Frakture present

RPM
St Brides Church , Catherine Street, Liverpool L8 ,
Good Friday April 14th 2006 @ 8.00pm £3.00
Venue Details

Dark twisting electronic sounds brooding with intensity
Keith Rowe / Colin Potter / Phil Mouldycliff

Keith Rowe [ web link more info]
Trained as a painter. An original member of AMM, best known for his innovative table-top-guitar work. Has worked with composers such as Christian Wolff, Howard Skempton and especially Cornelius Cardew. More recently he has been working with MIMEO, Toshimaru Nakamura, Taku Sugimoto, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz and Peter Rehberg, amongst others. He performs extensively in Europe, makes regular tours of the USA and Japan, and has made recent visits to Australia and the Central African Republic. He continues to show his paintings and make installations.

Colin Potter [ web link more info ]
He has been involved in the field of electronic and experimental music for over 30 years. Based at his own IC studio, he has recorded, produced and distributed a wide array of projects. He has gained a reputation for innovative mixing & sound processing, working with artists such as Current 93, Ora, Organum, Kiln, Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough and,
most notably with Steven Stapleton on many albums by the renowned Nurse With Wound. Several solo works have been released, as well as many collaborations & he is one half of Monos, who have released several CDs. A desire to return to live performance has lead to appearances at the Beyond Music Festival in Los Angeles, 7 Hz in San Fransisco, Liverpool Biennial, the Termite Festival in Leeds, the Earational Festival in Holland and numerous
concerts in New York, Portland, Seattle, Vienna, Brno, Hamburg & London.

Phil Mouldycliff
Over the past twenty years he has been involved in creating large scale, multi-disciplinary projects for live performance, recording, exhibition, installation and radio. He has collaborated with artists such as Tom Phillips, Keith Rowe, Bruce McLean and Michael Nyman. He has shown his work across the UK including presentations at the Bluecoat and Tate Galleries in Liverpool, The Cornerhouse and Museum in Manchester, The I.C.A. and Connaught Brown Galleries in London, Kettles Yard in Cambridge, Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester and Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield. Currently writing a book about the work of musician, Keith Rowe and collaborating with experimental sound artists including, Colin Potter, Max Eastley, Russell Mills, Loren Chasse, and David Cunningham.

Reviews
Colin Potter + Keith Rowe + Phil Mouldycliff Review
Posted By Murray On 25th June 2005 @ 00:58
Another show at Bunkers Hill in Nottingham, this time featuring the sonic explorations of Keith Rowe, Colin Potter and Phil Mouldycliff...

After the first performance - Colin Potter + Phil Mouldycliff duo - Keith Rowe explained the theme behind the event. It might seem a bit school teacherish (complete with calls for 'quiet at the back') but ultimately it was quite humble and enlightening. All but Rowe's solo piece were derived from field recordings and concerned with representing experience. I don't know if I can add any further insights to these comments but I certainly felt a weird connection to both the emotions/experiences of the actual performances, a stream of personal experiences they may have been tapping into and, of course, my own feelings/reflections ("a correlative for feeling, not an expression of feeling")
Admittedly I came in half way through CP + PM's duo set (I'm not doing too well at getting gigs on time lately) which was a very subdued, atmospheric landscape of textures gently layered on top of each other. Potter was sitting behind a gear fans wet-dream in the quantity of knobs, gizmos and cabling but sat over them in contemplative, controlled mood rather than as some mad-professor over his inventions. Mouldycliff's setup seemed focused on him physically playing sounds by touch bringing out some low, slow drumming evoking some subterranean depths into the wash of sound. Actually it reminded me of the drumming from the goblins in the dwarf mines in the Lord of the Rings. It's a difficult comparison in case it somehow cheapens the performance but the sound was very atmospheric and cinematic (not to mention that the quality of sound design in film is often exceptional).
After Rowe's introduction to the evening he performed a piece, sort of "about depression". Rowe had difficulty explaining this, and admitted he wasn't sure what the piece was about himself, but was in a way about sadness, not that he's sad or depressed, but just "not being happy". I'm not sure why, maybe because I decided to look out of the window, but I couldn't get the idea of surveillance out of my mind. The sounds crept around a similar sonic territory to the previous work whilst matching the weather's humidity in the way it closely filled the space, though it caused a lot less discomfort.
After a short break (containing a really annoying industrial dj set. The music wasn't too bad but the volume was too loud for an intermission and the sound quality was absolutely awful - everything rasped of too much treble) the air had cooled slightly, the sun had finally dimmed, the lights had been extinguished and the atmosphere became electric. All three performed based upon field recordings (sourced from a French market on a Sunday morning and a London tube line respectively). Raising the cinematic sound design comparison again, the first piece reminded me Tarkovsky's Solaris (in particular the lengthy motorway system scene). It started gently with abstract sounds conjured from various unknown equipment sources, moved through the afore mentioned Solaris and then, really slowly, you started to notice the heavily filtered remains of voices and birds. Ro! we appeared to be manipulating all sorts of interesting little gizmos running through a laptop which added a very physical sense to the acoustics, real object sounds rather than sounds sourced purely from electronics, with strange scraping, pulling, twisting sonics. There was more noise in the trio work also, much of it appearing to come from Potter, with lots of crackles and filtered distortion. He had 2 motion controllers affecting filter resonance and cutoff etc. and again it was nice to see tangible actions resulting in this damaged, beautiful soundscape.
My notes are a bit sketchy (as is my memory) so I'm not completely sure whether they played a second, separate piece or if they blurred into one. Never the less the latter part of the set had a more eclectic almost playful sense - the dynamics ebbed and flowed with louder, noisy passages dipping into near silence and a wider range of sounds including some almost musical, glacial notes from Mouldycliff gently trembling his fingers across his equipment. Towards the end of the piece you recognised the noise of a carriage rushing through the tunnels of the underground (a sound I love to listen to if I'm in London), the artists making the most of the percussive dynamics offered by the recording until drifting away into a tiny microcosm of sound which hung in frozen infinity. You don't often get to see improvised or sonic material of this calibre (certainly, I imagine, outside of London), excellent.

Article taken from (plexus) - music and events from the plexus fold - http://www.plexusmusic.co.uk
URL to article: http://www.plexusmusic.co.uk/2005/06/25/colin-potter-keith-rowe-phil-mouldycliff-review/

The Soundbeams gig at The Friends Meeting House was excellent last night. I arrived a little late with Dan, but thankfully they hadn't started without us. Colin Potter and Phil Mouldycliff played first - a piece based on a field recording made in a village in France last summer. Very hazily texured waves of sound with faintly heard church bells and insects flutter all mingled into a set perfect for such a summer evening. Next was a solo set from Keith Rowe which he introduced as a piece about "trying to understand what it is I do" (sic). Whatever it meant to him, it sounded excellent - my favourite piece of the night - thick and morphing drones covered in radiophonic clicks, fuzz and feedback. After the intermission, the final piece featured Keith, Colin and Phil performing an R.P.M. piece based on recordings made on the tube Circle Line in London. This was a much longer improvisation that moved through many different sections, with Keith in particular letting an electric buzz hang in the air for extended periods of time. This, in particular was to me a reminder of how we live with constant background noise all around us - that we tune in and out of, often without noticing at all.
5th June 2005 posted by Nigel
www.unked.co.uk/weblog.htm