Mike & Cara Gangloff (& Meitheal) -Whelans, March 10th

Myself and Dave Colohan join Mike and Cara Gangloff this Monday March 10th in Whelanslive. Tickets €12.50

'Southwest Virginians Mike & Cara Gangloff have been exploring the world in the last couple years, playing a personal, rural music that draws on Mike’s decades with Pelt and Black Twig Pickers and extends it into duo a capella harmonies and duets with fiddle, hurdy gurdy, sruti box and banjo for a sound that’s sometimes fierce and clattering, sometimes smooth and sweet. Expect ancient tunes learned from Appalachian masters and an improvisatory songcraft that blends deep drones with unexpected melodic and lyrical turns.'

Full details here: http://www.whelanslive.com/index.php/mike-cara-gangloff/

Adam Bohman Exhibition Fundraiser

Adam Bohman Exhibition Fundraiser at Café OTO 

Donate and get one of the postcards or limited edition prints detailed below in return. All funds raised will go towards the planning, installation and delivery of this exhibition at Cafe OTO’s new project space this summer.

dave phillips live at Extreme Rituals

dave phillips live at Extreme Rituals : A Schimpfluch Carnival, Arnolfini, Bristol 30.11.2012.

with Emma Weatherup, Vicky Langan, Kelly-Ann Jervis and Damaris.

http://www.davephillips.ch/

Video by Moju.

Late Hours of the Night (Part Two)

The second episode of Dean Kavanagh's 'Late Hours of the Night' is now online!

Late Hours of the Night - 2013 (Part 2)

Image: Dean Kavanagh

Sound: Vicky Langan

Created by deankavanagh.com 
Presented by experimentalfilmsociety.com

Hunter's Moon Score Trail 2013 →

A post on http://ansnagbreac.blogspot.ie/ about the Hunters Moon Festival Score Trail 2013. Caroline and Jennifer Walshe invited a number of artists to visually respond to graphic scores from invited composers and the results were distributed throughout the Dock Arts Centre and the town of Carrick-On-Shannon.

My piece, Wire Music, After Bettystown  was a response to Japanese performer/composer/sound poet  Tomomi Adachi's graphic score For Piano and 2 Graters.  

Here is a link to a pdf of all of the work in the Score Trail. Features Erin Gee, D. Edward Davis, Travis Just, Anthony Kelly, John Godfrey, Joe Kudirka, James Saunders, Tomomi Adachi, Karen Power, Anton Lukoszevieze, Danny McCarthy, Amnon Wolman, Istvan Zelenka, Alvin Curran, Paul McGuire, Jennifer Walshe, Sandra Lulei, Vicky Langan, Natalia Beylis, Felicity Ford, Caroline Walshe, Gavin Prior.

The Wire Magazine - 2013 Rewind

Keep an eye out for my small contribution to the Wire's 2013 Rewind issue.

I give a rundown of some of my favourite releases, reissues and personal highlights of 2013. 

Late Hours Of The Night

The second episode of @DeanKavanagh89's 'Late Hours of the Night' is now online: https://vimeo.com/80790309  Music by myself. RTs appreciated x

Waking Playthings - Galway, Dec 7th

A Live Improvised, Experimental, Durational Performance 
A collaboration between Red Bird Youth Collective, Dominic Thorpe (Performance Artist) and Vicky Langan (Sound Artist).

Red Bird Youth Collective’s experimental performance ‘Waking Playthings’ will take place from 4.00- 5.30pm on the 7th of December in Nun’s Island Theatre. This performance is the end result of a collaboration between performance artist Dominic Thorpe and sound artist Vicky Langan. This project is kindly supported by The Arts Council under The Youth Ensemble Scheme.

This collaboration began in September 2013 and took the form of weekly workshops in Galway Arts Centre where Thorpe and Langan shared ideas around performance and introduced various approaches to working with live art.The workshops ranged from interaction with materials to vocal improvisation, with a strong emphasis on experimentation and exploration. This project will tour to The GrainStore in 2014. This is Red Bird’s fourth collaborative project, their last project was the creation of an original film entitled ‘Belong’ with Jonathan Sammon and Ruadhrí Brennan. In 2014 they will pursue an architectural project with architect Dominic Stevens and visual artist Ruth Le Gear under the ‘Engaging with Architecture Award’ from The Arts Council.

Dominic Thorpe is a visual artist working primarily through the body in live performance. Through his practice he often engages with subject matter that has significant social importance. He is a co-director of Unit1 performance art and is currently a resident at the Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin.

Vicky Langan's performance practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly live art, sound, and film. In 2009, Langan founded Black Sun Cork, a platform for world-class underground music and experimental cinema in Ireland. Langan co-organises the Avant, an annual festival for Contemporary Arts in Cork

.
Admission is free and no booking is required for performance. Audience may come and go as they please through out.

New Irish Underground Film at Spectacle, New York

Experimental Film Society @ Spectacle Theater, New York NOVEMBER 2013 from EFS Video Archive on Vimeo.

