James Rushford & Joe Talia are two distinctive and exploratory voices in the contemporary Australian underground. They first caught our ear with their wonderful ‘Manhunter’ release on Graham Lambkin’s KYE label. Drawing upon strategies from contemporary composition, music concrete and improvisation, it weaves together greyscale electronics, dehumanized drum machines, amorphous vocal fragments, domestic detritus and sundry devices into a clouded, submerged narrative fabric. Although the duo’s working methods and sound sources have changed radically between releases (and even performances), all of their work breathes the same peculiar air of lingering obsession and decayed virtuosity.
Support comes from two local exponents of the underground scene Kelly Jayne Jones & Sam Weaver revisiting there past duo project 'Laid Back Never Holding Back"
£5 (Unwaged) / £7 (waged)
James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer. His work is drawn from a familiarity with specific concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist languages. Currently, his work deals with the aesthetic concept of musical shadow.
James has collaborative projects with Joe Talia, Golden Fur (with Samuel Dunscombe & Judith Hamann), Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Will Guthrie, Oren Ambarchi, Klaus Lang, Kassel Jaeger, Annea Lockwood, Graham Lambkin, Francis Plagne, Tashi Wada, the visual artist Michael Salerno and the writer Dennis Cooper.
His music has been published by Pogus (US), Prisma (Norway), Bocian (Poland), Penultimate Press (UK), Black Truffle (AUS), Holidays (IT) and KYE (US).
James holds a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and was a 2018 fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Joe Talia is an improviser and composer who works with percussion, tape and electronics. Focussing on the use of Revox tape machine and analogue synthesizers in combination with instruments and field recordings, Talia’s electronic works patiently build up sparkling, detail-rich sound worlds of gliding tones, skittering percussion and burbling location atmospherics. In live situations, Talia often uses tape and effects to process and warp his own and others’ playing into uncanny chains of echoes and spectral smears of sound.
A virtuoso drummer, as a percussionist Talia emerges from the traditions of jazz and free improvisation and has developed a unique personal language of shifting accents, subtle virtuosity and discreet extended technique that he welds equally ably in jazz, rock, new music and improvisational contexts. Like his electronic works, his drumming often demonstrates a keen attention to long-form structures, dynamic development and group interactions.
An important member of Tokyo’s vibrant improvised music scene and internationally active as a performer, Talia performs and records regularly with Oren Ambarchi, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, James Rushford and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. In addition to these regular collaborations, he has also been involved in projects with Keiji Haino, Chris Abrahams, Tetuzi Akiyama, Akira Sakata, John Duncan, Richard Pinhas and many others. His work has been published by international labels such as Black Truffle, Bocian, Kye and Touch.
Kelly Jayne Jones is a Manchester artist making work that combines performance, installation and sound. Mostly self taught, she began working in DIY noise music expanding her practice to include dance, sonic drawings, stone sculpture and film scores.
She is interested in creating multi-sensory experiences, often exploring animist ideas around the breath and spirit of mountains and rivers. Her work traverses the emotions of desire and anxiety, the comfortable and uncomfortable edges of our inner spaces and social co-existence.
KJJ has collaborations with Hannah Ellul (White Death), Greta Buitkute (Clout then Grappling) and Dan Valentine from Rainer Veil. She was one half of the group part wild horses mane on both sides, which disbanded in 2016.
She has performed across Europe, presenting work for the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, ICA London, Le Plateau Paris, Borealis Festival Norway, Tectonics and hcmf.
Sam Weaver, who uses his studio as a laboratory for sonic investigation and production, re-routing instruments into abstraction and deliberately misusing his equipment. Sam’s work exists between acousmatic music, free improvisation and experimental electronics, seeking to explore dynamics of sonic harmony and chaos.