Saturday, August 29, 2020 at 4pm CT
Front Porch Productions presents:
4:00PM - Arnold Dreyblatt
4:30PM - Pita & Tina Frank
5:10PM - Tony Buck
5:40PM - Bill Orcutt
6:00PM - Chris Abrahams
Artist Bios
Jamie Stewart (b1978) is from Los Angeles, California. In 2002 he began the musical group Xiu Xiu and started to waste his life.
Xiu Xiu tries to make music for people opposed to and opposed by the horror and disquiet of life.
They have been called “self flagellating,” “harsh,” “brutal,” “shocking,” and “perverse;” but also “genius,” “brilliant,” “unique,” “imaginative,” and “luminous.”
Xiu Xiu draws upon musical traditions of British post punk, 20th century classical, industrial noise, experimental and traditional percussion musics, 50s rock and roll, field recordings, queer dance pop and kosmische musik.
Xiu Xiu has toured relentlessly all over the world. They have shared stages with Sun Ra Arkestra, Ben Frost, Zola Jesus, Deerhoof, Prurient, Liars, Swans, Matmos, Faust, Grouper, Genesis P Orridge, Angelo Badalamenti and thousands, perhaps billions, of other unstoppable musical fairies, dignitaries and saints.
For the past decade they have been more productive than ever. Xiu Xiu released 6 studio albums of original music, collaborated with Mitski, Merzbow, Eugene Robinson, Mantra Percussion, and Lawrence English and recorded reinterpretations of the music of Nina Simone (NINA), American religious songs (Unclouded Sky), Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and the music of Twin Peaks (Plays The Music of Twin Peaks).
They have created museum installations for the Berlin and Venice biennales, LACMA, the Getty Museum and Laguna Art Museum. Jamie Stewart's debut novel, Anything that Moves, will be published next year.
Their download site, xiuxiu69, dedicated to rare and obscure releases of the band, donates 100% of its proceeds to various progressive activist groups.
Girl with Basket of Fruit, the band's 11th studio album, came out in 2019 and was a collaboration with Haitian master drummer Daniel Brevil.
They are currently at work on their 12th album slated for release in 2021.
As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a "powerful musician... a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance."
Orcutt originally appeared on the underground scene as a co-founder of Harry Pussy, whose explosive music combined ‘70s no wave, the ferocity of ‘80s hardcore, and the acrobatic intricacy of Cecil Taylor. Seemingly single-handedly, and over the course of dozens of releases, Harry Pussy built the prototype for noise-rock in the ‘90s and beyond. Throughout, Orcutt (aided occasionally by a second guitarist) wove incandescent, treble-heavy lines through the maelstrom of Adris Hoyos’ percussion. They toured extensively, performing or traveling with bands like Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, The Dead C, and Guided by Voices, before screeching to a halt in 1997. Writing about a 2008 compilation of their work, Pitchfork described Harry Pussy as "just about the most abrasive band America has ever seen."
After a hiatus of over a decade, Orcutt reemerged as a solo artist, at first performing solely on acoustic guitar. Drawing influences from Cecil Taylor (again), Dylan’s Basement Tapes, and the recursive voice of Gertrude Stein, Orcutt began exploring the invisible threads linking free improvisation to the forgotten crevices of the American songbook, from blues to minstrelsy.
Upon his return, recognition was immediate. His 2009 album "A New Way To Pay Old Debts," originally released on Palilalia and reissued by the acclaimed Viennese electronic music label Editions Mego, was named 3rd best recording of that year by WIRE magazine, who praised its "tense muscularity." Orcutt went on to work extensively with Editions Mego, issuing a total of four records under their auspices. NPR named Orcutt's 2011 album "How The Thing Sings" as the 3rd best avant garde album of the year, commenting that his playing would "make Derek Bailey do a double-take". His 2013 album of standards, "A History of Every One," made NPR's list of the year's best new guitar records, and was singled out by the Guardian, who described it as "covers of traditional American songs, deconstructed in lurching flurries of twanging metal." Most recently, Orcutt's 2015 album "Colonial Donuts" was ranked #14 on Rolling Stone's Best Avant Garde Albums of The Year.
Orcutt maintains an active tour schedule, performing in North & South America, Asia and Europe, and appearing at festivals world-wide, including Hopscotch (Raleigh), Incubate (Tilburg), Le Nouveau Festival du Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Unsound (Krakow). Rolling Stone described his performance at 2014's Big Ears Festival as "savage.