Tangled And Far, the latest collaboration between Max Le Cain and myself, will premiere at Spectacle Theater in New York this Thursday 21st at 10pm.

This screening is part of a whole programme of films Max and I have made. Also showing: Contact, Wölflinge 17/11/'10, Light/Sound,Hereunder, Desk 13 and Dirt.

Our programme is, in turn, part of a six-programme series devoted to New Irish Underground Film, specifically by members of Experimental Film Society, curated by Donal Foreman. Dean Kavanagh's superb feature A Harbour Town is also playing on the 21st. Full details here.

Tangled and Far - New Langan/Le Cain film

Tangled And Far is the most recent collaboration between Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Drawing on footage of Langan’s performances over the past two years, as well as scenes specifically shot for this video, it foregrounds the overlap between intimate domestic detail and its reflection in Langan’s performance work. The private and public projections of her presence and actions collapse into each other in this phantasmagoric continuum of alternate selves and self-images to form a fractured dream portrait. 

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Cross Platform / The Wire Music Magazine

Daniel Spicer interviewed me about my solo work for the latest issue of the Wire music magazine (#350). Included in the two-page feature are some great photographs by Aoife Barry, Zoe Valls and Jedrzej Niezgoda.

http://www.thewire.co.uk 

Jedrzej Niezgoda

Meitheal tape sold out at source | Liminal TUSK review

MEITHEAL tape sold out: try @lokirecords @wingnutgalway or Into the Void if you missed it. Almost out of some others on.fb.me/13LALVx

— Fort Evil Fruit (@FortEvilFruit) March 9, 2013

And somewhat related to the tape, here's a teeny excerpt from a TUSK review that Rich Hughes did for the Liminal:

Antidotes to the noise came in the form of more rustic and acoustic artists that littered the bill. Meitheal (an Irish word for a work team or gang), a trio of Mike Gangloff, Vicky Langan and David Colohan, played folk songs, tinged with ancient lore. Prior to singing, Langan and Colohan passed between them an old folk songbook which they used for direct inspiration and the set had the feeling of something ritualistic, with each member taking the lead for one piece. The semi-improvised cries slow harmonium drones, while Gangloff’s violin was allowed to sweep and soar.

Photo by Andy Newcombe

Early in the Spring, Late in the Fall by Meitheal

Some news from Fort Evil Fruit over the weekend.

The End Of The Earth Is My Home (2012)

Dominique Monot and Vicky Langan

At an airport on the island of Hai-Wan, a young boy witnesses a failed assassination attempt. The assassin, a young woman called Mei, abducts the boy and brings him to her superior, the Metal Dragon. The Metal Dragon is the last of an old order of immortals living secretly in Hai-Wan. He resides on the top floor of the Gold Hotel, from where, via "all-seeing" security surveillance, he presides over the four dragons of the island's districts. These dragons are mortal men. Despite Mei's objections the Metal Dragon imparts the secret of long life to the boy before banishing him onto the streets of Hai-Wan.

The End Of The Earth Is My Home is a modern fantasy inspired by elements from the traditional Asian Stories of the Monkey King and Bram Stoker's Dracula, combined with the writer/director's travel experience.

The film was made over the winter and spring of 2011 / 2012 with a micro-budget raised by crowdfunding. The film uses very few CG effects, most of the effects being achieved in-camera with back-projections, models and other old studio techniques.

The film has an international cast and an original soundtrack by European Sensoria Band, in collaboration with some of the cast.

Premiered at the Darklight Film Festival 2012 and at the Kerry Film Festival 2012.

Directed by Alan Lambert

www.metaldragon.net/

MEITHEAL - Early in the Spring, Late in the Fall

http://fortevilfruit.blogspot.ie/2013/01/meitheal-early-in-spring-late-in-fall.html

Mike Gangloff is best known as a member of drone improvisers Pelt and Spiral Joy Band, as well as Appalachian old-time outfit The Black Twig Pickers. In March of last year he performed at one of Vicky Langan's Black Sun events in Cork, alongside David Colohan's Raising Holy Sparks, and the Cork Sacred Harp Singers, with which Langan is  involved. The three musicians played a short piece togethe

r to close the show. The trio, now named

Meitheal

, reconvened to appear at Newcastle's Tusk Festival in October.

The material here is largely culled from the Sacred Harp tradition, with vocals backed by Gangloff and Langan's twin fiddles and

Colohan's harmonium and shruti box drones. On the Tusk recording, each member sings lead in turn (culminating in what may be Colohan's finest recorded vocal to

date). The unadorned, unaffected approach allows the musicians' characters, and the traditions that shaped them, to shine through. In this way the music effortlessly reunites the folk traditions of Ireland and the Southern United States, while being informed by the hillbilly drone of Henry Flynt. Songs that date from as far back as the 19th century are placed in an unusual yet sympathetic context, retaining their directness and emotional power. 

This release consists of both the Cork and Newcastle sets, as well as a rehearsal prior to the latter, and so contains Meitheal

's entire recorded work to date. 

