Tickets here....https://www.fonfestival.org/event/concert-aoire/
Programme note sneak preview.....
REVERB/ Aoire/ John Hall
Following the Play Summat We Know book, and the Play One Of Your Own exhibition, the REVERB project now looks at the ways in which the material extensions of music and pop culture affect us.
Musician Shaun Blezard, sculptor Alex Blackmore and Animator James Alexander will work with Lead Artist / writer John Hall to look at the enduring and ephemeral delivery systems of pop; at tape and records, at souvenirs, merch and personal memorabilia; at shops and venues and their place in the communal memory of the scenes they served and helped create, and in the animation and revivification of town centres and buildings.
And, we are working with the responses of local people to the exhibition in mind.
We begin with a work-in-progress combination of text and music from Aoire and John Hall.
Aoire is local musician and sound artist Shaun Blezard. He has been a part of the Barrow music community since the mid 80s, starting as bass player with The Peach Thieves and The Clementines. Inspired by mid 90s ambient dance he started making electronic music. This has his been his main interest for the last 25 years, incorporating field recordings and free improvisation into his music. He became the first Cumbrian composer to be featured in the British Music Collection and is returning to the stage after a break of a few years. He has played with musicians from Pere Ubu, The Slits and Mike Flowers Pops and many of the leading free improvisers in the UK.
John Hall is REVERB's lead artist and Project Manager. He was a founder Director of Full Of Noises and worked with Shaun in the laptop improv band Good Noise Bad Noise. Johns live work has taken him to Glastonbury Festival, the San Paulo Biennale and a Biker bar in Nashville . He produces books, records and audio for broadcast, and the pop culture 'zine Flypaper.
Aoire
is working on a commissioned cassette album for REVERB due out
towards the end of this year. The music is made from elements of
recordings of local independent bands from the 80s and 90s, mostly
taken from old cassettes, many of which have been in various lofts in
Barrow for decades. The music comes clad in tape hiss, wow, flutter
and muck, degraded by copying, each play delivering less information
and more evidence of the frailty of the vessel. Aoire deep-mines
these accretions for stems and samples, and subjects them to a
granular, forensic examination. What emerges is like a hazy memory of
youth glimpsed from a middle aged perspective, it floats in a
suspension of blue pub air and valve amp hum, pinpricked by shards
of clarity.
My work here includes a number of shortish recordings I've called Familiar Music. Familiar as in reminiscent of something previously heard or felt, and Familiar as agent, companion, accomplice. Hopefully providing some ritual ambience, Familiar Music comprises , so far, 6 pieces of music, field recording and recovered audio that began as attempts at a recreation of an accidental folk music of television themes, advert jingles, idents, the aural wallpaper that was in the background of our lives and didn't quite leave us. Conjured, enlisted, then locked within form...tape, vinyl, digital system, that stuff has agency. It can be be used to inspire states of awareness and recall, to accompany unselfconscious rituals and exchanges, to wake cultural sleeper cells, to summon the trace from the walls.
The Song was assembled from a failed Fetch , from fragments delivered by inadequate file recovery software. Many people came to the POOYO show and remembered lost friends from their scene; this is me remembering one of mine.
REVERB is an Artspace project.
https://www.artspacecumbria.com/
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