Aaron Dilloway and Vicky Langan
In June 2019, Sherkin Island’s Open Ear festival presented the first fully developed collaboration between two uncompromisingly visceral performers, Aaron Dilloway and Vicky Langan.
“Late on Friday, Aaron Dilloway and Cork based artist Vicky Langan unite for a set of expulsive noise. Conjured via contact mics and tape delays, it’s a fully improvised triumph that sees tongue and breathing manipulation from Langan mirror the limb-flailing paraoxysms of Dilloway.” - Brian Coney, The Wire
“What comes next, then, shortly after midnight, stands testament to the adventurous and nonlinear programming of Open Ear, one that champions the experimental time and again, holding it in its deserving, “peak-time” regard where other events would shove it to the side.. Where other festivals would likely keep the clubby momentum going, Open Ear insists on joyfully fucking with the expectations of how a festival “should” run, and is all the more vital and exciting for it. The festival’s own Vicky Langan and Aaron Dilloway step up with a 35-minute burst of brutal and cathartic improvised noise and howling drones, all met with rapturous energy from a more than receptive audience. Immense altogether.” - Eoin Murray, The Thin Air
“Their onstage chemistry immediately registered with audiences at their initial sets together at London’s Café OTO. In these, they formed a human sound loop as Langan fed Dilloway noises generated from her physically intense contact mic interactions with objects such as stones and scratched slates as well as her own body, sounds which he processed and responded to. Both artists appeared locked in an electric current, not only of sound but feeling. The noises and materials may have been raw, their gestures and movements may have been distressed by normal standards, but the palpable intimacy generated between them was what made these performances so powerful. It was as if two artists whose natural emotional environment of apparently dark intensity were celebrating finding each other.” - Maximilian Le Cain
Aaron Dilloway is a celebrated improviser and composer who works with 1/4" tape loops in 8-track cartridges as well as other discarded electronic equipment. In his performance-based practice, he manipulates magnetic tape in real-time by feeding the loops sounds from his body, everyday objects, electronic sources, prepared tapes, as well as the occasional actual instrument. Aaron (a co-founder of the Michigan Trip Metal group Wolf Eyes) is currently based in Oberlin, Ohio, from where he runs the Hanson Records label and mailorder.