Things? Ears in C Major? Things coming up, the year waking up…..

Ruby Bird and Helena Von Kuntz will be debuting their new psychedelic performance- Lab Rat at Psycho Ward- February 27th. it happens at Resistance Gallery Bethnal Green, London, E2, more about that closer to the date, those ears just demanded to be here today. More about it all here…

Psycho Ward… 27th Feb

What if the drought never ends? Maybe music is over? While we consider that, this looks promising….

Keith K. Hopewell:  BROKEN SYSTEMS IN C MAJOR

Hoxton Gallery, 9 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DA.  Thurs. 15th January 2015/ Opening 6:30 – 9:30 pm

VaVa Records are excited to invite you to experience Keith K. Hopewell’s sound installation ‘Broken Systems In C Major’, launching the release of his inaugural LP under his birth name entitled ‘Chaoid Systems’. This installation brings together Hopewell’s visual practice of surface deconstruction and re-arrangement of objects in the public sphere, and his history as a recording artist for Big Dada/ Ninja Tune under the monikers, Part2ism and New Flesh.

Broken Systems is a reductive spatial work, focusing on the effects of low sound frequencies on the human body, where the viewer becomes a vibrational string being stretched and plucked. Inside a dark receptacle, the audience is directly exposed to the visceral qualities of bass resonance, built up by a feedback loop generating the ramifications of an echoic chamber. As the sound outlives itself into the surrounding environment, the passing of train’s overhead, become incorporated into this experience. Paint removed from the surface of a concrete South London wall appears to be reacting to the vibrations of the low sound frequencies, returning back to its natural anamorphic state in the form of a monochromatic film projection, high-lighting the division of space between image and sound, as a language of the senses unravels.

“It’s both the slow rumble of structural damage happening in real time and the distilled essence of anticipation. Heart thumping, you open the door, and – – – shine. You’re swallowed into a moment of harmonic richness, pressure, rhythm and possibility. As a piece of art, it’s designed to create a powerful experience of sensory disorientation, and it’s at work long before you actually find it. Pumping a perpetually transposed one bar bass sub-wave into a blackened sound chamber, you, the subject, stand inside, at first hugging the wall, unable to tell whether you’re in a space four feet by two or 40 by 20. There’s a lurking discomfort you might be about to commit an accidental invasion of somebody else’s intimacy. Deprived of vision, you’re forced to listen, as they say, as if under a microscope. This is sound decomposed to its rudiments: a single frequency that your body physically resonates. It builds, darting through different spatial registers, becoming momentarily overwhelming, then eddies back to nothing. Your brain, looking for sugar, tricks you into finding shadow melodies.” James McNally (From the sleeve notes of ‘Chaoid Systems’)

Music preserves its primal beauty and sublimity in this installation, for both its disappearance and playful performance inside a receptacle that is always in a state of becoming. It is not words as the objectification of ‘things’, or objects them-selves that can define the inner significance of our pure emotive being, but the heterogeneous nature of sound.

More reading here.