Joan La Barbara:
Solitary Journeys of the Mind (2011)
Erin (1980) (UK premiere)
Windows (2013-2017)
Chris Newman Selection of songs including:
Dandruff
Foreign Land
Mushrooms on Toast
My Wife is French
Very Embarrassing Situation (all 1983)
Songs accompanied by a new film, Yes Thank You No Please, by Stefan Oppenländer
Yeah You Live set
Performers:
Apartment House (Newman):
Philip Thomas (piano), Mark Knoop (keyboard), Vicky Wright (clarinet/sax), Simon Limbrick (percussion)
Chris Newman voice
Joan La Barbara voice
Elvin Brandhi and MYKL JAXN (aka Yeah You)
The re-wilding of pop has been a core interest of many contemporary composers and performers and music producers. Tonight we focus on three ways in which punk, pop and the everyday have been reconfigured to experimental ends.
The centrepiece of the evening will include a rare visit from one of the 20th century's great vocal pioneers, Joan La Barbara, who did more than anyone to extend the possibilities of the voice, replenishing the stock cupboard by introducing all manner of forbidden and overlooked and quotidian sounds into the singer's lexicon. Tonight we hear her perform a survey of her own radical compositions from across her long and varied career.
Before this, a performance from Berlin-based artist and veteran musical experimentalist Chris Newman. Like many contemporaries in the early 80s, Newman was taken by the punk turn in rock and began an underground band called Janet Smith. Tonight, with the help of Apartment House, we hear a very rare revival of the songs he wrote for Janet Smith, which premiered at the ICA in 1984.
To end the night we welcome the electronic dirt pop of Yeah You, a 'father/daughter dada-leaning dyad'. Their improvisations on synths and vocals, often worked out in the family car ('to redeem resented weekly Tesco shops and traffic jams'), echo, invert and explode tropes from commercial music: they 'will leave your head spinning like a well rubbered doughnut in a car park.'
For those not able to make this London performance, Joan La Barbara will also be performing at the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation, at the University of Leeds, on 9 December at 4pm