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Electronic music for head and body from Pan Sonic’s Mika Vainio, Mark Fell’s Sensate Focus project and Philadelphia’s Bee Mask.


With: Bee Mask, Mark Fell, Mika Vainio

Mika Vainio, currently based in Berlin, was one half of the minimal electronic duo Pan Sonic from Finland, (the other half was Ilpo Väisänen). Before starting Pan Sonic in beginning of the 90’s, Mika Vainio has played electronics and drums as part of the early Finnish industrial and noise scene. His solo works, under his own name and under aliases like Ø, are known for their analogue warmth and electronic harshness. Be it abstract drone works or minimal avant techno, Vainio is always creating unique, physical sounds. He has released on labels like Editions Mego, PAN, Touch, Wavetrap and Sähkö and has worked with Alan Vega of Suicide, Keiji Haino, Chicks on Speed, John Duncan and Bruce Gilbert.

 

Mark Fell aka Sensate Focus is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield, well known for his work together with Mat Steel in the duo SND and as one of the most important figures working at the juncture of sound practice and club music right now. In 1998 he initiated a series of critically acclaimed releases, featuring both collaborative and solo works on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego, Raster-Noton, and Alku. In early 2012, Fell released his Sensate Focus project, also the name of his new label – distributed through Peter Rehberg’s Editions Mego label – and the title of the first release, a two-track 12″. Employing a sensual warmth worthy of the name as well as the familiar energy of dance music, the exploratory compositions of Sensate Focus critically reconfigure the drum textures of vintage house and techno.

 

Bee Mask is a project of Chris Madak, from Cleveland Ohio (now based in Philadelphia), and a vehicle for an intricate and deeply warped idea of modern electronic music which draws equally on the ecstatic human/machine couplings of 1970s west coast synthesis, the fractured gloss of sampler concrète, the iridescent thumbprint of High Minimalism on the humid throb of trunk bass, and the barely- sublimated currents of vertigo and terror that course beneath the most unsettling moments in the canon of home-recorded psychedelia. The 2011 reissue of Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico on Spectrum Spools (another imprint of Editions Mego) revealed Bee Mask’s place on the leading edge of a world in which distinctions between head music and body music no longer apply. In the wake of Canzoni and the double LP retrospective Elegy for Beach Friday, Chris has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Europe and completed commissioned electroacoustic works dedicated to The Sonic Arts Union and John Cage.