What we are up to

World Premieres: Scanner, Iris Garrelfs and Steven Fowler

10/09/12 Live
by Nathan Jones

Mercy and Liverpool Biennial 2012
with Deep Hedonia

present
[part of Mercy's EVP Weekend at LB2012]
World Premiere performance works
 Scanner //  Iris Garrelfs // Steven Fowler & Ben Morris

8pm - 1am Saturday 6th October
@ Hi-Fi (formerly Binary Cell) 40 Seel Street
 £5 BUY

As the grand finale of this awesome weekend interrogating the hauntological electronic voice, Mercy, Liverpool Biennial and Deep Hedonia bring together three internationally significant new works made especially for the festival.

Each work brings a uniquely contemporary entry into the intersection of electronics, voice and paranormal psychology. Expect ghostly soundscapes, otherworldly screams, cuts, flows, and synaesthetics at this unique event.

Featuring

SCANNER
One of the foremost and singularly recognisable sound artists of his generation, Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) has won international admiration from amongst others, Bjork, Aphex Twin and Stockhausen. With this new commission for Mercy and Liverpool Biennial 2012, Scanner will present EVP recordings from a theatre in Stockholm built in 1766 along with his trademark intercepted phone conversations to create a survey of anticipation in sound and words, things to come, but not fulfilled. The voice emerges, found, processed, unwrapped, but lost. Throughout, Scanner himself will act as The Host bringing in these voices and spirits to an engaging soundscape.

"For Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, music is not an end point. Instead, it is part of a complex web of activity that defines the democracy of the digital world." The Wire

IRIS GARRELFS
Described as the Diamanda Galas of Glitch, Iris' work suggests a kind of siphoning-off of sonic nerve impulses, fragments of melody, rhythm and correlation floating around in her body and brain. Using her voice as raw material, Iris his transmutes the body into machine noises, choral works and pulverised sound. For this new work, Iris will improvise a new composition based on the theme and performance environment.

"granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing" the Wire

STEVEN FOWLER AND BEN MORRIS
Two artists at the forefront of the avant garde in music and poetics return to Liverpool for this, their third iteration of a collaborative work exploring the voice under the pressure of violence, exhaustion and analogue processing. The work will include dramatic physical elements along with the considerable vocal and audio skills of this partnership.

Steven Fowler is one of the most promising poetic voices of his generation, along with his work with Mercy he has produced commissions for London Sinfonietta, Voiceworks, It's Nice That and Tate
"Punchy, lyrical, and incandescently inventive, by turns surreal and disarmingly direct... if Captain Beefheart had done San Quentin, the result might have sounded something like this." Philip Terry

Ben Morris is one half of folk jazz improv partnership Chora. A true original, and natural collaborator:
"A beautiful, dense rumination ... Every change is striking, every move precise... a new improv movement that's definitely worth exploring" Dusted

This work is a commission for Mercy, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

THE ELECTRONIC VOICE PHENOMENA WEEKEND is FUNDED BY NATIONAL LOTTERY through ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND's GFA, and LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2012.