PAST EVENT
12 December:
Not sorry
Hackney Church
Melinda Maxwell
Live improvisation on the aulos
Jon Rafman
COUNTERFEIT POAST (2023)
Charles Ives
Take-Off No. 3: Rube Trying to Walk 2 to 3!! (1906)
(world premiere)
James Clarke
2016-E (2016)
(UK premiere)
Joanna Ward/Laurie Ward
Sissy études: Houdini (2024)
(world premiere)(LCMF commission)
INTERVAL
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
hypnogirl 24 (2024)
(world premiere)(LCMF commission)
Steve Beresford / Maggie Nicols
Live
[Edward George has had to withdraw due to sickness]
Jon Rafman
COUNTERFEIT POAST (2023)
Laila Arafah
Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate] (2024)
(world premiere)(LCMF commission)
INTERVAL
Matt Copson
LET’S CREATE: PART 2 (2024)
(world premiere) (LCMF commission)
Andrew Hamilton
The Heavens (2014)
(world premiere)
∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O
Live
(UK debut duo)
Performers:
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Tetsuo Yamatsuka (∈Y∋)
Yasumichi Miura (C.O.L.O)
Explore Ensemble (Arafah, Clarke, Ives)
Steve Beresford piano
Maggie Nichols vocals
Café Rat (Joanna Ward, Laurie Ward)
Melinda Maxwell aulos
Sarah Park drum
Andrew Hamilton piano, vocals
‘When [the trickster] Loki is suppressed the world collapses; when he – and disorder – returns, the world is reborn.’
— Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World
It’s hard to overstate how much Plato hated the aulos – and how much he almost certainly would have hated LCMF. For the Greek philosopher, this raucous instrument – a double-reed precursor to the modern oboe – was impure, unreliable, unruly. In the Republic he advised that it should be banned. The aulos has had the last laugh, however. Earlier this year AI deciphered a scroll from Herculaneum that revealed that the aulos was being played to Plato by a Thracian slave-girl on his final evening alive. Had he finally come round to it? Or was he being trolled? Tonight, composer and reeds specialist Melinda Maxwell will recreate these skronky ancient sounds that proved so offensive to Plato’s idea of harmony and order.
The disobedience of the aulos is perfectly suited to the spirit of the figure presiding over this year’s festival: the trickster. As is AI. Tonight we present five episodes from COUNTERFEIT POAST (2023), a film by artist Jon Rafman, one of the great manipulators of artificial intelligence. Constructed from a palette of data garbage and Reddit copypasta, and drawing on the Mandela Affect – in which false memories form a mass delusion – the video work is an algorithmic fantasy, ‘a Boschian 21st-century hellscape andd purgatory’, in the words of the artist.
AI – and the datasets they rely on – is a form of digital net, a dredge to plunder our collective memory, a vast immaterial lasso to catch contingency. And the net is, according to Lewis Hyde, the trickster’s central invention:
‘In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches humans how to catch salmon, he makes the first fish weir out of logs and branches. On the Northern Pacific coast, the trickster Raven made the first fishhooks; he taughtt the spider how to make her web and human beings how to make nets… ‘Trick’ is dolos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch fish.’
No sooner had the mythical tricksters invented the net, however, than they were working out a way to unravel it. Trickster is always both a catcher of contingency and a creator of contingency. In this, free improv – of which we welcome two legends tonight: Steve Beresford and Maggie Nicols – is the exemplary trickster artform. Here, accident is always essence.
The trickster is a poreseeker. An unraveller. An escape artist. Never happier than tearing holes in the tightly woven fabric off the world.
Enter Houdini and Magdeleine G.
Theatre maker Laurie Ward and composer Joanna Ward (aka Café Rat) will present Sissy études: Houdini: ‘an aquatic exercise in sisterhood, a passing of the key’. The work ‘spirals from an obsession with Houdini’s extended sonic universe: Kate Bush, keys, water, Eminem, jingle-jangle, Dua Lipa. This obsession led to a strange sonic and symbolic zone in which to question the boundaries of self/other, infancy/adulthood, and intimacy/distance between sisters.’
Following the interval, we welcome celebrated artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and the latest iteration of her Apparitions cycle, developed since 2013.
‘hypnogirl 24 is the story of an apparition told by another
apparition.
hypnogirl is Madeleine G. (born 1874) is Dominique G-F
(born 1965), who never studied dance, dancing in an hypnotic state, experiencing music through movement and emotions.
a kind of musical seance disconnected from any rehearsal
and acting.
– with original music by Julien Perez (Exotourisme)y
When does a trickster become a troll? Pioneering modernist Charles Ives was without doubt both. To celebrate his 150th anniversary, Explore Ensemble will perform an tiny unplayed sketch, Rube Trying to Walk 2 to 3!! (1906), a transcription of a friend’s drunken stumble home: ‘written as a joke, and sounds like one!’ writes Ives on the score, ‘Watty McCormick only one to see it! And Harry Farrar! At 2.45 A.M.’ Ives’s forays into polytonality, polymetrism, even atonality, at his Yale frat house in the 1890s, demonstrate how crucial barefaced trolling was to the earliest
experiments of modernism.
A perverse streak can be found in most modernists. Especially any that have chosen this path in the unforgiving atmosphere of the British state. Tonight – and on Saturday – we champion one of our favourites, the dogged and unsung James Clarke, whose 2016-E, performed by Explore Ensemble, alchemises into sound the stark colour blocks and explosive cracks of the paintings of Clifford Still and Barnett Newman.
Alongside the Clarke, Explore Ensemble will premiere a new work from a composer repping Gen Z, Laila Arafah – a true modernist trickster in the making. Like Rafman’s COUNTERFEIT POAST, Sibelius Studies 2: [keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate] is a bravura exercise in shitpost modernism and the subcultures of the chronically online:
‘Sibelius Studies 2 is a sequel to the first one, but this time even more disappointing. A delirious smudge of thin gruel, characterised throughout with a haphazard pummeling of sensible musical principles and, quite frankly, the audience, leaving the musicians of Explore Ensemble doodling aimlessly.’ — Laila Arafah
Our final trio begins with the second of four mysterious phone calls created specially for LCMF by artist Matt Copson. And before we descend into primeval chaos – the trickster, remember, is the main conduit between the divine, the mortal and the Stygian – we visit The Heavens (2014) courtesy of Andrew Hamilton: ‘a very simple song about heartbreak…’ Closing us out, however, brace yourself for a slice of pure mayhem thanks to a rare visit by two representatives of Japan’s notorious noise scene: ∈Y∋ (Boredoms and Hanatarash) and C.O.L.O (Cosmic Lab).
NB Edward George had to withdraw due to sickness.