In recent years, Orcutt has resumed his paint-peeling electric guitar attack, best represented by his collaborations with drummers (Chris Corsano or Jacob Felix Heule), guitarists (Loren Connors and Sir Richard Bishop), and others (including cellist Okkyung Lee and vocalist Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux). His newest work continues the guitarist's signature interrogation of his instrument, yet signals a new phase of cautiously-employed conventional melody and song structure. With each recording and performance, Bill Orcutt continues to invent a sonic vernacular built around raw and tortured tones, ragged minimalism, and seemingly inexhaustible improvisational stamina.
Tony Buck is regarded as one of Australia’s most creative and adventurous exports, with vast experience across the globe. As a drummer, percussionist, improviser, guitarist, video maker and producer, he has been involved in a highly diverse array of projects but is probably best known around the world as a member of the trio “The Necks”.
Apart from The Necks he has played, toured or recorded with Jon Rose, Otomo Yoshihide, John Zorn, T. Cora, Phil Minton, Haino, Even Parker, The Machine for Making Sense, Lee Ranaldo, Ne Zhdall, The EX, Clifford Jordan, Ground Zero …
Following studies and early experience in Australia he spent time in Japan, where he formed “Peril” with Otomo Yoshihide and Kato Hideki before relocating to Europe in the mid-nineties.
Some of the more high profile projects he has been involved with include the band Kletka Red, and touring and recording with, among others, The EX, The Exiles, and Corchestra, and involvement with most of the international improvisation and new music community and festivals.
He also creates video works for use with live music performance and has had pieces shown in Tokyo, Belfast, Berlin, New York and Sydney.
Current projects include a LIVE solo adaption of the UNEARTH music, incorporating installations, video, drums and guitar; “Spill” with Magda Mayas; “Transmit” (a guitar driven post-rock project); New York based trio “Glacial” (with David Watson and Lee Ranaldo); “Circadia” (with Kim Myhr, David Stackenas and Joe Williamson); a long standing duo with Axel Doerner as well as a continuing in ad hoc and improvised performance settings.
Xylouris White is firmly rooted in the past and future. Playing Cretan music of original and traditional composition, the band consists of Georgios Xylouris on Cretan laouto and vocals and Jim White on drum kit. Xylouris is known and loved by Cretans and Greeks at home and abroad and has been playing professionally from age 12. Jim White is an Australian drummer known and loved throughout the world as the drummer of Dirty Three, Venom P Stinger and now Xylouris White. For the last four years these two men have been performing as Xylouris White, the culmination of 25 years of friendship forged through music and place.
George Xylouris
If the talents of singer and lute player George Xylouris seem otherworldly, even god-given, it is hardly surprising. One of the best-loved artists on Crete, the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, Xylouris is a member of a clan long-regarded throughout Greece as musical royalty. A clan that hails from Anogeia, a mountain shepherding village down the hill from the Cave of Zeus, that hotspot of ancient mythology.
To hear Xylouris play his long-necked lauto and sing songs of love and liberty in his impassioned, distinctive voice, is to experience tradition at its finest; tradition that this bearded father-of-three grants respect, and crafts into something unique. It’s a sound that has taken him around the world, to festivals and concert venues throughout Europe, North America and Australia – where he lived for eight years in Melbourne, absorbing influences from the city’s thriving live rock scene – and back again to Crete. Teaching and playing at home, in village communities, is his lifeblood – just as it is his family’s.
Xylouris could not have been anything else but a musician: his father is the Cretan singer and lyra player Psarantonis, a man beloved of everyone from ethnomusicologists to Nick Cave. His late uncle was the iconic Nikos Xylouris, a singer and lyra player who became a symbol of the protest movement that brought down the Greek military junta in 1973. George was just a kid when he started playing the lute at the knee of his uncle Giannis Xylouris; after accompanying his famous father at village functions, there were several group recordings. Then George Xylouris struck out on his own.
Until then the Cretan lute was usually played as a backing instrument. But with albums such as Antipodes, by Xylouris Ensemble , Embolo with his uncle Psarogiannis and Oso ki an Dernei o Anemos out with All Together Now , Xylouris showcased the lauto’s solo potential with a repertoire of traditional and self-penned material.
His numerous projects are testament to his restless musical curiousity: there’s a duo, Xylouris White, with Jim White, Brooklyn-based drummer of Australian instrumental trio, Dirty Three, with who Xylouris has toured. The Xylouris Ensemble features his three Greek-Australian children.
His concerts at home have become legendary for their musicality and power; his onstage record is currently 18 hours straight.
