LCMF 2019

8 December: On Hauntology
Ambika P3


Maggie Nicols performing at LCMF 2019. Image: Dawid Laskowski


Susan Hiller
Belshazzar's Feast (Original Campfire Version – Reconstruction)
(1983-84) 

Rosemary Brown
Chopin's Nocturne in A flat (1966)
Liszt's Grübelei (1969)

Maggie Nicols
Live improvisation

Rosemary Brown
Schumann's Longing (1967)
Liszt's Jesus Walking on Water (1968)

Maggie Nicols
Live improvisation

INTERVAL

Eva-Maria Houben
A peaceful, silent place (2019)
(world premiere)(LCMF commission)

Performers:
Eva-Maria Houben organ
Siwan Rhys piano (Houben, Brown)
Maggie Nicols


Read the Guardian’s feature on spiritual-medium Rosemary Brown

‘Sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.’ (David Toop, Sinister Resonance)


Siwan Rhys performing the works of Rosemary Brown at LCMF 2019. Image: Dawid Laskowski

A night of technomancy, glossolalia and divining the dead. We present rarely heard works composed in the 1960s and 1970s by Liszt, Schubert and Beethoven as dictated to spiritual medium Rosemary Brown, witness the extraordinary, possessed vocal improvisations of Maggie Nicols, and screen a classic video piece by artist Susan HillerBelshazzar’s Feast, that transforms the TV into a primitive hearth, inviting us to see ‘the TV set [that] exists in everybody’s living room as a potential vehicle of reverie’.


Siwan Rhys at the piano and Eva-Maria Houben at the organ at LCMF 2019. Image: Dawid Laskowski

To end a 45-minute new commission for organ and piano from one of the leading members of the Wandelweiser collective of composers, Eva-Maria Houben, whose works teeter on the edge of the sounding present.