Sonic Specters with Richard Skelton, Jung An Tagen and Firmament
Between Nostalgia and Anticipation
Angewandte
Interdisciplinary Lab
Eerie atmospheres and flickering sound traces created by past audio sources and the
coming times – for each event of the new series Sonic Specters. Between Nostalgia and Anticipation two musicians track down
what has ceased to exist and what is yet to come. Firmament is the midst of the waters that divides the waters above
from the waters below. It is the past of the traveler that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are
or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Richard
Skelton is an English musician. Over the past seventeen years and over 50 albums & EPs, he has developed a signature sound,
often comprised of strings, piano and other acoustic instrumentation. Since 2013 he has increasingly buried these organic
sources in layers of detritus and static. The process, as he articulates it, is to use signal-degradation as a means of reflecting
the processes of decay and transformation in the natural world. His music has been placed alongside giants of experimental
music, such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Stars Of The Lid, William Basinski. A DIY advocate, most of his music has been self-released,
either via Sustain-Release (2005-2011) or Corbel Stone Press (2009+).
Renown for his expressive and innovative use of
acoustic instruments, his much-imitated treatment of strings — at once visceral and haunting — began in 2007 on the album
‘Box of Birch’, and was later developed on his trio of ground-breaking recordings, ‘Marking Time’ (2008), ‘Landings’ (2009)
and ‘Verse of Birds’ (2011). His work has been lauded by Gramophone, Mojo, Q, Record Collector and The Quietus, among others,
and in 2011 he was featured on the cover of The Wire magazine. In 2013 he was shortlisted for a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award,
and in 2014 he was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Award for Experimental Music.
Jung An Tagen invites
us to reflect on the diffuse but persistent term ‘experimental’ not as deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy, but as the design
and implementation of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results; ‘electronic’ as an annulment of the previous
instrumental tradition, and as a simultaneous reversion towards aesthetic openness; as the fragmentation of a theoretical
or mythical musical syntax by obsessive repetition, sequential motivic mutations, aleatoric arrays, pareidolic illusions and
moiré effects; ‘electronic’ as the ultimate split, dehumanisation, mechanic strangeness.
Backed up by 2 decades of discographic
activity under diverse pseudonyms and multiple collaborations on labels such as Editions Mego and Diagonal, Stefan Juster
performs tirelessly at Festivals like Unsound or Sonic Acts, researching the boundaries of techno and dissociative computer
music. Testing strategies of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena, encouraging minds and bodies to calculate
and intuit their own place in spacetime. It’s addictive music. Music in constant explosion.
The sound performance
series Sonic Specters is the first part of the program centering on AIL’s new topic: Haunted – Persistence of the Past. In
cooperation with Struma+Iodine.ail.angewandte.at 