Jim White
There are drummers and there are drummers. And then there is Jim White. Having first commanded international attention in the mid-1990s with the acclaimed Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three, the New York-based virtuoso is now the go-to guy for alt-A-list vocalists with collaboration in mind. Those who’ve worked with him – and all those he’s mesmerised as he plays - testify to his deft way with a rhythm, a downbeat, a jazz-fuelled wig out.
His is a unique playing style forged in the then isolated Melbourne; a style that can sound like a full band one moment, and something stark and beautiful the next.
PJ Harvey has said there is ballet in White’s light, precise touch;. Will Oldham once remarked on White’s ability to dismantle a song, bit by bit, and rebuild it with his parts incorporated. The likes of Smog, Nick Cave, White Magic, Bonnie Prince Billy and Cat Power all know that there’s more to White’s drumming than mere accompaniment. His intuitive beats and singular approach have complimented the repertoire of the iconic Cretan lyra player, Psarantonis, and created sparks in his collaborations with the Cretan lute player George Xylouris. Whoever White is playing with, he is right there, present in the most inspirational sense.
With a career this long and varied, credits are too numerous to list. There have been projects with filmmakers, collaborations with visual artists; and an album of duets with the singer Nina Nastasia. A founding member of the now-defunct Australian avante-rock outfit Venom P-Stinger, White has curated the leftfield UK music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties. In his spare moments, he’s drumming. White never rests on his laurels.
Chris Abrahams is best known as the piano player with the long form trio, the Necks, a band that has built up quite a following internationally over the last thirty years.
Parallel to this, Chris has developed a formidable reputation as a solo pianist. His piano music explores the resonating properties of the vibrating piano string – coaxing from it strange, varied and beautiful sounds that often transcend the generally observed tonal qualities of the instrument. At times his approach borders on the electronic, acoustically modelling reverbs, distortion, delays and low frequency oscillations. He conjures a meditative sound world that is both mesmerizing and emotional.
Chris is about to release his ninth solo album “Fluid to The Influence” on Room 40 records.
Chris Abrahams is best known for being the piano player in the long form music trio the Necks. However, with ten solo albums under his belt and many performances internationally, he has developed a formidable reputation as a solo artist outside of the group. He brings to the pipe organ a unique perspective that combines experimental sound design with highly developed keyboard skill and in the process he conjures a meditative sound world that is both mesmerising and emotional.
Of his last album “Climb” John Shand (Sydney Morning Herald) wrote: “Routinely in play is Abrahams’ penchant for glacial beauty, enigma and a sense of disquiet, as if something has been left unsaid.”
Tyondai Braxton
It was either a fortuitous coincidence, or cosmic intervention, on March 21, 2013, when Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE, a new work for percussion and electronics, had its world premiere in the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s cylindrical Guggenheim Museum in New York. HIVE—which was later performed at the Sydney Opera House, the MONA FOMA festival in Tasmania, and London’s Barbican Centre—was created as a live multimedia piece that was part architectural installation and part ensemble performance. Five performers sat cross-legged atop their own space-age oval pods designed by Danish architect Uffe Surland Van Tams; each pod was programmed to complete the sonic mood of the piece with ever-changing LED light emitting through its perforated wooden walls. The piece derived its name, as Braxton told London’s Guardian, because “there’s a very social aspect to what’s happening in this project. Technologically speaking, the performers of the piece are very connected together.”
The same night as the Guggenheim premiere, 20 blocks south, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Oktophonie, a 70-minute electronic work depicting an epic battle between the forces of the archangel Michael and Lucifer, had the first of nine performances at the Park Avenue Armory. It was after attending Stockhausen’s work later that week—part narrative ritual, part spatial and environmental experiment—that Braxton reconsidered the music he had just premiered, and now wanted to take further, and deeper. Two years later, only fragments of that original Guggenheim performance remain on HIVE1.
Written and recorded throughout 2013 and 2014, HIVE1 marks a new direction for Tyondai Braxton: his first album in six years, since 2009’s Central Market, and his first recording for Nonesuch, where he joins formative influences such as Morton Subotnick and John Adams. Most significantly—after having several of his large-scale orchestral works performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, and Wordless Music Orchestra—HIVE1 is the composer’s first fully realized work of purely electronic music since his earlier loop-based music in the early 2000s, and an unmistakable swerve away from Braxton’s signature materials and musical concerns to date.
