LCMF 2018

13 December: New Intimacy IV
Ambika P3


Anon.
Greek mourning songs

Pascale Criton / Silvia Tarozzi
Circle Process (2012)

Maryanne Amacher
Head Rhythm 1 and Plaything 2 (1998)

Michael Pisaro
Grain Canons (2016)
(European premiere)

INTERVAL

Florence Peake / Eve Stainton
Slug Horizons (2018)

INTERVAL

Lawrence Dunn
Set of Four (2017)

Maryanne Amacher
Dense Boogie 1 (1992/1998)

Pascale Criton
Trans (2014)
(UK premiere)

Anon.
Greek mourning songs 

Mark Leckey / Steve Hellier
Singing Nobodaddy Sings Songs (2018)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)

Performers:
Apartment House (Dunn):
Mark Knoop and Philip Thomas (keyboards), Mira Benjamin (violin), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), George Barton (percussion)
Apartment House (Pisaro):
Philip Thomas (piano), Emma Williams (flute), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), George Barton (percussion)
Florence Peake, Eve Stainton
Silvia Tarozzi (Circle Process)
Duo Lallement Marques (Trans)
Vangelis Kotsos, Anthoula Kotsou, Nikos Menoudakis
Mark Leckey, Steve Hellier

|Talk: Thurs 13 Dec, Walmer Yard|


Tonight we return to one of the richest threads of last year's festival — a further exploration of intimacy in art and music.

We open with the generous, spontaneous, slumber party-ish delights of Slug Horizons (2018), a performance work by Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, which 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.'

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. We 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 we 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 we have two acts of distinctly private music-making: mourning and the ‘male solo song’. From Greece we welcome three professional mourners, Nikos Menoudakis, Anthoula Kotsou 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’.