London Contemporary Music Festival
London Contemporary Music Festival
Nalemag
AB Programme notes LCMF:
In the late 1970’s, Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson were enthralled by the aural poetry and parallel visions they encountered during numerous boat trips on the Thames. Bow Gamelan Ensemble, the group they later formed, originated at this point. For the next 10 years they worked on ideas to distil and extend these stimuli, ranging from jagged and harsh to haunting and lyrical, into events all over the world.
Since Burwell’s death, Wilson and Bean have since carried on working together in many contexts and modes, continuing to treat both sound and visuals as inter-relating sculptural forms in works such as Dark Haloes and Spooky Drums for Liverpool Biennale.
Now, Wilson & Bean enter the territory as W0B with their glass scores placed on music stands. This is a world that cracks and splinters and grinds and struggles into being as it races backwards and forwards through friendships of 40 years, resurrections of dead friends, awareness of endless scrabbling and searching around boat-yards and scrap-yards, gas depots, pyrotechnic munitions, steam-whistle and siren-makers’ stores, voyages on many rivers in countless vessels and a frenzy of carrying, welding, investigating and making across the planet. Like greedy sprites overwhelmed by the fertile upheaval of this unorthodox magic, W0B attempt to conjure this heap into reverberations before and beyond Bow Gamelan, using their repertoire and scores of bangs, taps, thumps, rattles, echoes, whispers, blasts, booms, clangs, clashes, howls, peals, pops, roars, rolls, rumbles, slams, smashes, thuds, thumps, thunder, whams, hums, murmurs, purrs, shouts, grunts, hisses, hollers, hoots, claps, screams, screeches, shrieks, wails, whines, whistles, whoops, yammers, sniffs, sobs, squalls, whimpers, groans, laments and sighs. NALEMAG becomes the totemic incarnation of this alchemy.
THE UK’S BEST EXPERIMENTAL FESTIVAL: LCMF REVIEWED
The set-up for visual artists Richard Wilson’s and Anne Bean’s NALEMAG , an astonishing portrait of the Thames and its shipbuilding communities, is gigantic. Behind flickering bulbs, Bean and Wilson dance precisely between blow torches, oil drums, fog horns. Balloons scream a cluster as they rise one by one to the ceiling, panes of glass shatter under flame, firecrackers writhe on Ambika’s walls. Electronic Beats
FESTIVAL REVIEW: LONDON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL
…….this piece, along with Anne Bean’s and Richard Wilson’s highly gestural and brilliantly orchestrated piece, NALEMAG (2015), demonstrated that avant-garde tendencies do not always have to be overburdened with solemnity; art can be entertaining too.
Backseat Mafia
FESTIVAL REPORT: LCMF
Anne Bean and Richard Wilson are now known primarily as visual artists, but throughout the 1980s were two-thirds of the legendary Bow Gamelan Ensemble (along with Paul Burwell, who died in 2007). In a festival coup, Bean and Wilson have been persuaded to take their instruments (fashioned from retrieved industrial scrap) out of storage for a performance entitled NALEMAG(2015). A spooky séance for the ruined East London of thirty years ago, their set is lit by flashing sodium lights, flickering televisions, fistfuls of exploding bang snaps and the glow of the blowtorches they use to shatter sheets of glass (in the evening’s second instance of real danger). The ghost is summoned through the eerie sounds of their gong sculptures and Bean’s wailing vocals. The Quietus
… Drop dead cool – NALEMAG by Anne Bean and Richard Wilson
LCMF @lcmf2015’s Instagram profile • Tofo.me:
London Contemporary Music Festival
London Contemporary Music Festival
Nalemag
AB Programme notes LCMF:
In the late 1970’s, Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson were enthralled by the aural poetry and parallel visions they encountered during numerous boat trips on the Thames. Bow Gamelan Ensemble, the group they later formed, originated at this point. For the next 10 years they worked on ideas to distil and extend these stimuli, ranging from jagged and harsh to haunting and lyrical, into events all over the world.
Since Burwell’s death, Wilson and Bean have since carried on working together in many contexts and modes, continuing to treat both sound and visuals as inter-relating sculptural forms in works such as Dark Haloes and Spooky Drums for Liverpool Biennale.
Now, Wilson & Bean enter the territory as W0B with their glass scores placed on music stands. This is a world that cracks and splinters and grinds and struggles into being as it races backwards and forwards through friendships of 40 years, resurrections of dead friends, awareness of endless scrabbling and searching around boat-yards and scrap-yards, gas depots, pyrotechnic munitions, steam-whistle and siren-makers’ stores, voyages on many rivers in countless vessels and a frenzy of carrying, welding, investigating and making across the planet. Like greedy sprites overwhelmed by the fertile upheaval of this unorthodox magic, W0B attempt to conjure this heap into reverberations before and beyond Bow Gamelan, using their repertoire and scores of bangs, taps, thumps, rattles, echoes, whispers, blasts, booms, clangs, clashes, howls, peals, pops, roars, rolls, rumbles, slams, smashes, thuds, thumps, thunder, whams, hums, murmurs, purrs, shouts, grunts, hisses, hollers, hoots, claps, screams, screeches, shrieks, wails, whines, whistles, whoops, yammers, sniffs, sobs, squalls, whimpers, groans, laments and sighs. NALEMAG becomes the totemic incarnation of this alchemy.
THE UK’S BEST EXPERIMENTAL FESTIVAL: LCMF REVIEWED
The set-up for visual artists Richard Wilson’s and Anne Bean’s NALEMAG , an astonishing portrait of the Thames and its shipbuilding communities, is gigantic. Behind flickering bulbs, Bean and Wilson dance precisely between blow torches, oil drums, fog horns. Balloons scream a cluster as they rise one by one to the ceiling, panes of glass shatter under flame, firecrackers writhe on Ambika’s walls. Electronic Beats
FESTIVAL REVIEW: LONDON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL
…….this piece, along with Anne Bean’s and Richard Wilson’s highly gestural and brilliantly orchestrated piece, NALEMAG (2015), demonstrated that avant-garde tendencies do not always have to be overburdened with solemnity; art can be entertaining too.
Backseat Mafia
FESTIVAL REPORT: LCMF
Anne Bean and Richard Wilson are now known primarily as visual artists, but throughout the 1980s were two-thirds of the legendary Bow Gamelan Ensemble (along with Paul Burwell, who died in 2007). In a festival coup, Bean and Wilson have been persuaded to take their instruments (fashioned from retrieved industrial scrap) out of storage for a performance entitled NALEMAG(2015). A spooky séance for the ruined East London of thirty years ago, their set is lit by flashing sodium lights, flickering televisions, fistfuls of exploding bang snaps and the glow of the blowtorches they use to shatter sheets of glass (in the evening’s second instance of real danger). The ghost is summoned through the eerie sounds of their gong sculptures and Bean’s wailing vocals. The Quietus
… Drop dead cool – NALEMAG by Anne Bean and Richard Wilson
LCMF @lcmf2015’s Instagram profile • Tofo.me: