24 March 2023 Friday 6-8:30pm. DJ from 6-7:30pm. Live by artist from 7:30pm.
25 March Saturday 6-8:30pm. DJ from 6-7:30pm. Live by artist from 7:30pm.
26 March Sunday 3-7pm. DJ from 3-5pm. Live by artist at 5 AND 6pm.
Free entry. . [[Photosensitive Warning]]
Merkaba Macabre presents a new audiovisual project that explores colour to sound synthesis for a three-day residency at Project DIVFUSE. The project maps the perceived colour spectrum to the audible frequency spectrum, allowing each color tone to pair with a unique sound tone. These ‘binary tones’ are performed live as quantized patterns across three digital projectors and a 3.1 sound system. Building upon the artist’s previous research in analogue light-based composition, Merkaba Macabre investigates this field in a purely digital process resulting in a triptych audiovisual expanse.
Ticket: £10. 8 seats only (Sold out now!). To buy tickets, please email divfuse@gmail.com for payment details.
Project DIVFUSE is pleased to present our third event under our curatorial series Sound Meta, which celebrates sound making through performances or workshops. Join us for a 2023 version of this unique event by Robin The Fog where tape loops will take over the entire venue – and the audience will be expected to help hold it all together!
Robin The Fog is a Cumbrian sound artist and audio producer based in London. He is the founding member of Howlround, a project that creates recordings and performances entirely by manipulating sounds on a quartet of vintage reel to reel tape recorders, with all additional effects strictly forbidden – no samples, no synths, no pedals, no plug-ins. Howlround’s eighth studio album was released in 2022.
Each session is about 30 minutes. 8 places each session. Please email divfuse@gmail.com for a space.
Artist will be present during the event. Free entry
‘In the late 1980s I was living on Clarence Road a stone’s throw from DIVFUSE Gallery.
Looking out through the windows of my upstairs flat I made a ten-minute film, Views from Home.
Shot in time-lapse, the film also recorded sunlight passing through the empty rooms while I was out at work. Sax player Alan Wilkinson lived and practised in the flat below, and he unknowingly provided much of the soundtrack.
For this event, a live video of the street plays alongside an adapted version of the original film.
Note: Views from Home was filmed in super 8mm and completed on video in 2005.’
16 December Friday 6:30-8pm [UPDATED from 9 December]
£5 | 12 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Workshops :
10 December Saturday 2-4pm PART ONE
17 December Saturday 2-4pm PART TWO
£12 each part or £20 for attending both parts | 6 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing information
Note : Participants are recommended to attend both parts as PART TWO will be building on the materials delivered in PART ONE. BYO instruments.
Two workshops and a lecture by Caroline Kraabel
Exploring her own practice, along with a wider view of improvisation and identity: even the world of freely improvised music can be experienced as an enclave that excludes, despite the perceived association of improvisation with limitlessness and freedom.
How do people who improvise feel and think DIFFERENTLY from each other on the subject? How do we avoid or alter any dominance of particular groups over the theory or practice of improvisation? Does the experimental nature of improvisation make it easier for members of élites to shine in the field, because they have more pre-existing socio-cultural capital? Or, does improvisation come more easily for outsiders who are already primed to find alternative paths? How are improvisers affected by their musical and cultural histories? How does a group, maybe a large group, of improvisers negotiate space and time, noise and silence in a musical and just way?
For improvisers who have experienced forms of oppression in music making and/or life, is the aim when making music merely to recapitulate existing power structures, but try to place themselves at the top? Or to create new and fairer structures?
References: Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, by George E. Lewis, Columbia University
3 & 4 December Saturday & Sunday 2:30-6:30pm. Artist will be dialling in from Poland for an artist’s chat between 5pm and 6pm on Sunday.
Running time : 30 minutes. Free Entry
This is one of the three exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 4 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected by Project DIVFUSE and sound artist Kate Carr.
A Hole in a Wall (2021)
‘When I was at the Sanatorium of Sound Festival in Sokołowsko I hiked a lot. During one of my trips I found the ruins of some old buildings. Ruins were based on a slope of a hill in between meadow and woods. When I came closer I saw black eye of a rusty pipe looking back at me. It went from the outside to the inside of ruins. I put my ear to the dry pipe and I heard a rumble so different from the calm soundscape of the spa. It was so loud but almost unnoticeable even from a short distance. It amazed me so I put a shotgun microphone into the pipe and a pair of omni mics I left outside.’
Early Electro-acoustic music in the empty ballroom (2021)
‘Not so long ago I used to work for the local theatre company. The company owned an old hotel which they meant to renovate for a new stage. Empty space of a ballroom in the hotel was central to the building. Before renovation started I decided to honour the space and its unique reverbnation which was going to be lost soon. I went there at night with my microphones. The night was silent. I’ve decided to provoke reverbnation by using found objects such as broken tiles, scrap and rubble. I moved it on the concrete floor of the room. I recorded all of it on a broken tape recorder and then played it once again into the same space (inspired by “I am sitting in the room” by A. Lucier) and simultaneously playing on rubble once again. The outcome is a microphone performance/field recordings and homage to place which is gone by now.’ – Maciej Wirmański
This is one of the three exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 4 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected by Project DIVFUSE and sound artist Kate Carr.
International Waters (2022) is an ongoing project that explores the porous exchanges and complex entanglements of water, culture and economy around the world.
Part 1: Late Night, Cais do Sodré, Lisbon, Portugal. Containing both the Railway Station and the docks, this area was a notorious vice district. In the course of the last two decades it has been rapidly regenerated. People do not sleep here, and the sounds of music are carried on the wind out over the harbour, mingling with the crashing of waves and the wailing and grinding of metal in the docks.
Part 2: Early morning, La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Matanza-Riachuelo river is one of the 30 most polluted places in the world. Factories, tanneries and slaughterhouses pump industrial waste into its waters for miles before it reaches the mouth, La Boca. There are two ways for pedestrians to cross: the footbridge on the highway or the tiny row-boat ferry beneath it. The footbridge is free, while the ferry costs 1.5 pesos. Most people choose the row-boat, bringing them within inches of the contaminated water, free to trail their hands in it, and listen to the gentle lapping of water against the boat mixing with the sounds of heavy industry and transport.
