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London Contemporary Music Festival 2018: New Intimacy IV at Ambika P3

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Time 19:30
Date 13/12/18
Price £10

LCMF returns to Ambika P3 with an exploration into intimacy in art & music. Expect a looping performance from Florence Peake, alongside work from composer Maryanne Amacher, Silvia Tarozzi & more.

Line-Up:

LCMF open the evening with the generous, spontaneous, slumber party-ish delights of Slug Horizons (2018), a performance work by Florence Peake and Eve Stainton. Slug Horizons sees the two artists reclaiming the potential of the female body through intimacy and touch, lips and limbs, stories and saliva. 'Promoting an emotional landscape of bravery, in response to restrictive normative attitudes to the visceral body, the work enquires into the marginalised affection, sexuality, power and energies within the intimate bodies of women.'

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making work since 1995. Her performance practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture combined with found and fabricated objects placed in relation to the moving body. Site and audience, live and recorded text, wit and candour are key to her work, which has been presented internationally and across the UK.

Following this will be some radical and rarely heard electronic work by composer Maryanne Amacher. In the 1970s Amacher posed the idea that our ears create their owns tones — tones that would meet and mingle with the waves barging their way in — and set about creating pieces that would interact with this interior sound world. A fizzy, sonic op art was the result. A music that reaches down deep into the cranium. LCMF will present a selection of her astonishing work.

Composition can be a very solitary process. But for Pascale Criton every work is composed in a spirit of deep cooperation and exploration, quite unique in contemporary classical music. Tonight, LCMF welcome three of her regular collaborators: violinist Silvia Tarozzi from Italy and Duo Lallement Marques, made up of French guitarists Estelle Lallement and Filipe Marques, who will present rare performances of two ravishing Criton compositions, Trans (2014) and Circle Process (2012), that revel in subtle shifts of touch and timbre.

Microtonal tunings play a large part in Criton's work, as they do in Lawrence Dunn's. To crack open equal temperament and start rummaging around in the rich earthy soil in between is an act of often lonely excavation, intimate in its esoteric spirit. As is the musical portrait. Apartment House will play a new arrangement of one of the most gorgeous recent homages, Dunn's Set of Four (2017), a love letter to four composers, Bryn Harrison, Amber Priestly, Sergei Zagny and Laurence Crane.

In Michael Pisaro's Grain Canons (2016), it isn't just the softness and strangeness of the timbres, dynamics and harmonies that suggest a private ritual being eavesdropped on but the grains themselves that the musicians turn to play when they down their instruments — rice and millet falling on ceramic and metal, farmyard domesticity interlocking with age-old forms. Apartment House will give the work is European premiere.

To complete the night, LCMF have two acts of distinctly private music-making: mourning and the ‘male solo song’. From Greece, LCMF welcome three professional mourners, Nikos Menoudakis, Nota Kaltsouni and Vangelis Kotsos, whose keening lines, wrapping tightly around each other, will usher in the sounds of the abyssal. And to end the night Mark Leckey's cyborg statue Nobodaddy (commissioned by Glasgow International) is transformed into a ‘Male Solo Singer’ for LCMF 2018, and in collaboration with producer/artist Steve Hellier (ex-founder member of Death in Vegas), will perform cover versions of ‘male solo songs’.

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