WOB Kicking the Bucket /Waking the Dead, 2016

Since their 1980s collaboration as Bow Gamelan Ensemble (with Paul Burwell), Bean and Wilson have explored, in many contexts – from Iraq to the Maunsell Forts – ongoing other-worldly encounters. 

Now, as W0B, they reach backwards and forwards to access cracks in time, capturing fragments of these works to create Kicking the Bucket /Waking the Dead, back in their old regular stomping grounds of BOW Cemetery.

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 ofthe 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    
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