LCMF 2024
PAST EVENT
11 December:
Sorry
Hackney Church
Philip Corner
During This Concert the Hall will be bombed – or blown up (1969)
(UK premiere)
Russell Haswell
the truth is as elusive as ever (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
(with BSL interpretation)
INTERVAL
Philip Corner
An anti-personnel CBU-Type cluster bomb unit will be thrown into the audience (1969)
(UK premiere)
Laurie Tompkins
The Feelmouth Greeny (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Viola Torros
new found fragments (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Adam de la Cour
Groyne ‘n’ Goosed (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
INTERVAL
Philip Corner
As soon as I finish speaking this hall will be struck by an intercontinental long-range rocket (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Matt Copson
LET’S CREATE: PART 1 (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Jennifer Walshe
A Glimpse Of the Art Basel
from The Text Score Dataset 1.0 (2021)
(world premiere)
aya
aya plays the music of aya (2024)
(world premiere)(LCMF commission)
Performers:
Dean Kissick (Corner)
Russell Haswell
Rachel Jones sign-language interpreter (Haswell)
Lena McKenna-Graham girl speaker (Haswell)
Musarc chorus (Haswell, Walshe):
Alice Watson, Anna Cséfalvay, Aranza Fernandez, Ashmi Thapar, Carol Mancke, Carolyn Roy, Clara Meyer, Dominic Thurston, Douglas Cape, Franziska Böhm , Hannah Archambault, Hélène Lomenech, Ivo Krankowski, Joanna Ward, Joseph Kohlmaier, Mariam Bergloff, Mia Damerum, Natalie Savva, Paul Martin, Rebecca Faulkner, Reuben Esterhuizen, Saori Miraku, Sophie Barshall, Stephen Graham, Zeina Nasr
Laurie Tompins vocals
Sam Andreae saxophone
Catherine Lamb viola (Torros)
Johnny Chang viola (Torros)
Adam de la Cour’s panto Groyne ‘n’ Goosed:
Adam de la Cour, Lore Lixenberg, Mark Knoop, Neil Luck, Alwynne Pritchard, Patricia Auchterlonie, Vicky Wright, Alan Witts, Cameron Dodds, Andy Ingamells, Sarah Parkin, Angela Wai Nok Hui, Matt Rogers
aya
‘Transcendental Cringe is when something is so bad it tears a hole through the fabric of spectacle to reveal a pure imminent truth. You are not a $ubject. Can you feel the stillness of the universe, the stillness of others?This is what genesis looks like. Do you really think this song is about you?’
— Barrett Avner, ‘Finance Punk/Omnicringe Manifesto’, Covidian Aesthetics
The opening night of this 10th anniversary edition of LCMF features a type of work that cannot be performed and mustn’t be performed – though unconscionably it is performed every year. That’s right: I’m talking about our new panto. Once the epitome of popular European entertainment, the panto has since retreated to these shores and now squats proudly in our theatres during winter, the Millwall of art, one of the most reviled forms in history.
Tonight, composer Adam de la Cour reunites the panto with one of its closest and not much less despised relatives: experimental music. The mother of these two slippery worlds is the same: the vaudeville spectacles of the Edwardian age. (On 17 January 2025 at the Wigmore Hall we present the missing link: the world’s first experimental music, Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori, will be heard in Britain for the first time since 1914, when this noise orchestra was forced to battle it out with sundry variety acts at what was then a music hall, the London Coliseum).
De la Cour’s new Groyne ‘n’ Goosed, inspired by the Garbage Pail Kids, brings together the cream of London’s fractious experimental music scene, including vocalists Lore Lixenberg, Patricia Auchterlonie and Sarah Parkin, composers Neil Luck, Alwynne Pritchard, Matt Rogers, Andy Ingamells, Cameron Dodds and Alan Witts, clarinettist Vicky Wright, pianist Mark Knoop and percussionist Angela Wai Nok Hui.
The night starts, however, with a truly forbidden art: Philip Corner’s During This Concert the Hall will be bombed – or blown up (1969). Writer and artist Dean Kissick will present the UK premiere of this Vietnam-era text score, and after each subsequent interval two more: An anti-personnel CBU-Type cluster bomb unit will be thrown into the audience (1969) and one Corner wrote especially for this festival As soon as I finish speaking this hall will be struck by an intercontinental long-range rocket.
The guiding spirit of this LCMF – perhaps every LCMF – has been the figure of the trickster. And if there’s something that unites the mythical tricksters – Coyote and Èsù, Hermes and Loki – it is the intrepid interloping instinct. In this vein we will witness noise artist Russell Haswell’s first foray into opera. Emerging from the lineage of the mould-breaking operas of Robert Ashley, the truth is as elusive as ever – an absurdist sci-fi work ‘set in today’s murky future’ – features the experimental choir Musarc and Haswell himself on electronics, and takes on ‘spam, the cost of living crisis and world war three and other current topics’.
At the heart of the night Johnny Chang and Catherine Lamb present some newly uncovered fragments from the mysterious composer of the early middle ages, Viola Torros, who specialised in composing and performing on some of the first lute-like instruments:
‘Some were perhaps similar to the rabab, and others similar to the modern day instrument which is, perhaps, her namesake. It is unclear whether she was the initial inventor, or whether she was friendly with a highly developed ... unknown maker(s). Regardless, she certainly is one of the earliest known composers to have written for such modern-like bowed string instruments ...
At some point v. Torros seems to have disappeared from the cultural centers she found herself initially drawn to. It is believed she settled further north, most probably into the foothills of what is now considered the Alps. It is here where archeologists have discovered musical, written documents (in a peculiar notation), embedded under layers of stone, which could only be attributed to her.’
As part of our 10th anniversary celebrations, we’re celebrating the London experimental music scene with new work spread out over the four nights by a number of key figures, young and old. Wednesday sees composer Laurie Tompkins team up with saxophonist Sam Andreae on The Feelmouth Greeny, where omnicringe and shitpost modernism meet. ‘Sounds strain under duress,’Tompkins writes of his musical practice, ‘looping their way through scenes of grubby presence, not-quite riff, mouldy echo, and swollen bombast.’
And we end with a trio of artists whose commitment to the bit is unassailable. Derived from the past 70 years of text-score history, A Glimpse of the Art Basel is one of the works that make up Jennifer Walshe’s The Text Score Dataset 1.0 (2021). Here AI – the quintessential trickster tool: a dredge to plunder our collective memory, a vast immaterial net to catch contingency – was used ‘to “breed” new text scores by feeding in pre-existing compositions by artists:’
‘I don’t view the scores in this booklet as written by me. I view them as products of a community – of a shared avant-garde imaginary in continuous dialogue with itself, which has its roots in John Cage’s classes at the New School for Social Research in the late 1950s and stretches all over the world today. Throughout the project, my role has felt much closer to that of folklore collector than composer.’
We’ll hear the first of four mysterious phone calls that the artist Matt Copson has compiled specially for LCMF, and electronic producer aya – ‘an actual person from off the Pennines’ – who is the 44th aya listed on the online encyclopaedic music listing site Discogs, will play with the music of the 43 ayas that precede her.