Friday 11th November at Grey Area at 4pm
Grey Area Exhibition - Opening with Crank Sturgeon, id' M Theft able and Fritz Welch

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Friday 11th November at The Old Market from 6pm - 12pm (Doors 5.30pm)

Aki Onda (JP)
Musician and visual artist Aki Onda is best known for his Cassette Memories project – a series of releases and performances using an extensive sound diary of field-recordings collected over a span of two decades. A frequent traveller, Onda liked the way he could “collect these sounds recklessly, innocently”, initially with no intention of making a musical statement of any kind. Layered and collaged they form electrically charged fragments of memories and resonances - surreal portraits of the everyday. The Walkman would become Onda’s musical instrument of choice – physically manipulating and mixing multiple sets during his performances. Born in Japan, he currently livesin New York and has collaborated with amongst others Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock and Shelley Hirsch.
Homepage

I'D M Theft able & Crank Sturgeon (USA)
Ordained minister and usurper of plateau monoculture, Sturgeon has been active in the wandering peripheries of noise and performance art since 1992. Combining the foundations set forth by the Dadaists, Joseph Beuys, and Allan Kaprow, Crank’s simultaneously caustic and celebratory performances trample the lines of quasi-art presentation - whether with just solo voice and spontaneous poetry or armed with an array of busted guitars, contact microphones and the essential scrappy costume in tow.
‘The current alias of Skot Spear, id m theft able is an improvising sound artist from Portland, Maine, who primarily uses vocals combined with sounds culled from amplified/unamplified found objects, circuit bent instruments, homebuilt keyboards and modified tape machines. Theftable has an available-ist approach to audio and its creation – making intuitive use of all sound thefts - from media reappropriation, to the rhythms of passing cars, water, or 2009’s obsessive reworking of Theatre Organ tracks. Theftable has been mooted as the ‘Best noise (??) comedy act ever!’’ Guy Montag
Theft able Homepage
Crank Sturgeon Homepage

Darksmith (USA)
Aptly described as both atmospheric and claustrophobic Tom Darksmith's unrefined musique concrete is a decidedly crude manipulation of lo-fidelity ‘domestic’ and field recordings. Since 2007 he has produced a small but solid discography - his most recent release 'Total Vacuum' (Hanson Records, 2010) confounded listeners with its gauzy, uniquely delicate audio collages and was widely considered one of the best records of the year. Darksmith performs primarily using cassette machines and his appearance at COOS will mark only the third public presentation of his music. Darksmith lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, irregularly presenting audio recordings and similarly crude drawings under the Mom Costume banner.

Ludo Mich (BE)
Mich first came to prominence in Antwerp’s nonconformist, communal artspaces of the 70s. He orchestrated mass group performances and released a series of underground films culminating in ‘Lysistrata’ - an ecstatic all nude adaptation of Aristophanes’ satire featuring a soundtrack of primal yelling, tape delay machines, instant sax blasts, African poetry, de-tuned guitar, glass and elastic. A prolific musician, film-maker, poet and artist, Mich’s recent installation ‘Mesmerized Zig Zag Experiment’ is inspired by Mesmer’s experiments with magnets.
Homepage

Wreck & Drool & Smack Music 7 (IL/UK)
Alex (Drool) Yonovich (b.1976) is a self-taught drummer, "non-musician", improviser and pivotal figure on the Israeli avantgarde circuit. He has collaborated live with a diverse selection of international musicians such as Steve Noble, Adam Bohman, Jérôme Noetinger, Steve Mackay, Dora Doll, Sharon Gal, Arnaud Rivière, Valerio Tricoli, Daniel Padden, Mattin, Ignaz Schick, Eric Boros & many more. Utilizing a simple setup of modified acoustic instruments, tape loops and analogue synths he creates a variety of dynamic sounds that shift from sparse crystalline movements to dense fog shrouded avalanches, which have as much in common with the likes of John Cage and Bob Cobbing as it does with Wolf Eyes and The New Blockaders. His duo Wreck & Drool with El Bootkeh has released recordings on labels such as Red Bootkeh, that Canadian label and Tophet Prophet. Wreck is in the praxis of analogue audio destruction & re-build since the early 90', chief and founder of the maellfunctioning karkourian Redbootkeh label since 2004, also known as Gedem andBbrainholes.. love is back... future is next!!! This time wreck is bringing a self build acoustic instrument & 6tons of echo'd reality...
Reigning in the tape terror and replacing it with a lost in the jungle lushness Smack Music 7 is the solo project of painter / sound artist Karen Constance. She is one half of tape collage/free vocal/lo-fi improv duo Blood Stereo, one third of Ceylon Mange, equal parts spaceage and prehistoric.
chocolatemonk

