14.05 -
The New Anxiety
The 300+ year technologies built to capture, understand and connect the world - from maps through geostationary satellites to contemporary algorithms and big data collection - have been exposed as weapons-grade systems that pluralise reality and destabilise the present. How does living in this new anxious world feel, and how deep do these systems take root?
photography by Caroline Bourdignon
Ryan Patrick Maguire & HM Mease
Free Language (2018, world premiere - a VIRTUALLYREALITY commission)
Michael Pisaro
asleep, desert, choir, agnes (2016, European premiere)
[INTERVAL]
during the interval:
Michael Baldwin
Talking Music (2018, world premiere)
Kepla
live set
performers:
Aidan Meier (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Anna Disley-Simpson (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Bofan Ma (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Callum Coomber (electric guitar, Michael Pisaro; audience, Michael Baldwin)
Carmel Smickersgill (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Darren Gallacher (percussion, Michael Pisaro)
Flora Xia (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
George Burrage (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Jack March (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Kathy Hart (clarinet, Michael Pisaro; audience, Michael Baldwin)
Lloyd Forse (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Mark Reid (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Michael Brailey (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Michael Cutting (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Otis Enokido-Lineham (cello, Michael Pisaro)
Phillippos Rousiamanis (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Poppy Philligreen (tenor saxophone, Michael Pisaro)
Robert Smith (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Rosalind Ridout (flute, Michael Pisaro; audience, Michael Baldwin)
Sean Rogan (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Shaun Davies (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Stephen Bradshaw (objects, voice, Michael Pisaro)
Kepla
VIRTUALLYREALITY presents an evening themed around submergence and emergence. We open with a new work from video artist HM Mease in collaboration with the Virginian composer and sound-artist Ryan Patrick Maguire, whose work as 'The Ghost in the mp3' constructs detailed, arabesque works out of the sounds lost in .mp3 compression.
This is followed by the European premiere of fellow US-based composer Michael Pisaro's 'Asleep, Desert, Choir, Agnes', a hushed, insular work for 22 musicians which stifles sustained instrumental tones under sounds from pine cones, stones, branches and more.
During the interval, Michael Baldwin's 'Talking Music' shall almost go unnoticed. Unknown performers make annotated recordings of the concert performances, integrating and interpolating them into conversations during the interval. This integration is compositionally structured so that conversations gradually and subtly become infused with musical and performative dimensions that resonate with what has come, and remains to come, of the concert experience.
Finally, fresh from releasing his debut LP 'Absent Personae' with DeForrest Brown Jr. on New-York label PTP, Quantum Natives-affiliate and heavyweight of the Liverpool scene Kepla will be performing live. His work inhabits sprawling, philosophical sound-worlds that suggest deep, ecological and environmental networks, worlds that propose a recalibration, a re-flattening of the hierarchy between man and nature.