Tuesday 30 January 2024, 7.30pm
Vito Ricci’s leading edge instinct and creativity have made him a vital and prolific composer of illuminating and compelling works. Infused with poignancy and honesty, his music has the power to linger in the listener’s memory. Ricci is an American artist and prolific composer of wide ranging genres & electronic ambient music from music for theater and dance as well as string quartets, song cycles, piano and small ensemble pieces.
The Dutch label Music from Memory borrowed its name from Ricci’s 1985 vinyl and reissued recordings and tapes in 2015 as “I Was Crossing a Bridge ”.
In 2016, a Symphony for Amiga was commissioned and composed with the old intelligent instrument. A book / cassette “My Little Life” was published in 2017 by Séance Centre out of Toronto.
Lise Vachon, an inspiring and mesmerizing vocalist concerned with spontaneity, has maintained a vocal collaboration with Ricci. She captures the spirit of creative singing and interprets feelings more than stories. Commitment to exploration and influences has taken her to a spontaneous vocabulary of her own. Ricci produced her CD “Vocalise” with stellar musicians, Rashied Ali, Peter Zummo, Blue Gene Tyranny, Byard Lancaster.
Loula Yorke is an award-winning composer, improviser and live performer working primarily with a modular synthesiser.
Yorke's dynamic and ever-fluid practice draws a line between music, activism and live art, incorporating participatory pieces, such as 2021's Atari Punk Girls, critically acclaimed recorded works, such as 2022's Florescence, and live modular synthesis performances that incorporate a kaleidoscope of melodic sequences, noise, and snatches of processed voice.
In January 2024, Yorke will be releasing Volta, an album that stands on the solid foundations of her previous releases – the errant experimental frequencies of ysmysmysm, the scratchy techno punk of LDOLS, the gravitational mass of Florescence – but nonetheless marks a complete departure for her in process. Here Yorke steps into a zone of self-imposed order, setting aside the unpredictability of live improvisation. Within the luminous sonic tessellations of Volta, synth lines are programmed rather than randomly generated, refined through hours of listening, thinking and tweaking at her modular sequencer … until a wormhole opens and we tumble in. Revolving and rotating, swelling and contracting, waxing and waning. The loop is the symbol of infinity, a connection between human pattern-making and cosmic cycles unknown. And just as a tilt in Earth’s axis gives us the seasons, the smallest shift in a sequence can expand one sound into a musical universe.