Licker (USA)
Licker is the solo world of John Schoen - long time sound creator/manipulator best known as the helmsman of Rochester New York’s psychedelic noise champions ‘Pengo’ – one of the most musically wayward, brazenly diverse groups to emerge from America’s late 90s subculture. Notoriously difficult to pin down, Licker finds Schoen stubbornly refusing to adhere to any particular generic forms each live event channelling different strains of music/noise/performance.

Infinite Gaaah (UK)
More spellably, Gaaah is Tom Roberts, mainstay of Brighton’s deconstructionist art-jazz (un)ensemble Bolide, performing tonight with chewed tape, knacked bass and tabletop roufage. Since leaving landlocked Northampton ten years ago he has lurked under the foam of Brighton’s stranger musical tides, surfacing in a variety of head scratching propositions including Daguerreotype at the inaugural Colour out of Space in 2006. Gaaah sounds like ill-plumbed radiators gone feral and things falling off shelves, with occasional yodelling.

Clive Graham & Anthony Donovan (UK)
A new duo, formed in spring 2011. Clive Graham is probably best known as a member of long standing improvised electro-bio collective Morphogenesis and occasional collaborator with Nurse with Wound. He runs the CD label Paradigm Discs, which specialises in releases of archival music by the likes of Adam Bohman, Morphogenesis, Daphne Oram, Trevor Wishart and other experimental artists. Anthony Donovan is a member of the London-based improvising and new music group Vultures Quartet; as well as working solo as Murmurists, and in collaboration with Lux P0g0, the.clinamen and HAK, and on projects with Bryan Lewis Saunders, Colin Johnco and Rebecca Bogue. Donovan co-runs the Classwar Karaoke label, whose back-catalogue includes Bob Ostertag, Michael Giles Mad Band, John Hyatt, Jochen Arbeit, Hjuler and Mama Baer and Astral Social Club.

Tobias Kirstein & John Lunds (DK)
Tobias R Kirstein and Johannes Lund are from Copenhagen and renown for their solo projects and their numerous collaborations with people like Mats Gustafsson, Keith Rowe, Tony Conrad, Torturing Nurse, CM Von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren and bands such as Yoke&Yohs, Fjernsyn Fjernsyn, Lights People and Jørgen Teller and The Empty Stairs. A multi instrumentalist Lunds plays bass, violin, glokenspie and a variety of wind instruments. Kirstein works with a diverse range of material - from computer created sinus tones to the sound of the raw power of electricity in open tape recorders. His drumming has been described as a pure expression of brute force. The duo run Mayhem - a venue for experimental music, free jazz and noise.

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Saturday 12th November at the Jubilee Library - 12pm / Midday (Free)

Bohman Brothers (UK)
Instigators and long time players on London’s fringe improv circuit, Adam and Jonathan Bohman have been exploring the microtonal sound realm of the everyday for over two decades. Live their performances can resemble electrified flea-markets with hand made instruments and amplified objects coerced into revealing their inner-most sound lives, as the Bohman’s recite poetry in the form of found text and advertising spiel. The Wire’s Ben Watson explains the Brothers approach as follows: 'It's hard to describe the raw, explosive audio art they perpetrate. Everyday objects and sounds are worked on until they attain a convulsive beauty… their art oscillates between states of the absurd to highly articulate explorations of extra-musical sound...more

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Saturday at the Sallis Benney Theatre from 1pm - 5pm: Film / Live Cinema / Panel

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Saturday at The Old Market from 6pm - 12am (Doors 5.30pm / First Act- 6.20pm)

Bren't Lewiis Ensemble (featuring Gnarlos & Lucian Tielens) (USA)
‘One of the most exciting cultural excavations of the past few years has been the unearthing of the convoluted history of the Buttecounty Free Music Society aka BUFMS, a wild collective of artists, non-musicians, rockers and goofballs who came together in comparative obscurity in the early/mid-80s and who, as their world-defining box set ‘Induced Musical Spasticity’ makes clear, were as attuned to garage rock, psychedelia and free jazz as much as noise, avant garde and surrealist traditions. The BUFMS aesthetic paralleled the earlier experiments in spontaneous musical theatre of LA Free Music Society associates like Le Forte-Four, Airway et al, but with a post-punk/pre-Bananafish style that was less west coast freak and more industrial strength in its urge-to-usurp. Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble remain one of the society’s central groups and the main carrier of their particular brand of liberated excess.’ Volcanic Tongue. Hidden behind a maze of pseudonyms the trail left by the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble would lead to Vomit Launch, Glands of External Secretion, The Idiot, Needles, Serious Prblmz, and Bananafish magazine. Gnarlos and Tielens's appearance at Colour Out of Space is the first live show by Bren't Lewiis in 27 years.

