ARTAUD AND NOISE - LIVE ELECTRONIC DISSECTIONS

ARTAUD AND NOISE: LIVE ELECTRONIC DISSECTIONS

Venue: Visconti Studio, Kingston Hill, London

Date: 29 July 2024 7-10pm

Curator: Richard Crow (Institution of Rot)

[Musical Instruments] will be used for their qualities as objects and as part of the set. Also, the need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through the sense organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into qualities and vibrations of sounds to which we are absolutely unaccustomed, qualities which contemporary musical instruments do not possess and which compel us to revive ancient and forgotten instruments or to create new ones. They also compel research , beyond the domain of music, into instruments and devices which, because they are made from special combinations or new alloys of metals, can achieve a new diapason of the octave and produce intolerable or ear shattering sounds or noises.

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty (Musical Instruments, in First Manifesto),1932

Artaud and Noise - Live Electronic Dissections investigates and celebrates the legacy of Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty in the context of Industrial and Experimental Noise music. As Artaud writes in The Theatre and its Double (1931-32) the use of music(al and non-musical instruments) in the Theatre of Cruelty’s first manifesto must be imagined as ‘sounds that cannot be endured’. For Richard Crow this was a rallying call for new and extreme sounds and a definition of what noise music would/could hopefully become, and it is also inextricably linked (for Crow) to John Cage’s statement ‘you don’t need to call it music, if the term shocks you’.

Since the mid-1980s performer and sound artist Richard Crow has engaged with Artaud’s writings as a key source for the exploration of the disruptive, visceral, and affective qualities of noise and its psycho-physical implications for the listener.

Together with Adam Bohman he established the live improvisation duo Diastolic Murmurs in 1985 and performed what they called Live Electronic Dissections

PERFORMERS AND CELEBRANTS

Knife Grinder/Guardian Angel (Antonin Artaud)

Richard Crow (live) (Diastolic Murmurs)

Crow’s work as an inter-disciplinary artist transverses multi-media platforms including sound, installation and live performance. His solo and collaborative performances have consisted of highly conceptualized interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organisation and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the cult project The Institution of Rot.

For almost 40 years Crow has worked obsessively with the ideas of Antonin Artaud and The Theatre of Cruelty. He has during this time recorded, performed, collaborated and corresponded with a number of Artaudian scholars and practitioners including Jane Goodall, Paul Buck, Edward Scheer, Allen S. Weiss, Stephen Barber, Kathrine Waugh, Mischa Twitchin, and the late Sylvere Lotringer for whom Live Electronic Dissections #6 is dedicated.

He has been omnipresent in the experimental art-music-noise scene in London and elsewhere since the mid 1980s. Crow has collaborated, performed, and recorded with a number of experimental musicians, sound poets and sonic artists. including Duncan Jack (What is Oil?), Joe Banks (Ashenden), Zan Hoffman, Phill Wachsmann, Adam Bohman (as Diastolic Murmurs), Richard Barrett, Paul Obermayer, Furt, The Elision Ensemble, The Hafler Trio, Clive Graham, Michael Prime, Heimo Lattner, Dean Roberts, Kaffe Matthews, Michael Morley (Gate, The Dead C), Sandoz Lab Technicians, Tanaka-Nixon Meeting, Nigel Bunn, dy’na:mo, e-Xplo, Alessandro Bosetti, Dmitri Prigov, KREV (The Kingdoms of Elgaland Vargaland), Esther Planas, Gabriel Séverin, Gintas K, The Bohman Brothers, Richard Thomas, Aleksander Kolkowski, Nicola Woodham, Chandor Gloomy, John Wall and Luke Jordan.

His work has been performed and exhibited in Artspace (Sydney), Volksbuhne (Berlin), ICA (London), Halle Saint-Pierre, (Paris), South London Gallery (London), Moscow Museum of Modern Art at Petrovka (Moscow), The Freud Museum (London), Raven Row (London), Maxxi, (Rome), 5th Marrakech Biennial (Marrakech), Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico, (Mexico City), The Showroom (London), Café Oto (London), West (Den Haag), Calvert 22 Foundation (London), Visconti Studio (Kingston University), The Horse Hospital (London), Iklectik (London), Gallery 46 (London), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin) amongst others.

His work has been broadcast by BBC Radio 4, Touch Radio, ABC Classic FM Australia, Radio Arte Mobile Rome, Radio Corax Halle, Resonance FM, Kunstradio Vienna.

Crow has published many sound works since 1984 on his own imprint Institution of Rot, as well as labels such as ZH27, Shelf Life, Vintage Productions, Paradigm Discs, Durian Records, Touch, Chocolate Monk, [RHP] CDRs, EAM, COMA †‡† KULTUR ƩNĐ ϴF DΔYS, Musica Dispersa Records, Nostalgie De La Boue, Psych.KG, La bois records.

Adam Bohman (live) Diastolic Murmurs

Jonathan Bohman (live)

The Bohman Brothers

Adam Bohman and Jonathan Bohman have been recording together since their early teens and playing live since 1984.

Their repertoire includes a combination of sounds created in the moment and distinct compositions including songs. They use unconventional instruments, household objects, dislocated text from found, literary and commercial sources and collaged layers of recordings.

Regular concerts started in the mid-90s in London at places like The Club Room in Penton Street, The Red Rose and The Klinker. From 2000 to 2005 they had their own concert series upstairs at The Bonnington Café in Vauxhall, London.

Working together they are in a number of groups, including : Secluded Bronte with Richard Thomas, The BBC with Richard Crow, Apricot My Lady with Lukas Simonis & Anne La Berge and Ischio Romantico with Leonard Aspen & Roger Boulding. They have also worked with film-maker Peter Strickland on various projects.

