GRAIN presents: Tongue Depressor, Marija Covačević, and more

Event information

Tongue Depressor (New England, USA) is the duo of Zach Rowden and Henry Birdsey. They write and perform drone-based music with continually expanding instrumentation including bagpipes, double bass, pedal steel/lap steel, tape loops, harmonicas, organs, and bells. They tour regularly in North America, Europe, and the UK, and have released 30+ LPs, CDs, cassettes, and lathes on labels including No Rent, Astral Spirits, Xkatedral, Stoned To Death, Redscroll, Chocolate Monk, Full Spectrum, Dinzu Artefacts, Worried Songs, and Soundholes. Tongue Depressor maintains collaborations with a revolving door of third members including Austin Larkin, Weston Olencki, John McCowen, Jakub Battick, and Leila Bordreuil.

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Serbian born, New York City based violinist Marija Kovačević works in classical, experimental and improvised music.

Her project Music for Broken Violins is an exploration of sonic textures with broken violins, bows and their fragments. Marija has developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary of dragging strings, playing cracks, bowing broken bodies, wrapping loose hair and creaking pegs. In performance, there is a minimalist, ritualistic structure to her unembellished studies, as each instrument is approached in procession, with silence in between each visceral deviance from the accepted technical norms. In addition to four albums of solo work, broken violins also appear on Rainy Afternoon near Paris album with Thierry Müller, Push Broken Duet album with Romain Perrot (available on Chocolate Monk), Bez Vremena album with Paul Collins and Quentin Rollet (available on Astres d’Or) and most recently Playable Litter album with Theo Gowans (available on Scatter Archive). Marija’s fifth solo album is set for release this year on Relative Pitch Records.

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GRAIN is a concert series and archiving project for experimental and improvised music, largely happening within South Bermondsey, and programmed / produced by Caius Williams & Theodora Laird.

Through programming and documenting new and adventurous music through collaboration, archiving, workshops, and performances, the project explores the ongoing dialogue between the transience of DIY art spaces and the communities that inhabit them.