Light / Sound (7 mins, 2010), the first video I made with Max Le Cain, acclaimed by critic Fergus Daly as one of the top ten films of 2010 in the Senses of Cinema magazine end of year poll, was chosen for distribution by Paris-based experimental film cooperative Collectif Jeune Cinéma.
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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
and is presented by
in partnership with Arnolfini,
,
,
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
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
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.
Originally posted on wearenoise.com
Full photoset on here
It was great to come in out of the cold. Almost immediately, I struck up some conversation with an older woman who was also hovering next to the radiator by the front door. Asking her if she was aware that the seating arrangement for tonight was going to be a little unusual, she replied enthusiastically about a play she had seen in the Granary Theatre years ago where “we were all in it together”.
“How did that make you feel?” I asked her, “Were you self conscious or did it feel electric?”
“Oh no, I didn’t mind at all. It was fun. I was well able for any surprises.”
The back bar was full of excited faces and plastic pints. We downed our drinks and headed up the stairs to the stage where we entered an all-black rectangle, walled on one side and cordoned off with sheer black material on the other. In each of the four corners of the space were four medium-sized plinths, a spotlit chair on each of them. In the dead centre of the room sat a spotlit chair and a small desk (on which lay Cage’s score to Roaratorio, open on the second section of the piece).
The lightest of purplish mists hung in the air which added to the feeling of having collectively lost our bearings. I couldn’t tell where I was in relation to the main stage or the Half Moon Theatre. Where was backstage? What was behind the wall? There wasn’t time to figure it out. People quickly took up the seating along the edges of the space, others sat on the floor. A man sat in a meditative posture and bowed his head, quietly preparing for the performance. The four musicians emerged and took their seats. The tape recordings began. I looked up and noticed the rig above us, the speakers spread out and pointing downwards, with one suspended squarely above the empty chair in the middle of the space.
The room swelled with Cage’s sprechstimme, himself softly lilting the text, stretching out consonants, burring and enunciating syllables like soothing incantations. Recordings of water, women, men, carillon, birds, singing, laughing, dancing music, babies crying, gulls, wailing, rattles, explosions, shouts, cries, banging, barking, bleating, purrs, mewing, children singing, and motor engines lapped and curled through the haze.
People seemed a little too shy to be the first to break through the empty space and experience the fuller sound by walking around the room, but it didn’t take long before the space was filled with tranced listeners, brushing sleeves with strangers and winding their own path around the black box, occasionally stopping, with a bowed head or the opposite, shoulders back, head up, positively *receiving* the sound from above. At one point, an almost full circle had formed around Cage’s chair and desk, where the sound of the text was at its strongest.
Paddy Glackin’s warmth cut through the clamour like a hot knife through a lump of Kerrygold. Seamus Tansey on flute, his hornpipe tonguing bending around the corners of Liam O’Flynn’s slow air notes. Mel Mercier’s rhythms stopping everybody in their slow tracks… I was experiencing that manic feeling of being taken away when things were really pounding. There were moments of such intensity that it felt on par with some of the most affecting noise shows I’ve experienced. My skin crackled, I felt sound rush past me as though I were on the street. At times I was nowhere but my own head. A young couple lay on a bed of coats at Liam O’ Flynn’s feet. Life was all around us. Emotionally, I found it to beyond moving and joyous, other times completely ordinary, maybe surreal. I was fighting tears, trying to hold it together for a lot of the performance, especially when Peadar Mercier’s drumming or Joe Heaney’s voice would surface. We were all in it together, we were in a hundred different places.
Here's something myself and Max made back in April 2011. It was filmed in Galway and in Tuam, my hometown. A good portion of this was shot in the middle of the night in my Grandfather's shed. As an only child living with my grandparents, I spent a huge part of my childhood fooling around in there on my own.
I have a sad memory of spending a whole day trying to catch a Bánóg Bheag. Finally I had one clasped between my hands and it, fluttering wildly. I brought it to the shed to transfer it to a jar I had half-filled with india ink, naïvely hoping to help it get patterns on its wings. I forgot about the butterfly and found it drowned the following day. The shed was where I did my best exploring. Tools, rust, strange cans and tins, making up mixtures, climbing up the mountain of turf and sliding down again, finding dead birds, hammering nails into things. For me, so much of my head is tied up in that place.
So far, Hereunder has been screened at the Just Listen sound art festival in Limerick,
Hilltown New Music Festival, Westmeath, Cinekinosis in Bristol, the CineB Festival in Chile and at the Galway Arts Centre.
Hereunder from Vicky Langan on Vimeo.
Collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain 12 mins, HDV
Black Sun Cinema presents A Programme of Lithuanian Experimental Film j.mp/UR30JC
— Film Ireland (@FilmIreland) October 10, 2012
Dirt (2012) from Vicky Langan on Vimeo.
Since 2010, sound/performance artist Vicky Langan (Wölflinge) and experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain have been working together in a unique creative audio-visual partnership. This is built on the strikingly fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms.
Dirt (2012) is a phantasmagoric mélange of live performances and elements of gothic horror, resulting in a haunting, intense and sometimes humorous portrait of Wölflinge.
Next screening at Hunters Moon Festival, alongside a programme of film from Vivienne Dick, Ludo Mich, Rouzbeh Rashidi and Michael Higgins.