Early in the Spring, Late in the Fall by Meitheal

Mike Gangloff - voice & fiddle 

Vicky Langan - voice & fiddle 

David Colohan - voice, harmonium & shruti box 

1.1: Recorded by Sam Grant, October 6th 2012 at the Tusk Festival in The Star & Shadow, Newcastle Upon Tyne, England. 

2.1: Recorded March 8th 2012 at Black Sun in Plugd, Cork, Ireland during a solar storm. 

2.2: Recorded October 6th 2012 during rehearsals for the Tusk set. 

Artwork by David Colohan. 

Pan illustration from 1920 songbook of "The Quaker Singer", David Bispham. 

Thanks to Lee Etherington (Tusk), Sam Grant and Carapace.

Numbered edition of 100. Includes download code.

Coming soon:: Extreme Rituals: A Schimpfluch Carnival

Rudolf Eb.er & Joke Lanz : Akustische Aktion (Essen)

Next week (30 November - 2 December), I'll be heading over to Bristol to take part in

Extreme Rituals: A Schimpfluch Carnival

,

a three-day series of performances, talks and more devoted to the legacy of the Swiss performance group Schimpfluch.

The event takes place in the

Arnolfini, Bristol

and is presented by

Sound and Music

in partnership with Arnolfini,

Tusk Music

,

Harbinger Sound

,

Second Layer Records

and

The Live Art Development Agency

.

The Extreme Rituals carnival is a long-overdue retrospective and a celebration of Schimpfluch. Through an extensive programme will highlight the influence Schimpfluch has had since the late 80s, with audiences treated to a selection of performances, sound-installations, films, photographs and contextualising panel discussions. Alongside core Schimpfluch acts such as Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, Sudden Infant, G*Park and Dave Phillips this carnival weekender features rare UK appearances by international guest artists such as Hijokaidan's Junko Hiroshige, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Phurpa and Vagina Dentata Organ.

Rejecting any given norm and genre, tearing down mental barriers, unlocking all gates to the nether regions of the human psyche, their celebrated work aims to unlock an awareness of existence and encourages the audience to 'get off the plane of miseducated adulthood'.

Founded in Zürich in 1987, Rudolf Eb.er created Schimpfluch, a platform for extreme and outsider artists and the generation of highly disturbing and irritating audio/visual works. Gradually expanding to the Schimpfluch-Gruppe art-collective, Eb.er and Joke Lanz have since channelled grotesque humour into an ongoing series of confrontational radio broadcasts, physically demanding performances, ‘abreaction plays’ and ‘psycho-physical tests and trainings’.

On Friday, I'm landing and jumping straight into a panel discussion entitled Sound/Music/Noise in Performance Art. Chaired by Thomas John Bacon,other panelists include Ron Athey, Leif Elggren and Holly Ingleton.

Friday will also be disrupted with a number of guest performances from myself, Junko, Doreen Kutzke and Ute Waldhausen!

I'll also be performing solo on the Saturday, alongside a bill of Trevor Wishart, Vagina Dentata Organ, Joachim Montessuis, Sudden Infant and Runzelstirn and Gurgelstøck.

There are too many interesting things to list here so be sure to check out thefull programme over at soundandmusic.org. Apart from a full weekend of Schimpfluch artists and friends, Doreen will be giving a workshop in 'extreme yodeling', Chris Sienko leads a discussion on the history of Schimpfluch as well as a panel discussion on 'Confrontational and Transgressive Strategies Within Noise Music', feat. GX Jupitter-Larsen, Dave Phillips and Mike Dando! Rare Schimp. films, installations, performances from Alice Kemp & a fully stocked Second Layer on site!

I really can't wait.

Embedded below is a great Soundart Radio show recently put together bySteve 'MuhMur' Cammack. (http://www.muhmur.blogspot.ie/)

MuhMur SoundArt Broadcast. 15/11/2012 by Steve Cammack on Mixcloud

Anseo, Dublin. May 2009

Corona Cork Film Festival 2012

Myself, the cub and Ronan Leonard at Triskel Arts Centre, Cork. Photo: Jed Niezgoda

Just about recovered after this year's Corona Cork Film Festival and enjoying some time off before getting ready for next year's festival! Met some lovely people and worked alongside an amazing team of volunteers and annual staff. I didn't get to see as much stuff as I'd like to have seen but it was a real joy to be caught up in the whirlwind of it.

One thing that really caught me by surprise was Paul Duane's excellent documentary Very Extremely Dangerous. Recommended!

Very Extremely Dangerous - Promo from screenworksfilmandtv on Vimeo.

Photo: Marcin Lewandowski

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/14375856?badge=0" width="445" height="250" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/14375856">Very Extremely Dangerous - Promo</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/screenworks">screenworksfilmandtv</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

Black Sun Cinema: A Programme of Lithuanian Experimental Film

Pictured at our recent programme of experimental Lithuanian cinema at Triskel Arts Centre, 20th October:

(L-R) Alan Lambert, Vicky Langan, Ambassador of Lithuania Vidmantas Purlys, Max Le Cain, Julius Ziz.