Praised by the Washington Post as “one of the most acclaimed experimental musicians of the last decade,” Braxton has been writing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively, under various group titles, since the mid-1990s. He is the former front man of experimental rock band Battles, whose debut album Mirrored was both popular and influential. Since departing Battles in 2010, Braxton has focused on composing music for HIVE, as well as composing commissioned pieces for ensembles such as The Bang on a Can All Stars, Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, and Brooklyn Rider. In 2012, he collaborated with Philip Glass—performing as a duo for the festival series All Tomorrow’s Parties, as well as remixing Glass’ work for the REWORK remix album.
HIVE1 is probably not the album that most people would have expected Tyondai Braxton to make after Central Market. Dense, jagged, angular, abrasive, mischievous, and complex, HIVE1’s eight compositions will require several listens for most of us to unpack. In this regard, the album represents the categorical opposite of what most people understand by the term “electronic music” today.
Where the dominant influence on Central Market was the Stravinsky of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, HIVE1 draws more from the mid-20th century avant-garde, a world inhabited by the likes of Varèse, Xenakis, and Stockhausen—along with the more contemporary examples of Florian Hecker, Carston Nicolai/Raster Noton, and Braxton’s frequent collaborator Ben Vida, who appears as a performer in HIVE1. Where Central Market was scored for a small army of strings, guitars, horns, kazoos, and singers, the music of HIVE1 derives from the abrasive textures and manipulation of organic and synthesized sounds.
It was Varese’s 1931 work for 13 percussionists, Ionisation, that was a starting point in Braxton’s mind as he wrote HIVE1, along with the corresponding questions it raised: What, exactly, does the idea of a percussion ensemble mean today—where the instruments seesaw between a textural and rhythmic role?—and what does the conversation between that ensemble and modern electronic music sound like?
Braxton says, “There is a sense of impossibility when you hear electronic music tapped to its full potential—especially when it’s an analog instrument. The sound is real, but it’s doing something that would be impossible for a person or a traditional acoustic instrument to do. Balancing that with a more traditional sense of making music, considering rhythm and harmony, you realize the massive world this way of working inhabits.”
Central to the ideas of HIVE1 is the idea of what Braxton calls “generative,” versus “intuitive,” composition: “When I say ‘generative’ I mean the content wasn’t created by me physically playing a guitar or keyboard, but by ‘setting up scenarios’ using electronic means: sequencers, LFOs, etc. When I say ‘intuitive’ I mean more actual playing an instrument as well as how I laid out these generative recordings and parts. All the pieces have been sculpted and reworked to find forms that I liked.” Braxton points to Xenakis as the father of generative music: “To hear his sense of time and space, and pacing—how long to sit with an idea before it moves on…” He continues, “I’ve been excited about the idea of music that acts not only as virtual environment but as a narrative as well. Sound environments with a story.
“My starting point was the idea of incorporating my love of Varèse’s and Xenakis’ orchestral and percussion music and seeing what that meant now in my own electronic music and way of working. After notating all the percussion parts I soon found myself trying to do the same with synthesizers and realized notation and MIDI sequencing wasn’t using the strange nature of these instruments. It took a long time to understand how to work using generative ideas and realizing that you could actually control them.
“I didn’t understand prior to making this record that algorithmic composition is something you can control with real depth—to the point where you can generate music that sounds like you, as opposed to being at the mercy of a limited process that ends up sounding generic. This was a real awakening for me” he says. “As an electronic record, HIVE1 is ironically maybe the most natural record I’ve made, as far as the feel of it. The generative process of it mimics forms and functions that are found in nature and the pace of the music unfolds fluidly.”
Like Xenakis and Varèse, Braxton delights in smashing and manipulating blocks of musical material against one another, building up and knocking down with sly humor and irreverent exuberance. On HIVE1, the blocks are percussive and electronic, and rhythmic rather than melodic: a complementary dialogue between musicians and machines. Percussionists Yuri Yamashita, Chris Thompson, and Matthew Smallcomb use an assortment of percussion instruments such as bongos, woodblocks, cymbals, and snare drums that play against the continuously irregular electronics at speeds that stutter and fall in and out of sync. At times, the dialogue is terse, fractious, interrupted; at others, the conversation becomes spirited, accelerated, syncopated, more frenetic. To use a visual metaphor, its organizing structure is closest to collage, or cut-up: the result of a generative process rather than a conventionally descriptive or symbolic work of art.
