre on lap steel guitar. Preceding the performance will be a special screening of ‘The Movement of Phill Niblock’ – a film by Belgian filmmaker and visual artist, Maurits Wouters.
Phill Niblock will also be performing at Close-Up on Sunday 5 June.
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.
Lore Lixenberg is the leader of The Voice Party (an opera & political party you cannot join, it joins you) standing in the 2019 UK elections. In 2021 she won the Phonurgia Nova soundart prize for ’theVoicePartyOperaBotFarm[myFuryIsMyMuse] and was nominated for the Centre Pompidou Prix Heidsieck for her participatory voice pieces, ‘Pret a Chanter’ ‘PANIC ROOM - the singterviews’ film ‘The Fool', and BIRD!
Working with code, her explorations into participatory & digital practices continue with her extended voice dating app(ERA) SINGLR, taking place in 2022 and her voice currency VOXXCOIN, exploring the dramatic potential of encoded voice and dramatic exchange.
Her career began performing in physical theatre with Complicite, working with Simon Mcburney on Out of a House Walked a Man for the National Theatre that used texts by the Soviet writer Daniil Harms. Following this, her work has spanned performances on concert platforms and opera scenes to installations and vocal performances with composers, experimental visual and sound artists (STELARC, Bruce Mclean, ORLAN, David Toop, Imogen Sidworthy, Georgina Starr, Sam Belinfante)
She has played with Stewart Lee, Richard Thomas & Simon Munnery appearing in BBC2 Attention Scum and The Kombat Operas that won the Rose D'Or prize for comedy. Performing regularly the music of Frederic Acquaviva (with whom she founded & ran the Berlin-based Artspace www.laplaquetournante.org) she is in his piece 'SEMINAL' alongside Joan La Barbara, Vinko Globokar, Wills Morgan and Jacques Lizene for DeutschlandFunkKultur 2022. her first artist book, Memory Maps was published by Editions AcquAvivA, and her first monographic CD, The afternoon of a phone is on £@ß. Her vinyl NancarrowKaraoke (vocal transcriptions +performances of the piano rolls of Nancarrow) is out now on the NL label De Player. and her new Isou recording will be out next year.
Since January 17, 2018, Lixenberg has declared that everything she does is an extension of her voice and singing practice and is therefore to be considered an extended vocal.
Guy De Bièvre is a composer, musician, arranger, sound designer, sound art curator, theorist, and sound engineer. As a composer/performer he focuses on experiments, which combine computer, live electronics, acoustics and standard arrangement formats. He had works commissioned and/or performed by musicians such as Guy Klucevsek, Seth Josel, Anne La Berge, The Bozza Mansion Project, Annette Sachs, Zivatar Trio, and various local and international organizations.
As a performer (performing internationally in Europe, the USA and Japan) next to his own works, he collaborated with various composers and musicians such as Phill Niblock, Anne La Berge, Tom Hamilton, Ensemble Champ d’Action, and Peter Zummo.
Maurits Wouters (°1986 Turnhout, Belgium)
Filmmaker and visual artist.
He graduated as narrative filmmaker at the RITS in 2009. He then concluded a Master in Film & Theatre Studies at the University of Antwerp in 2011. From October 2013 onwards he has been doing doctoral research financed by the FWO (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek/Fund for Scientific Research).
In spite of his training in narrative film his artistic field of action has evolved towards the plastic arts. In this he does not limit himself to film. Also photography and installations have more and more become part of his artistic path. The films of Wouters were shown, among other venues, at the International Short Film Festival in Louvain and Experimental Intermedia in New York.
