7 YEARS OF DISCREPANCIES

Event Information

---THURSDAY 19th April---

PIERRE BASTIEN
Pierre Bastien’s is a french gentleman born 1953 who builds his own machineries, at the cross between music and visual art, blending live trumpet sounds with screen projections of on-site mechanical sound sculptures in a very poetic way. His work is described as “a timeless sounding orchestra, both futuristic and slightly dada, conjuring ancient traditions in its surprisingly sensuous music.” His work has been called a “mad musical scientist with a celebrity following” by The Guardian.
In 1986 he formed his own self made one-man orchestra, Mecanium and made over 20 records over the years. For this concert Pierre presents Quiet Motors, a concert with his home-made machines as heard on his latest record for Discrepant.
“My sound machines cannot be found in the music shop. I slowly construct them in my studio, with a screw driver and a soldering iron. They don't hide in a steel case labelled by a Japanese top brand. Instead they exhibit their mechanisms from the electro motor that activates the wheels and gears, to the final movement that produces the sound. Along the concert they are filmed and projected in real time and in a big scale. The large projection shows every source of sound and magnifies every mechanical activity. Then the listener becomes also a viewer and an explorer: he travels into the sound, he discovers the music both by listening and watching, as if he were having a walk inside the composition.” Pierre Bastien, 2017

CARLOS CASAS feat David Toop
Carlos Casas is a filmmaker, visual artist and musician whose work is a cross between documentary film, cinema, and contemporary visual and sound arts. He will be joined by David Toop for a special presentation of his last album for Discrepant, Pyramid of Skulls.
Inspired by the common task (Fedorov) and the people of Pamir in Tajikistan, Pyramid of Skulls deconstructs far away sights and sounds to create a unique field recording experiment that equally worships past, present and future traditions. Nikolai Fedorov thought the Pamir to be the cradle of humanity, the hidden and forgotten nest, a Pyramid of skulls that holded the secrets of past human kinship. He believed that most Asian myths of human origin pointed the Pamir region as their inception. For the Chinese, Indian and Semitic myth, this mountainous region of Central Asia, often referred to as 'the roof of the world' was the key to understand and start his resurrection plan.

TASOS STAMOU
Tasos Stamou is an electroacoustic music composer, performer, alternative music technologist, instrument builder and tutor. He will premiere a live version of his recent electroacoustic music project ‘Musique Con Crete’ for Discrepant (CREP54). The record is the result of a three-year creative research project across Crete (GR) where for a 3-year period Tasos was collecting field recordings, performing and recording with local musicians, producing electronic compositions and gathering old records and tapes of traditional music of the region. The project resulted in an assembling of a unique sound collage which reflects his personal experience as a music visitor to this part of the South Mediterranean with one of the richest ancient history and living traditions.


---FRIDAY 20th April---

POREST
Across decades, Porest (aka Mark Gergis) has issued a trail of confounding agitprop sound art, post-globalised hate-pop, diabolical radio dramas and carefully re-arranged realities on multiple labels. His blatant embezzlement of human syntax and cultural misunderstanding broadcasts vital mixed messages. Since 2003, with the Sublime Frequencies label, an ethnographic music and film collective out of Seattle – and more recently with his own label, Sham Palace – Mark has shared decades of research of scores of archived international music, film footage and sound recordings from the Middle East, South East Asia and elsewhere.

PEOPLE LIKE US
People Like Us is audiovisual collage artist Vicki Bennett, who has been making work available via CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, performances, gallery exhibits and online streaming for 25 years. Since 1992, she has developed an immediately recognisable aesthetic repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and appropriation as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form.
For this event Vicki will present the London premiere of People Like Us’ new audiovisual immersive cinema performance called “The Mirror“. The subject content will be appropriated sample collage exploring concepts of inward reflection, and outward reflection and projection into the beyond.

KINK GONG
The musician and DIY music ethnographer Laurent Jeanneau returns to London with his Kink Gong project. Since 1999, over many trips to Southeast Asia, Jeanneau has documented the local music traditions of ethnic minorities whose cultures are threatened by modernisation. Jeanneau collects and compiles these unedited recordings into an ever-growing sound and video archive, mostly published on his own private press label Kink Gong Records. In addition, Jeanneau uses these recordings, which focus mostly on vocal and percussion music, as the starting point for his own emotionally-charged electronic experiments and sound compositions then broadened by other field recordings. In these compositions, the traditions and avant-gardes of a diverse range of places merge into new, contemporary statements. Discrepant has released 6 of these electroacoustic works and counting. He returns to London to present his new double LP for the label with collages and recordings based on Chinese pop culture, expect kitsch noise art galore.