Sat 19 October 2024 > Sun 20 October 2024, les Ateliers Claus Brussels
What could it mean to practice politics by performing music? How could musical improvisation – as a process of collectively searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them – reconfigure our sense of the world? How can we experience and understand music not simply as what presents itself in the context of sound-phenomena-organized-in-time-and-exchanged-for-cash within the factory of post/industrial capitalism, but also, as an aesthetic-poetic-political mode of enquiry, a mode of perception, a way of learning and sharing – in and outside of the vibrations of sound or the marks of language?
These and other questions will be explored over two days through the practice of X- Ray Hex Tet – an ongoing collaboration between:
Billy Steiger – celeste and violin
Crystabel Riley – drums
Edward George – words and music
Pat Thomas – piano and electronics
Paul Abbott – drums and synthetic sounds
Seymour Wright – alto saxophone (actual and potential)
Six musicians of different backgrounds working at the margins of what is (to many) acceptable in terms of music, genre, technique, interpretation, history and ‘tradition’; a set of subjectivities, energies and philosophies who, in dialogue together, venture and probe the awkward wealth and friction of investigation, finding pleasure (and treasure) in searching for the hidden, secret, and mysterious at the edges of music and meaning.
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In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent). In collaboration with Courtisane, Auguste Orts and In vitro, with the support of VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie) and Q-O2.