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A night of expansive sound exploration and improvisation, featuring three celebrated performers from the electronic and noise avant-garde.

The serially innovative multidisciplinary artist Russell Haswell, who performs his Oscillographics set, a real-time exploration of phase scope image generation; Chicago’s Kevin Drumm, one of the truly cult figures in avant-garde underground music over the past twenty years; and the vibrant precision synthesis of musician and installation artist Thomas Ankersmit.

Russell Haswell is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator from Coventry, England, who lives and works in Suffolk. Hailed internationally as one of the key figures exploring the extremes of electronic music/sound exploration, he has worked on an incredible array of projects, performances and collaborations. Haswell has developed live and studio projects with artists including Rob Brown and Sean Booth of Autechre (with whom he recently toured), Masami Akita [MERZBOW], Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Peter Rehberg, Yasunao Tone, Ilpo Vãisãnen & Mika Vanio [PAN_SONIC], WHITEHOUSE, PAINJERK and hard disc jockey [HDJ] duos with Richard D James [Aphex Twin]. His solo recordings have been released by Editions Mego and NO FUN Productions, and more recently he has worked with DOWNWARDS. In 2003 He started a collaboration with Florian Hecker, working on Iannis Xenakis’ graphic-input ‘UPIC Music Composing System’, which has been presented in a series of acclaimed surround sound and laser live sessions around the world, including at the Frieze Art Fair; in addition Mego, Warner Classical, and Warp records have released Haswell & Hecker recordings. As well as his sonic projects, Haswell has continued to work as a writer, visual artist and curator. His extensive curating credits include a series of major projects at P.S.1/MOMA, New York, the two brilliant London All Tomorrow’s Parties club events, entitled ‘Easy to Swallow’ (2005 – 6), and ‘LISTEN’ at Aldeburgh Snape Maltings Concert House (2009). Surround sound compositions, by Peter Zinovieff and Yasunao Tone, which Haswell curated for TBA21 are currently being exhibited at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. He has exhibited visual artwork at many internationally renowned galleries and artspaces, including Sadie Coles HQ, London; TN Probe, Tokyo; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the ICA, London. As a writer, He has contributed to Frieze Magazine articles on Japanese noise, computer music software and Peter Halley. An interview for FACT is here, and last year’s FACT mix here.

Kevin Drumm was born and raised in 1970 in South Holland, IL, playing in a handful of rock bands before relocating to Chicago in 1991 to work at the city’s Board of Trade. He soon began his experiments with prepared guitar, applying objects including magnets, binder clips, chains, a violin bow and even toenail clippers to distort the instrument’s sound; in time Drumm befriended a number of members of Chicago’s growing improv community, including Jim O’ Rourke (with whom he served in Brise-Glace, additionally contributing to Gastr del Sol’s Upgrade and Afterlife album and Ken Vandermark. In late 1997 Drumm made his solo debut with a self-titled (Perdition Plastics) and has released superb duo records with Taku Sugimoto (Sonoris), Axel Dörner, Martin Tètreault (both Erstwhile) and Ralf Wehowsky (Selektion). His chameleon-like presence has been documented on a number of projects, each revealing new facets of his wide-ranging and unique talents on both guitar and electronics. Drumm seamlessly melds the worlds of acoustic and electronic sound, occasionally teetering on the edge of silence, yet always remaining impeccably musical. He has recorded and performed with Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Jim O’Rourke, MIMEO, Mats Gustafsson, John Butcher, Thomas Ankersmit, Taku Sugimoto and many others.

Thomas Ankersmit is a musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. His main instruments are the Serge analogue modular synthesizer, computer and alto saxophone. He frequently works together with New York minimalist Phill Niblock and electroacoustic artists Valerio Tricoli and Kevin Drumm. “Ankersmit constructs a musical world that feels alive and capable of going anywhere, and yet also manages to give the music a strong sense of structured purpose, a degree of compositional control unusual in this area of live performance. It is the fine balance between the sense of chaos that threatens to pull everything apart and the controlled formation of the music into clearly defined sections of differing intensities that raises the work above that of so many of Ankersmit’s contemporaries.” Richard Pinnell, The Wire

Visionary Kingdom

Across four evenings, the Visionary Kingdom programme presents a spectrum of incisive contemporary live music, film and performance from established talent and fast-rising names from the underground.

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Season pass £20/£18 concs