Three day mini-festival at the legendary Roppongi, Tokyo space SuperDeluxe which shuttered just a few months later in January 2019.
Opening performance and site reconstruction by Antibodies Collective; Taku Unami and Masahiko Okura present their 'They Live' duo; Screening of Terre Thaemlitz' Deproduction (in English and Japanese); trio of Leif Elggren, crys cole and Oren Ambarchi, solo performances by Marta Forsberg and Matana Roberts; ISM: Pat Thomas, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal; Eiko Ishibashi/Joe Talia/Jim O'Rourke trio.
Made possible with support from Musikverket (RIP). Thanks to Mike at SuperDeluxe.
Marta Forsberg is a Swedish-Polish sound artist and musician based in Berlin. In recent years, she has released music through labels such as Warm Winters Ltd., XKatedral, and Superpang. Her work delves into themes of language and human memory, with a strong focus on archival research.
Alongside Lo Kristenson, she co-founded Konstmusiksystrar, an organization dedicated to promoting gender equality in the Swedish music scene. Marta studied electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.
Pat Thomas studied classical piano from aged 8 and started playing Jazz from the age of 16. He has since gone on to develop an utterly unique style - embracing improvisation, jazz and new music.
Islamic innovation is at the heart of Thomas’ solo projects and draws a direct link between his Sufi faith and a totally unique style of playing. Each of his solo piano records is a dedication - not just to the innovators Thomas names but to the beauty of the universe in all its complexities.
Improvising bassist, Joel Grip, makes music at the countenance of the other.
Anchored to a spontaneously fermented musical approach, his music reverberates and transforms within a collective body of timing and sound.
Joel Grip practice improvising, as a way to learn and develop a forthright sound, and embrace its reactiveness, rapidity, and startling character with the aim of pushing music to intense, ecstatic and transformative levels.
Antonin Gerbal is a percussion player, improviser and composer, active in the field of contemporary musics – from jazz to non-idiomatic languages.
He has studied music at Paris Conservatory and philosophy at EHESS. In 2009 he co-founded Umlaut France, an organization which runs the eponymous label and organizes concerts and festivals in Paris and Berlin. Antonin Gerbal is mainly using percussion elements to develop multiple accesses to musical languages in jazz, improvised or written music. He has collaborated with many international artists and played in United States, Japan, Russia and Europe.
Terre Thaemlitz (1968) is an award winning multi-media producer, writer, public speaker, educator, audio remixer, DJ and owner of the Comatonse Recordings record label. Her work combines a critical look at identity politics - including gender, sexuality, class, linguistics, ethnicity and race - with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economics of commercial media production.
He has released over 15 solo albums, as well as numerous 12-inch singles and video works. Her writings on music and culture have been published internationally in a number of books, academic journals and magazines. As a speaker and educator on issues of non-essentialist Transgenderism and Queerness, Thaemlitz has lectured and participated in panel discussions throughout Europe and Japan.
As of January, 2001, he resides in Japan.
Oren Ambarchi’s works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal.
From the late 90’s his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum’s Embrace, Ambarchi employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.
Ambarchi has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), Thomas Brinkmann, crys cole, Keiji Haino, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Curran, Loren Connors, Manuel Gottsching/Ash Ra, Merzbow, Jim O’Rourke, Keith Rowe, David Rosenboom, Julia Reidy, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, Fire! and many more.
crys cole is a Canadian sound artist based in Berlin (DE) who works in composition, performance, sound sculpture and installation. Taking a conceptual approach, she generates subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials to create texturally nuanced electro-acoustic works that continuously retune the ear.
cole has performed in Canada, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, the USA, UK and throughout Europe. Her regular collaborators include Oren Ambarchi (AU) and James Rushford (AU) (as the duo Ora Clementi). She has also worked with Francis Plagne (AU), Leif Elggren (SW), Tetuzi Akiyama (JP), Seiji Morimoto (DE), Jessika Kenney (US), David Rosenboom (US), Annea Lockwood (US/NZ), Keith Rowe (UK), Lance Austin Olsen (CA), Jamie Drouin (CA), Mathieu Ruhlmann (CA), David Behrman (US), Tim Olive (JP/CA) and many more.
Her work has been published on labels Black Truffle (AU), Penultimate Press (UK), Students of Decay (US), Ultra Eczema (BE), Boomkat (UK), Second Editions (DE), caduc (CA), Bocian (PL), Another Timbre (UK) and Infrequency editions (CA/DE). With guest appearances published on Touch
Leif Elggren is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm.
Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer, he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition.
His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from mesmerizingly quiet electronics to harsh noise. His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons.
Matana Roberts is the internationally acclaimed New York-based composer, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, sound artist and visual artist of whom the music site Pitchfork has said: “One of the most exciting new spirits in contemporary music”.
Roberts is perhaps best known for his musical masterpiece Coin Coin, which is now up to four discs and which, via improvisation, spoken word and quotes from songs and anthems, examines history, memory and ancestry, not least from an American horizon.
Born in 1975 in Chicago, Illinois, Roberts grew up on the city’s South Side and studied classical clarinet. Roberts formed the trio, Sticks and Stones, with bassist Josh Abrams and drummer Chad Taylor. In 2002, Matana Roberts moved to New York and started as a street musician in the subway.
Matana Roberts works in many different contexts and several different media with music, visual arts, dance, poetry and theater. In the summer of 2015, Roberts was artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of research-based sound works entitled i call america. The following summer, Roberts had a solo exhibition at the Fridman Gallery titled I Call America II.
“A unique, shape-shifting compositional voice” – LA Times
“Coin coin is a brilliant and deeply original project”.- LIRA
