Artist to Artist // In Conversation
Our Artist to Artist talk series invites musicians to take part in unmoderated discussions. There are no hosts, no questions and no themes – instead, we’ve asked our artists to improvise a little, to discuss the similarities and differences found in their music, and to learn about each other as we do.
Created in partnership with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf//) as well as the Centre For Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at Huddersfield University, we began curating this series together for hcmf// 2020, producing talks between musicians at vastly different stages of their musical career.
Alvin Curran + Leafcutter John
Renowned American composer Alvin Curran has made some of the most formative pieces of sound art in history. Having begun his musical career as a jazz pianist, he found his own voice in experimental composition, improvisation and sound art.
Leafcutter John doesn’t consider himself a musician, but he does make music. He’s worked with field recordings for much of his career, and can frequently be heard mashing up pastoral folk tunes with old tech.
Laura Ducceschi + Sasha Elina
Artist and curator Laura Ducceschi has been a driving force across the arts world for years, exploring what exists at the intersection of literature, visual art, film, dance and theatre. She is interested in how art can choose you – how you find yourself within a project, rather than the force behind it.
A curator and performer, Sasha Elina’s musical background steered her towards a search for creative autonomy. In Elina’s work, music is not an isolated thing: it is connected to architecture and history, and to what we do with the spaces we’re in.
Ann Cleare + Carola Bauckholt
An artist who describes composing as ‘shaping a sound’, Ann Cleare’s music is beholden to setting and set-up. Her ambitious pieces often relate back to our own relationship with environments, with new works such as ‘Rinn’ referencing Irish landscapes, and the vantage points they can be seen from.
German composer Carola Bauckholt’s work utilises noise, going deep into the specifics of what that word can mean: interested in the way we can be affected by dissonant sounds, and how they might find the listener in the mix, her work can often sound like an inversion of contemporary music norms.
Auclair + Annea Lockwood
This talk features two musical iconoclasts working in vastly different realms. Renowned composer Annea Lockwood has been making pivotal strides in experimental music since the 1960s, challenging the ways we present and receive sound. She is known best for the striking performance pieces she made for Fluxus – which included burning and drowning pianos in a pond.
Through treated vocals, glitched melodies and looping rhythmic pulses, Auclair makes a firm break with reality, installing surrealism into everyday life. Having made abstract electro-pop for labels such as Kit Records, her music has found a space between density and sparsity, playing noisy textures and hushed minimalism off of one another.
Clara Iannotta + Cassandra Miller
London-based composer Cassandra Miller builds on the history of notated music to create pieces that feel like they’ve been metamorphosed. Her pieces invite you to hear the raw material already out there, on her terms, ‘magnified and transfigured’.
In this discussion, she’s joined by Clara Iannotta, whose work reimagines ensemble performance through heavy use of digital music and found sound. Her work embraces flux, with recent pieces including Dead Wasp In a Jam Jar III, an intense, constantly moving piece performed at hcmf// 2018.
Mariam Rezaei + George E. Lewis
One of the world’s most prominent trombonists, composers and improvisers, George E. Lewis has been releasing records since the late 1970s, gracing Chicago and the broader American jazz and experimental scenes with his combination of brass and electronics. He’s collaborated with legends such as Anthony Braxton and Muhal Richard Abrams, and continually renewed his style in the process, working with labels such as John Zorn’s Tzadik. He is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself – The AACM and American Experimental Music.
In this talk, he’s joined by turntablist and composer Mariam Rezaei, whose musical output draws on noise, sampling and glitch. Rezaei’s work plays club culture off of the experimental underground. As a composer and curator, her work extends to TOPH, a mixed-use arts space she runs for DIY artists in Newcastle.