Tuesday 10 January 2017, 7.30pm
A concert of people who decided to form groups with Adam and Jonathan Bohman. Some of them are now dead, but they have still agreed to play just this once - exclusively and for one night only.
Jive Bunny roadkill + musique concrete.
Four Perfect Balls is a blend of speech, layers of multi-tracked free improvisation using unamplifi ed objects and modifi ed instruments, fi eld recordings and computer generated synthesis. Speech content is derived from a collage of original writing and Police Training Manuals, pulp potboilers, recipes, menus and information relating to the North Sea fi shing economy. These improvised interactions took place in the headphone soundstage rather than the live space. The edited results are pieces that self-subvert, gyrating between pulseless baroque pointillism, post-rock-ist incoherence and word beats. For almost 20 years Adam and Jonathan Bohman, Panos Ghikas and Richard Thomas have worked together, as live performers in the large ensemble The Bohman Extended Family as well as in other splinter
“Sometimes it helps to close your eyes.”
Diastolic Murmurs formed in 1985. Adam Bohman and Richard Crow began their findings inside Philip Wachsmann’s near-legendary Electronic Music Studio at the City Literary Institute, London—an electro-acoustic lab now erased, but still resonant.
Their practice is pseudo-medical, visceral, and invasive. Objects—preferably damaged, broken, or discarded—are opened up and interrogated. Contact microphones are directly injected. Sound is extracted, not performed. What emerges is an inner, occult anatomy: rupture, friction, residue.
This method became Live Electronic Dissections—audio-visual performances informed by “theatre of cruelty”—and a parallel body of home recordings made at the Institution of Rot, Finsbury Park. These works circulated quietly on limited cassette and CD-R editions, passed hand to hand, archived imperfectly.
Not industrial by definition, but undeniably aligned. The group’s severe output—early releases, tape covers, photographs, posters, collages, zines—shares a bloodline with transgressive industrial and noise culture. Bohman and Crow remain obsessive home-tapers. Early material still festers online, preserved by tape archivists such as Mors Mea and Celestial Railroad. More recently, certain fragments have resurfaced via Nostalgie de la boue, Psych.KG, and scatterArchive. There are rumours that their seminal debut Electro-Medicine may yet be exhumed by Hospital Productions. No confirmation. No pulse.
The serious drama wing of Secluded Bronte, comprising Jonathan Bohman and Richard Thomas.
Paradigm's head man Clive Graham has agreed to supply some internecine sounds.
Panos Ghikas is Sudden Rectum. Other times he is Captain Miki. Panos is a composer and improviser, is a member of unpopular music band The Chap and runs Migro Records.
migrorecords.com
