Bernhard Living presents:
‘Corpora Aliena 2’: Liz Helman + Bernhard Living + Christine Webster + Olga Fedorova/Outlaw Compound
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 24th March 2018, 7.30pm – information here and here
The second evening in wind-multi-instrumentalist-turned-digital-composer/curator Bernhard Living’s ‘Corpora Aliena’ evenings at IKLECTIK (I missed the first one) continues to present artists who work across a wide range of creative disciplines (in this case, composers who are also filmmakers) while simultaneously keeping up a fair gender balance. Evening no. 2 is “a concert of analogue and digital experimental music performances based on the theme of dreams and shadows… composers who produce subdued sound textures and thoughtful sonic meditations.”
Bernhard is a onetime contemporary classical flute virtuoso with a foot in the British improv scene: from the ’60s onwards he performed Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Cage and Varèse, and worked with Cornelius Cardew, Hugh Davies, Barry Guy, Mike Westbrook and Linder Sterling’s Ludus. His work from the ’90s onwards has been minimal, electronic and concentrates predominantly on sound colour and sonic textures. That said, he claims inspiration from a vast range of American, European and Russian influences (including jazz, Soviet avant-garde visual arts and techno, the last of which he’s attempted to reinvent as an “evolved non-dance form… one that exists within a different cultural context and along a different time continuum.”
The evening features screenings of two works in which Bernhard collaborates with Russian artist and photographer Marinesca Marinesca (who herself cites a different range of inspirations including Hitchcock, Murnau and Tarkovsky plus “the gothic, the works of Dutch masters, the gentle poetry of Goethe and the dark stories of Edgar Allan Poe”, has a mood inclination towards the “classical subtle world” and who appears in her own work as using a “graceful, autistic androgyne” alter ego character. Marinesca also displays a readiness to draw directly from her own dreams, something she appears to share with Bernhard. Their ten-minute ‘Untitled Dream (Homage to Erik Satie)’, with music by Bernhard and images by Marinesca, is based on two separate dreams, each experienced by the two artists separately on the same night. They’ll also be debuting another new 2018 work called ‘The Metaphysics of Colour’. For some pointers towards what to expect, here’s their earlier minimal mood-and-motion piece ‘Dream Door’.
https://vimeo.com/251033913
Self-taught London composer and video artist Liz Helman will be presenting tracks from her recently released album ‘Daylight Dreaming‘, which continues her place-sensitive delving into music based on field recordings and her aim of “following the thread of the sound to its ultimate destination, which she likes to think of as sonic alchemy.” She’ll also show three of the short experimental films she made in London between 2007 and 2014, visually exploring “notions of dislocation, memory and displacement”: two from 2014 (‘Light [Drone]’, which uses the processed sound of a Seasonal Affective Disorder lamp, and ‘Peripheral’) and 2013’s one-minuter, ‘Imprint’.
https://soundcloud.com/lizhelman/liz-helman-liveiklectiklondon-sep2017recorded-mixed-by-saint-austral-sound
The methods of the Paris-based ambisonic electro-acoustic composer Christine Webster have been influenced by cinema and literature narratives, by the concert possibilities of multiplayer game and virtual reality networks and most recently by the modular synthesis revival. She’ll be mixing between improvised abstractions as well as create live remixes of some of the sound elements from her recent organic/meditative album ‘Iceberg the Drift‘, released earlier this year on Sublunar Society. Christine will also be showing her twenty-six minute 2012 audio-visual piece ‘Fukushima Days’ – a collaboration with Super 8/Rutt Etra video artist Kantoh featuring manipulated footage from the Japanese nuclear disaster, and aiming for “a dark and oppressive feeling, but not without a sense of tragic beauty… a clear support to Fukushima’s endless victims, a warning about the worldwide permanent nuclear threat we have to cope with.”
https://soundcloud.com/sublunarsociety/sets/christine-webster-iceberg-the
Bernhard will also be screening new material by Russian digital artist Olga Fedorova, including her ‘Outlaw Compound’ project made in collaboration with multifaceted Belgian vocal/electronic musician Yannick Franck (Raum, Orphan Swords, Idiosyncrasia and Y.E.R.M.O.) and inspired by “tiki culture, exotica, magick and other manifestations of modern escapist tendencies… the fascination of the industrialised world for a widely fantasised state of primitive innocence that it perceived as a lost paradise.” The first Outlaw Compound album ‘New Primitive‘ was recently released on ZamZamRec.
Misfit City 