LCMF 2022
16 June: Sad and Ruined
Fireworks Factory
World premiere of Marikiscrycrycry & Bianca Scout's WE HAPPY BUT WE BROKEN. Image: Dawid Laskowski 5
Marikiscrycrycry / Bianca Scout
WE HAPPY BUT WE BROKEN (2022)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Frank Denyer
Five Views of the Path (2022)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Katalin Ladik
Selected poems and films
James Richards
Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold (2022)
(UK premiere)
Lolina
Live
Jerskin Fendrix
Excerpts from his album Winterreise (2020)
Evan Johnson
émoi (2010)
(London premiere)
Ed Fornieles / Gretchen Lawrence
Associations (2021)
Nam June Paik
Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia (1962)
Performers:
Andy Ingamells piano (Paik)
Bianca Scout (Marikiscrycrycry)
Frank Denyer conductor (Denyer)
Jerskin Fendrix piano and voice
Jessica Aszodi voice (Denyer)
Katalin Ladik
Lolina
Malik Nashad Sharpe (Marikiscrycrycry)
Octandre Ensemble (Denyer)
Richard Craig bass flute (Johnson)
Consider the Sad Boy: a familiar crestfallen figure, resurrected by the internet, given fresh spectral life by the digitally hyperreal, given even more forms of emptiness to play with, even more ways to disappear.
Tonight we chart several new incarnations: a dramatic, experimental new commission from choreographer Marikiscrycrycry and musician and dancer Bianca Scout WE HAPPY BUT WE BROKEN ‘that lies between the aesthetics of melancholia and marginalisation’; a vertiginous confessional film by cult artist Ed Fornieles and electronic producer Gretchen Lawrence; and the breakup bedroom pop of composer Jerskin Fendrix, where Schubert meets PC Music.
Digital debris is the Sad Boy’s toy. And debris, or trash, ‘is culture retold as a joke, and, like all jokes, it becomes a harbinger of doom,’ writes Ken Hollings. Detritus, comedy, misery: tonight’s trifecta. Ruins in reverse.
Robert Smithson coined the phrase 'ruins in reverse' in his essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey to describe the chewed up wastelands of his birthplace. 'I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past,' he wrote. Many artists have sought this future out.
Celebrating work that builds with rubble, that constructs using failed sound, we welcome a visit by Hungarian poet and artist Katalin Ladik, who will present several works – both her shamanistic sound poetry and lesser known films – from her expansive six-decade practice that play with the ruins of society, of interior lives, of thought, of sound and language.
We explore the decompositions of outsider icon Lolina, FKA Inga Copeland, formerly one-half of the game-changing Hype Williams, the acoustic nervous breakdowns of one of America’s most exciting younger composers, Evan Johnson, in émoi, a work for bass flute performed by Richard Craig, and the 60th-anniversary performance of Nam June Paik’s Fluxus work Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia (1962), a tragicomic reimagining of the Moonlight Sonata that will be performed by composer Andy Ingamells.
And we present the UK premiere of James Richards’s new short Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold (2022), one of the highlights of this year’s Venice Biennale, which ‘compiles domestic still lifes, detritus, and civic sewage systems into a musical suite to look closer at the private and public dimensions of contagion, hygiene, and decay’.
‘Melancholy can be overcome only be melancholy,’ argued Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Accept a final tonic then: the bittersweet world of composer Frank Denyer, whose new commission 5 Views of the Path will be performed by the Octandre Ensemble.