Anla Courtis & John Godbert (AR/UK)
Courtis formed Reynols in Buenos Aires in the early 90s, galvanising the Argentinian experimental scene with a mixture of raw, primordial improvised performances and high/low concept art provocations such as their debut release - a ‘dematerialised’ CD. With Reynols defunct, Courtis has emerged as a musician with a fervent drive for experimentation and a willingness to embrace divergent forms of expression. A classically trained guitarist he has collaborated with the likes Pauline Oliveros, Nihilist Spasm Band, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke, Eddie Prevost, C.Spencer Yeh and many more. John Godbert likes to hit things, pluck things and blow things. In the past he's done all these things mainly in the company of Matthew Bower (Skullflower), Vibracathedral Orchestra & Sunburned Hand Of The Man. For COOS he's hoping to do all three things and more. His appearance will put to an end the rumours that he has an alter ego named Herb Diamante - who as most people may know, is attending a wine tasting event elsewhere.
Courtis myspace
Diamante myspace

Harappian Night Recordings with Pascal Nichols (UK)
Harappian Night Recordings is the solo project of Hunter Gracchus member Syed Kamran Ali. His critically acclaimed debut album, The Glorious Gongs Of Hainuwele, conflates and confuses ethnic field recordings, haunting Asian vocal transmissions, rough household drones and Singing Knives’ folk-primitivism. Ali has since produced a slew of increasingly left-field albums on various microlabels across Europe. This will be the debut performance of Harappian Night Recordings in the UK.‘Somewhere between the ethnic reportage style of Sublime Frequencies, the whole Sheffield elemental freak/drone scene and a peaking, proto-punk volume of the Nonesuch Explorer series - this is fantastic….’ Volcanic Tongue. Pascal Nichols is one half of ‘Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides’ – recently awarded unexpected mainstream coverage as ‘the best live band active in the UK’. He’s one of the country’s premiere young improvising drummers - interrogating different musical styles with a forcible zeal - less interested in rhythm than in sonic percussive possibilities.
Harappian myspace

Martin Klapper & Martin Jezek (CZ)
Born in Prague, Martin Klapper is a musician, filmmaker and visual artist. He began by experimenting in collage with unconventional materials such as wax, foam and minerals, later applying these techniques to film footage he’d bought in flea markets. Since 1981 he has been active in the field of experimental music, working with sound devices such as mechanical toys, consumer electronics and home built instruments created from scrap and junk. Martin Jezek was born in 1976 in Prostejov and studied film at the renown Famu Institute in Prague. Though regarded as one of the most prominent Czech authors of formal and conceptual film his practice also includes experimental documentaries and improvised multi-media events. For COOS the duo present a vivid, multi projection performance using films reworked by Klapper with techniques such as bleaching, tinting, handcoloring, painting, etching, scraping and layering. With modified Super 8mm projectors Jezek will hand manipulate the films according to Klapper’s live soundtrack.

Jozef Van Wissem (NL)
Devoted to what he terms ‘The Liberation of the Lute,’ van Wissem's compositions for the instrument have involved a dynamic mix of conceptual, minimalist, classical and improvisational strategies. Over the last two decades, he has used cut-and-paste tactics, created palindromic compositions and used field recordings and free improvisation to create a sound world that is at once meditative and surprising, new and arcane. His work is uncluttered and direct, with a viscerally hypnotic and emotional impact, delivered with an ascetic intensity reflected both in his Biblical titles and his No Wave influences.Van Wissem is able to bridge the language of 17th century music with that of the 21st century without compromising the timbre and resonance of traditional lute playing techniques. An incessantly touring musician, van Wissem's live shows have taken him all over the world. He has records out on Important Records and his own Incunabulum label and has collaborated with James Blackshaw, Keiji Haino and Jim Jarmusch amongst others.
Homepage