Dirt is dedicated to Lina Romay.
Here are the full programme notes by curator Florian Wüst for last Saturday's Black Sun Cinema screening:
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Photo by Declan Kelly
I've sat on a lot of recorded material for years, not releasing a thing, unconcerned with having anyone hear me. Time I look forward to is time spent with Declan, and often Dave (Raising Holy Sparks) underground. It's easy to forget about 'up there' when you're descending into pitch darkness, surrounded by cold concrete.
World Cup 2010 had wound up and Declan had given me a present of a small red vuvuzela that had belonged to our friend Takashi. I was eager to put my own stamp on it in the Dark Place. I had a short go of projecting a lot into that little toy, and the sound of it, the varying subtleties bouncing back to me from all sides was a wild kind of comfort. It was an exercise and a lament all at once.
I took the vuvuzela to Minneapolis for a gig but the plastic film on the mouthpiece ripped and that was the end of that.
Here's a new radio series that Declan has put together of archived recordings from visits to the underground. Have a listen!
Abandon Reason is an archive of recordings made in the highly reverberant (and unlit) space of a disused underground car park in Galway, Ireland. The recordings are mostly musical improvisations utilising a wide variety of instruments and voices, and very often objects (as well as the walls and fixturec) found in the car park itself.
Abandon Reason will be an 8-part series of half-hour episodes broadcast fortnightly on Curious Broadcast. It is presented by Declan Kelly and, alongside the radio programme, there is a blog (http://reasonabandon.blogspot.ie/) on which can be found more information about the contributors to the show as well as photographs and videos of the space. Contributors to date include:
Jorge Boehringer (Core of the Coalman)
David Colohan (Raising Holy Sparks, Agitated Radio Pilot, United Bible Studies)
Aaron Coyne (Yawning Chasm)
Darugaries
Declan Kelly (DeclanQKelly, Yawning Chasm)
Annemarie Deacy (Mirakil Whip, Fuaimbhac)
Gerard Duffy (School Tour, Patrick Kelleher and His Cold Dead Hands)
Kate Glavey (Burrows)
Sarah Grimes (September Girls, Black Robots)
Tony Higgins (Junior85)
Vicky Langan (Wölflinge, curator of Black Sun in Cork)
Alice McDowell
Peter Moran
Brigid Power Ryce
Gavin Prior (Deserted Village, United Bible Studies)
Episode 1 features Aaron Coyne, Declan Kelly, Brigid Power Ryce, Vicky Langan, David Colohan, Gavin Prior and Alice McDowell.
A three-day series of performances, talks and more devoted to the legacy of the Swiss performance group Schimpfluch.
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’.
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'.
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 GX Jupitter-Larsen, Phurpa and Vagina Dentata Organ.
Extreme Rituals also features performances by:
Junko Hiroshige (Hijokaidan)
Michael Barthel
M Vänçi Stirnemann
Mike Dando
and more tbc
Tickets:
Festival Pass: £40 (limited discounted Early Bird tickets available for a short time)
Day Tickets: £15
Tickets are available though the Arnolfini website here
Currently only Early Birds are on sale, individual day tickets will be available at a later date.
Black Sun Cinema from Black Sun Cinema on Vimeo.
Black Sun Cinema is Cork's platform for experimental, underground and far-out cinema.
For details of past and upcoming events: blacksuncork.tumblr.com/
I recently came back from a week long stay in the Isle of Man. One of the highlights was spending time at the Mann Cat Sanctuary. If you're feeling generous, Paypal them a donation here!
Some more holiday photos here.
Photo by Bríd O'Donovan
The Wire's Global Ear visits Cork in their August 2011 issue. Daniel Spicer takes a look at the Quiet Club, Strange Attractor, Black Sun (Cork), Wölflinge, SAFE, Vomit Nest, The Guesthouse, National Sculpture Factory, Sonic Vigil and the Crawford Art Gallery.
Meitheal (Irish pronunciation: [ˈmɛhəl]) is the trio of Vicky Langan from Galway, David Colohan of Longford and Mike Gangloff of Virginia. All are deeply involved in esoteric musical forms of various kinds (Wölflinge, Raising Holy Sparks and Pelt respectively) but each succumbs to the irresistible pull of some kind of folk music, both through influences weighing on their aforementioned identities and via, for example, Langan’s deep involvement in the Irish Sacred Harp community and Gangloff’s fiddle and voice in old-time trio the Black Twig Pickers.
Meitheal was born earlier this year when Colohan arranged a series of solo Irish dates for Gangloff, leading to an inevitable three-way throwdown that drew from their collective well of ancient music lore and their skills as improvisors. Meitheal is still very much an embryonic entity, we fully admit – no releases, one gig under their belts, no one’s ever heard of them – but knowing them individually, combined with being blown away by the 8 minutes that appeared on Youtube means we had to have them here.
We don’t doubt that when you hear them, you’ll know why.
Hullo all!
This will be the final Black Sun music-event in Cork, for the foreseeable future at least. Those keeping an eye on us last week will have seen the news that we're teaming up with the Triskel Arts Centreto continue our programming of experimental cinema. If you live in Ireland, please take a minute to check out our first programme! We're as proud as anything to be presenting day-long events devoted exclusively to experimental cinema at Triskel Christchurch.
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