Thursday 1 September 2016, 8pm
Skatgobs is the visceral vocal improv trio of Phil Minton, Dylan Nyoukis and Luke Poot. Channeling and contorting the voice into enveloping textures and contours that can be subtley crepuscular one moment and howlingly nightmarish the next, all three are peerless vocal performers. Also on the bill is Minton's vocal duo with the great Chinese-American musician, Audrey Chen.
For a long time now Phil Minton has been working as a improvising singer, solo and in groups and situations at various locations all over the place, deserts, quarries, concert halls, pubs, holes, dodgy clubs, containers, up trees, in prisons, on mountains, in churches, under bridges and cafe oto etc.
Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s - Then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s.
For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as an improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians, including tours with American singer Audrey Chen - with whom he has sang far and wide in the last ten years.
Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.
A former heavy metal kid, Dylan Nyoukis, is a noise expressionist and an experimentalist who explores improvisatory sounds of nightmarish beauty. ”…His solo vocal and tape work continues to push the envelope in terms of the expressive options offered by amplified physicality while his rejection of any kind of theoretical backdrop liberates him from servitude to any specific agenda. He remains a singular voice." - David Keenan.
Video by Helen Petts
Luke Poot. Sheffield based Strepsils abuser. Recent collaborations with the likes of Adam Bohman, Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides, Blue Yodel, Ben Knight, Acrid Lactations, Chastity Potatoe, and Phils' gang of toughs. 'I just listened to a bit that sounded like a pig pushing weights with a scotch egg in its gob.' - Stuart Arnot.
AUDREY CHEN is a second-generation Taiwanese American artist based in Berlin. Her work explores migration, memory and the transmission of untold histories through voice and the body. Using extreme vocal techniques and the Ciat-Lonbarde “Fourses” synthesizer, she creates visceral performances where body, space and sound merge in a feedback loop of resonance and imagination. For over two decades, she has toured internationally, performing solo and in long-term collaborations including duos with Phil Minton, Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (as BEAM SPLITTER), Lukas Koenig and Julien Desprez (as MOPCUT), Kaffe Matthews, Nick Klein and Hugo Esquinca. Her work has been presented at festivals and venues such as Maerzmusik, CTM, Unsound, Wien Modern, Berghain, Zacheta National Gallery and the Watermill Center. The Wire describes her practice as “uncompromising and idiosyncratic… tightly disciplined yet acoustically wild,” exposing the raw physicality of voice and utterance.
https://www.audreychen.com/