Peter Fengler (NL)
Born in 1964 in the Netherlands, Fengler’s unique performances can include absurdist stand-up, magicianship, intellectual pursuits, critical theory and the creation of his own lathe-cut vinyl. For COOS Fengler will present ‘Barogue, Non Barogue’ (a story about proportionism) – the latest instalment of a constantly emerging archive of sounds, texts and gestures in which he aims to redefine nuance from a musical and linguistic perspective. Fengler is a member of Coolhaven, Poolmongool and Ultra Hobby Complex and co founder of Rotterdam’s incredible left field arts space De Player.
Ultra Hobby Complex
Homepage

Micro_Penis
'Micro_Penis is a band from Mulhouse, France with Sébastien Borgo (Sun Plexus 2, l’Autopsie a révélé que la mort était due à l’autopsie, Ogrob, French doctor), Alexandre Kittel (Rosetta Stone), François Heyer (Patz) and Claude Spenlehauer (Myself, Hell's Gate, Hit the Dog). The press release for their debut LP maintains that it's a ‘modern variation of the Ritual Feast of the Libido’ and that pretty much hits the nail on the head. Shouted guttural mouth sounds are abundant, augmented by electronics, tape manipulation and a saxophone. Insanity, art brut and horror is a running theme...not that there's anything wrong in that. The artwork is fantastic too. They need to be slung back in that asylum and given some medication’ Bryon Hayes

PC Fencott (UK)
Clive Fencott is a writer, sound poet, vocal improviser and digital media researcher. He's been experimenting with the sound and printing of words/language for over 40 years. In addition to solo work, he has collaborated extensively with other poets and musicians - in particular Bob Cobbing, Chris Cheek and Bill Griffiths, co-founding the free sound/poetry groups JGJGJGJGJG, Oral Complex and Bird Yak. “Watching Fencott perform is like watching a strange contraption, a sort of human teleprinter with hiccups and mixed-up message” CA
Homepage

Raionbashi & Dylan Nyoukis (DE/UK)
Born in 1974 Daniel Löwenbrück is a performer, composer and curator living in Berlin. Since the mid 1990's he's performed with Schimpfluch-Gruppe (Rudolf Eb.er, Dave Phillips, Joke Lanz), Sudden Infant, Column One, Mattin, Doreen Kutzke, and solo as Raionbashi. Löwenbrück founded Tochnit Aleph in 1994 a label with around 100 releases devoted to noise subculture, actionism, academic sound- art, vocal / sound-poetry and musique concrete. Dylan Nyoukis 'Nyoukis' music exists outside of as many genre boxes as anyone might care to stick it into. mangled-throat vocalization, wobbly tape murk, and feral punk/noise, the sound is urgently alive and human with a volatile undercurrent of absurd/sinister humor. As the head of DIY label Chocolate Monk, Dylan has been issuing a steady stream of sub-underground homemade strangeness since the early 1990s, including a slew of tapes and CDRs by his former band Prick Decay/Decaer Pinga, Ceylon Mange (with guitarist Bill Nace) and now Blood Stereo (a duo with his wife, the artist Karen Constance)’. Howard Stelzer
Nyoukis/ubuweb

Brittle Hammer Trio (UK/USA)
Featuring Ali Robertson & Fritz Welch & Euan Currie
‘Bh3 was a six eared international communication sanctuary institution from the years 1967 to 1978 and 1983, based around vibrating surfaces and interrupted resonance. Said often anti-megalophonous honk can get a hamster doing laps in a brown paper bag and them could transgress musical expression when simulating the conversation style of the heavily sedated rodent rescue centre beneficiary. With leakings unedited. Volunteers from your local services: Muscletusk, Peeesseye, Usurper.’ Chanterelle Latrice

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Sunday 13th November at the Sallis Benney from 1pm - 5pm: Film / Live Cinema / Talk

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Sunday 13th at The Old Market from 6pm - 11.30pm (Doors 5.30pm - First Act 6.20pm)

Valeri Scherstjanoi (RU)
Born 1950, Scherstjanoi grew up in Krasnodar in the south of the present-day Russian Federation. Since 1981 he has lived and worked in Berlin as a sound-poet, author of radio plays, graphic artist and writer. Much of his work is rooted in Russian Futurism and he has published volumes of phonetic and visual poetry, developing a complex system of invented symbols (Scribentisms) for use in his own sound poems. Scherstjanoi has been the guest at numerous international sound poetry festivals and in 2003 was awarded the Hans Erich Nossack Promotion Prize.
Homepage

