Saturday 5 August 2023, 7.30pm
Sagome presents a triple bill with transcendent music by pianist and multi-instrumentalist Riccardo Sinigaglia from the legendary Italian 1980s outfit Futuro Antico (Oto debut), kaleidoscopic improvisations from Kenichi Iwasa & Maxwell Sterling, plus a dubbed-out set for clarinet and live electronics by Severin Black.
Born in Arona, Italy, in 1953, Riccardo Sinigaglia is an architect and a musician. Until his retirement, he taught electronic music at Milan Conservatory, where he studied during the Seventies with Angelo Paccagnini.
He has always worked in electronic and concrete music, with instruments such as Moog and Sinthy VCS and traditional tape-manipulation techniques. His work focuses on modes, mean tone, pitagorean scales and complex polyrhythmics - he is deeply involved in ethnomusicology, the elements of which are revisited and employed in his musical language.
In the 1970s, he created his first concrete-electronic compositions, including Scorrevole 1, Scorrevole 3 and Fluttuazioni, which integrate nature sounds, animal cries and various noises reworked with the analogue techniques. In the early 1980s, he formed the improvising group Futuro Antico with Walter Maioli, a musician and ethnomusicologist specialising in sounds obtained with instruments from primitive cultures, and Gabin Dabiré, a musician from Burkina Faso specialising in African instruments and rhythms.
Currently, he collaborates with Davide Zolli, the Cavalazzi trio, Sergio Armaroli, Federico Sanesi, Ariel Kalma and many others.
Kenichi Iwasa and Maxwell Sterling first began playing music together with Naima Karlsson and Neneh Cherry, celebrating the art and music of Don and Moki Cherry.
Through their love of improvised music and interest in obfuscating genres and traditions, they began collaborating on various performances- from catwalk shows for Louise Gray, to performance work with Linder Sterling.
Kenichi Iwasa is known for his legendary Krautrock Karaoke night as well as being a sought after collaborator throughout Europe. Maxwell Sterling is a composer and sound artist, releasing his debut album, ‘Hollywood Medieval’ in 2017.
Running the experimental label and event series Archaic Vaults, Severin Black has been forming a worldwide community around marginal music since 2020; the most recent collaborations including shows and released material alongside YL Hooi, Oxhy, Ewa Awe, Flora Yin-Wong, Nexcyia, Lisa Lerkenfeldt, Civilistjävel and Christoph de Babalon.
Using the label as an outlet for ongoing projects with violinist Vanessa Bedoret and sound artist Owen Pratt, Severin also has a sizable discography under the techno alias Nape – the most recent being the album Ten Tonne Angel on Psychic Liberation. They have performed in spaces such as the ICA (London), KM28 (Berlin), Le Poisson Rouge (New York), Mission To Seafarers (Melbourne) and on a giant pipe organ in a north-east London church.