Throughout the album, the sounds of percussion and modular synth collide and vibrate in ways that sometimes resolve but more often do not. There are ominous, dissonant screeches, woozy bass lines, crackling bursts of static, and low sustained drones, all counterpointed with clashing irregular rhythms. The music is peppered with sounds that resemble crickets, alarms, typewriters, bird calls, force fields, distant helicopters, airplanes taking off and landing. In this way, HIVE1 curiously (even unconsciously) recalls the piece whose performance initiated Braxton’s reimagining of HIVE: Oktophonie, which itself evoked Stockhausen’s memories of bombers, fighter planes, and explosions as a teenage conscript in a German field hospital during World War II.
—Ronen Givony
Tina Frank is an Austrian designer, artist, and professor at the University of Art and Design Linz where she is heading the Department Visual Communication at the Institute for Media. Since the early 1990ies she has been collaborating with musicians to create record covers, audio-visual performances and installations presented all around the world, such as Ars Electronica, Linz; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ICC, Tokyo, and played at numerous festivals such as Sonar, Atonal, Mute, etc. She received the Diagonale Prize for Innovative Cinema. Her works are represented in international collections for video art, experimental film and digital synaesthesia. Frank's visualizations are characterized by an abstract formal language and an intense colorfulness that playfully explores the limits of perception.
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Peter Rehberg (b. 1968, London), (aka Pita) is the founder of Editions Mego, and a composer and performer of electronic music.
Rehberg, since decades residing in Vienna, began his career over 25 years ago when the aesthetic possibilites of so-called Laptop music were just about to be discovered. He started working with computers since then and is internationally perceived as one of the pioneers of synthetic music. His musical background is to be found in Noise, Ambient and
Techno, as well as early electroacoustics. He currently explores the possibities of audio experimentation using a modular synthesizer set up.
Over the last years he has made many collaborations such Fenn’O’Berg (w/ Jim O’Rourke and Christian Fennesz), KTL (w/ Sunn O)))s Stephen O'Malley), R/S (w/ Marcus Schmickler), Shampoo Boy (w/ Christina Nemec and Christian Schachinger) and more recently NPVR (w/ Nik Void). These musical collaborations are completed by his cooperation with the French theatre director Giséle Vienne, Icelandic born/Berlin based choreographer Margrét Sara Gudjónsdóttir and Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy.
He has produced over a dozen albums, covering an astonishing variety of experimental electronic styles, LPs like the Get Out / Get Down / Get Off / Get In / Get On quintet have received broad international critical acclaim and were released on such labels as Editions Mego, Touch, Häpna etc.
His latest album Get On follows on from the 2016 release Get In. As with other titles in his ‘Get’ series we have an unwieldy blend of noise, abstraction, gnarled rhythm and blurred melody. Both analogue and digital tools are deployed as a means of expressing something outside of everyday electronics. ‘AMFM’ launches proceedings with some delightfully disorientating ricocheting electronics setting off a subversive sonic spectrum. ‘Frozen Jumper’ presents some ugly skittering electronics which rotate into exquisitely mangled forms before launching into an unsettling euphoria. The last piece ‘Motivation’ is a towering sensitive work, simultaneously haunted and emotionally moving. Get On marks another monumental work in the ongoing evolution from one of the ground zero pioneers of contemporary radical electronic music. As uncompromising as ever this is Pita in his prime. Emotion rung from the most twisted of frames.
He played various international festivals, like SONAR, All Tomorrows Parties, CTM Berlin, MUTEK, Donaufestival, Big Ears, Presences Electronique and won the Prix Ars Electronica for Digital Musics & Sound Art in 1999.
As head of the influential Editions Mego family of labels, he has released albums by internationally renowned artists like Fennesz, Oneohtriy Point Never, Kevin Drumm, Emeralds, Florian Hecker, Bernard Parmegiani, Russell Haswell, KTL, Akos Rozmann, Donato Dozzy, Bill Orcutt, Luc Ferrari, Stephen O'Malley, François Bayle, Mark Fell, Anthony Child, Heather Leigh, KlaraLewis, Simon Fisher Turner, Bruce Gilbert, Finlay Shakespeare, Caterina Barbieri, Oren Ambarchi, Xordox, Dome, Thomas Brinkmann, Jan St. Werner, Electric Indigo, Jasmine Guffond and many more.
Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American media artist and composer. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, Dreyblatt was elected to lifetime membership in the visual arts section at the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). He is currently Professor of Media Art at the Muthesius Academy of Art and Design in Kiel, Germany.