They have performed at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Roundhouse, Royal Albert Hall, South Bank and numerous smaller venues around the UK. Also across Europe and America.

Their duo recordings include 'A Twist For All Pockets' (Rossbin, 2001), 'Purely Practical' (Peripheral Conserve, 2002), ‘Back On The Streets' (Peripheral Conserve, 2012), ‘Library Music’ (Des Astres D’Or, 2019), ‘In Their 70s’ (Fort Evil Fruit, 2021) and ‘Room Service ‘ (Rural Isolation Project, 2024).

Nick Couldry (recordings on tape)

Nick Couldry is the co-founder with Richard Crow of the Institution of Rot (1992).

He became involved in improvised music in 1985 through Phillip Wachsmann’s class at the City Literary Institute, London, and also where he would meet and begin collaborating with both Crow and Adam Bohman.

As an improvising musician and keyboards player in the 1980s and 90s he played in many groups including Conspiracy, and WAKE with Adam Bohman and Crow, as well as performing with such luminaries as Derek Bailey, John Butcher, Lol Coxhill and Maggie Nichols to name a few.

He is better known today as an academic and he is currently Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, Dept of Media and Communications, at the London School of Economics. He is the author or editor of 16 books and many journal articles and book chapters. However, Couldry still continues to improvise and explore the sound possibilities of the piano and has agreed to record some fragments from the notoriously difficult 2nd Piano sonata by Pierre Boulez (1948) – Couldry will attempt to wrench out some of the ‘hysteria and enchantment’ embedded/embodied in the work, and this will be further exacerbated through unusual recording techniques.

Johanna Garnal (recordings on tape)

Born in The Lot, France. Studied Philosophy & Literature in Toulouse

Artaud's texts / letters referred to below were selected then recorded on a iPhone unrehearsed in an approx 45min single take by Johanna Garnal.

L' Ombilic Des Limbes

Le Pese Nerf

Lettre de Menage

Deuxieme lettre de Menage

Troisieme lettre de Menage

Lettres initially written for Genica Athanasiou

Lettres de Ville-Evrart , Lettre sa mere 1938-1943

Texte Preparatoiore a Paris-Varsovie 1947

Colin Potter (live)

Colin Potter started making unusual music in the early 1980s. He was part of the ‘DIY or tape underground’ which flourished at the time as an alternative to mainstream music. In 1981 he set up the ICR label and IC studio, now based in London, which are both still thriving after over forty years. He developed a reputation for innovative mixing, sound processing and production and has worked with artists such as Current 93, Fovea Hex, Ora, Organum, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, PNZ, Monos and many more, most notably with Steven Stapleton on numerous albums by Nurse With Wound.

In 1999 he started to perform live and since then he has been playing solo shows all over Europe and the US. He was also instrumental in persuading Nurse With Wound to return to playing live shows in 2005 and with them he has since played at many venues and festival all over the world. His performances feature live remixing of a multitrack recording along with sampling, electronic and acoustic devices with intense sound processing and propagation.

A series of reissues of his early work (on Deep Distance, Dark Entries, Joyful Noise Recordings, Sacred Summits, Polytechnic Youth, BFE & Platform 23) has led to an upsurge of interest in his music by a largely new audience.

Selected Live Performances

In the late Nineties, a desire to return to live performance has led to appearances at the Beyond Music festival in Los Angeles, 7 Hz in San Francisco, Primavera in Barcelona and Porto, Unsound in Adelaide and Krakow, Mutek festival in Montreal, Radar festival in Mexico City, Incubate in Tilburg, Donau festival in Austria, Brainwaves in Boston, All Tomorrow’s Parties at Minehead, Ether festival at London South Bank, Villette Sonique and GRM in Paris, the Liverpool Biennial, the LUFF Festival in Lausanne, Tusk Festival in Newcastle, Termite festival in Leeds, Resonator festival in Preston, REC festival in Reggio Emilia, Settembre Musica in Turin, the AvantGarde festival in Hamburg, , Nodutgang Festival in Bodo and numerous concerts in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Perth (Australia), Moscow, Berlin, Munster, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Stockholm, Malmo, Oslo, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Wroclav, Kracow, Gdansk, Bratislava, Geneva, Lyon, Athens, Venice, Milan, Cagliari, Naples, Pordennone, Ghent, Leuven, Amsterdam, Prague, Brno, Vienna, Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, Seville, Dublin, Drogheda, Manchester, Brighton, Bristol, Nottingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London.

Isa Ferri IKLECTIK (live - sound projection)

Isa is joinig the event both as an engineer and as a contributor to the sound design of the event.

Founded in 2014, IKLECTIK is a nonprofit creative organisation based in London.

We focus on experimentation within sound, art, new media, emerging technologies and cross disciplinary works. Our research initiatives and collaborations with academic institutions inform our curation and event selection. Through this, we explore processes and techniques whilst addressing social, political and cultural issues.

Our dynamic programme spans sound and music events, workshops, residencies, talks, panel discussions, installation work, film screenings and readings aiming to catalyse education, growth and transformation within our community both in-person and online.

Over the last 10 years we’ve hosted live performances from over 3000 emerging and established international artists across 1600+ live shows, 21 festivals and 23 fundraisers.

IKLECTIK is a non-profit community interest company (CIC) since 2018.

Curated by Richard Crow, a PhD candidate at KSA, the event is an integral part of his practical based research project Re-visiting The Institution of Rot Archive as a sound practice, an exploration of aesthetic noise centred on ideas of destruction and decay.

Supported by the Visual & Material Culture Research Centre Fund, Kingston University and IKLECTIK

Host or Publisher Richard Crow (Institution of Rot)