Vom Grill (BE)
Vom Grill is Dennis Tyfus - visual artist, purveyor of free noises, throat singer, heir of the Nordic/Belgian outsider tradition and one man driving force behind Ultra Eczema’s vast catalogue of avant-garde sound, books, screenprints and archival off-the-radar gems. His own performances can include a variety of animal noises, vocal grind, analogue synth shrieks, electrified rales and more.
Ultra Eczema

Maja Jantar (BE)
Maja Jantar is a multilingual, polysonic voice artist whose work spans the fields of performance, opera, poetry and visual arts. Alongside her solo work she is a co-founder of the group Krikri and a close collaborator with ‘Crew’ - a project that operates on the border between art and science. Jantar regularly performs with the Belgian poet Vincent Tholomé and her own poetry has featured in numerous anthologies. A joint CD and book of her work will shortly be published by arts imprint Hybriden Verlag in Berlin. Jantar lives in Ghent, Belgium.
myspace

Laundry Room Squelchers feat Leslie Keffer and Sharkieface (USA)
Rat Bastard returns this time with the full force, all star Laundry Room Squelchers – ‘one of the most unpredictable outfits in noise’s entire underbelly’. A founding member of To Live and Shave in LA, Bastard has been cracking heads, bursting eardrums, and causing structural damage to low rent basement dives for decades, most recently with his sprawling International Noise Conference, which touts: ‘No droning, no mixing boards, no laptops.’ Athens OH native Leslie Keffer has collaborated with the likes of Thurston Moore, Roger Stella and Val Martino and toured relentlessly throughout the US and Europe. Live she bombards the senses with an arsenal of sonics and weird alignment of avant-pop hooks.
squelch

Ninni Morgia & Silvia Kastel (IT)
Silvia Kastel runs Italy's Ultramarine record label and her first solo release ‘Love Tape’ is out now – a love infused, hi-concept merger of synth, voice, bass, beats, whispering, howling and moaning. Kastel has studied singing with Joan La Barbara and Lee Torchiaand and toured Europe and the US with the likes of Hjuler und Mama Baer. Ninni Morgia is a guitarist from Catania, Italy, now living in New York and active within Brooklyn’s thriving free jazz/improv/noise community. He’s played with countless musicians such as Peter Evans, Daniel Carter and William Parker and his current release ‘Sound Gates’ – a duo with veteran Italian percussionist Marcello Magliocchi is ‘most definitely one of the best improvised records you’ll hear this year’ (Digitalis).
ultramarine

Glyphs (UK)
Steve Goodall (of Southampton’s Dogeeseseegod) and Dan Palmer (of Threshold Tapes micro-label) have been working together as Glyphs since meeting at Colour Out of Space in 2007. Although free vocal improvisation remains at the heart of their music, in live performances the duo have incorporated low-grade electronics, tape manipulation, primitive noisemakers, contact mics and amplified objects.

Dog Lady (USA)
‘Dog Lady is Michigan violinist Michael Collino. Working in compositions of bleak subtraction, Collino scrapes through tape delays and modified and failing electronics. The sound is a private depravity, something anonymously jawing in the grime and weariness of our other life. His first recorded output appeared on the song "Cellar" (from the Wolf Eyes album Always Wrong [Hospital Productions]). What followed was a mess of self-released cassettes and releases on noise labels ranging from AA Records to RRR, Nurse Etiquette, American Tapes, Fag Tapes and Chocolate Monk, among others. Michael Collino was born on a dead-end road.’ CM

Johannes Bergmark & Tippi Tillvind (SE)
A game of free associations with amplified objects, electronics, samples - each performance a flux of sound that is found, acoustic, electronic, prerecorded, the trashy, the trivial - sound poetry gleaned from vintage movies hand in hand with the screech of zippers or rubber bands… Johannes Bergmark is a surrealist, improviser, piano technician, composer and writer. He is the inventor of The Finger Violin, The Brillolin (a miniature violin with two strings connected to a spectacle frame tied round the head), The Veloncell Marcel (after Duchamp) and The Whalefish - a one-man-band instrument with homemade sound objects, toys and kitchen utensils. Tippi Tillvind is an artist and sculptor currently experimenting with collage in improvised text and sound. She creates and performs using self-made electronics, micro modulars and circuit bent consumer items.
Bergmark Homepage
Tillvind Homepage

 

 

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