One of the second generation of New York minimal composers, Dreyblatt studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier and media art with Woody and Steina Vasulka. His early activities in music and performance included the albums "Nodal Excitation", "Propellers In Love" and the opera project "Who's Who in Central and East Europe 1933”.
Arnold Dreyblatt has charted his own unique course in composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. Often characterized as one of the more rock-oriented of American minimalists, Dreyblatt has cultivated a strong underground base of fans for his transcendental and ecstatic music with his "Orchestra of Excited Strings".
His music has been performed by the Bang On A Can All-Stars in New York, Jim O'Rourke, The Great Learning Orchestra in Stockholm, Pellegrini String Quartet and the Crash Ensemble Dublin. He has recorded for such labels as Tzaddik, Hat Hut, Table of the Elements, Cantaloupe, Important, Choose and Black Truffel. Dreyblatt has taught music workshops resulting in performed compositions with musicians at "The Music Gallery", Toronto; MIT Boston, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal and many others. He has performed with and without his ensemble at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Maerz Music Festival, Berlin; the Angelika Festival, Bologna; The Lab in San Francisco , Berghain Berlin and countless other festivals and concert venues in Europe and in North America.
Daniel Blumberg & Crystabel Riley
This is a special collaborative performance between Daniel Blumberg (drawings, harmonica, singsong) Crystabel Ryley (skins) and Yuki Yamamoto (video). Daniel Blumberg and Crystabel Riley are returning collaborators for the first time since GUO4. Their performance is recorded by video artist Yuki Yamamoto, a regular live visual collaborator of Daniel Blumburg, presenting work together in institutions such as Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Rotterdam Kunsthal, MACRO Rome.
Crystabel Riley works with skin (human and drum) as part of the multi-format duo project @xcrswx with Alto Saxophonist Seymour Wright
https://www.instagram.com/xcrswx/
Daniel Blumberg is a musician and artist from London. With a decade of musical activity behind him under various pseudonyms, he now focuses his activities under his own name to explore the intersection between classic songwriting and free improvisation, while forging ongoing exchanges with other artists and filmmakers and developing his practice as a visual artist.
On&On is his second solo album – the follow up to 2018's Minus – and is released on Mute in July. It confirms Blumberg as a unique creative force who pushes the art of song into expansive new territories, and features contributions from a tight-knit group of musicians: Elvin Brandhi (vocals), Ute Kanngiesser (cello), Billy Steiger (violin), Tom Wheatley (double bass) and Jim White (drums). The material is radically reimagined in live settings, with a rotating cast of players casting new light on his songbook from concert to concert.
GUO, his multi-disciplinary duo with saxophonist Seymour Wright, have released a number of live documents including GUO4 (released on Mute last year) alongside films by Peter Strickland and Brady Corbet, and texts by Fran Edgerly of art collective [Assemble] and David Toop. He has also collaborated with Japanese improviser Keiji Haino, video artist Marianna Simnett, and electronic maverick Elvin Brandhi in multi-disciplinary duo BAHK.
He has composed music for The BFI/Curzon Cinema’s Agnes Varda film season Gleaning Truths and recently completed the score for Mona Fastwold’s forthcoming feature The World To Come starring Vanessa Kirby, Katherine Waterston and Casey Affleck.
Blumberg is a prolific visual artist, described by Hans Ulrich Obrist as “one of London's most exciting emerging artists”, who makes drawings using the ancient technique of Silverpoint as well as oil monotypes, watercolour and graphite. He recently exhibited at Kunsthall (Rotterdam), Deichtorhallen (Hamburg) MK Gallery (Milton Keynes) and Union Gallery (London).
Charles Hayward is an English drummer/singer/composer and was a founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. He also played with early European improv group Mal Dean's Amazing Band and gigged and recorded with Phil Manzanera in Quiet Sun as well as a short stint with Gong. Since the late 80's he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations, including Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith), Monkey Puzzle Trio and Albert Newton (with Pat Thomas and John Edwards). The project This Is Not This Heat has recently completed a 3 year series of performances in UK, Europe, US and Japan.
Throughout a nearly 50 year career Charles has developed idiosyncratic attitudes and insights into a wide range of soundwork, spanning improvisation, song, sound as sound, using order and chaos as creative energies. He curates a six monthly series of performances, workshops and installation called Charles Hayward Presents on behalf of Lewisham Arthouse for Albany Theatre. Recent releases include ‘Objects of Desire’ cassette on Blank Editions and the piano centred song cycle ‘Begin Anywhere’ on Klanggalerie & God Unknown Records.