"Physical free noise smashing the boundaries between modular synthesis and body art. Evischen plays records with her nails, bites cables and bullwhips her self-built electronics into submission. This is as punk as power electronics gets, essential FFO: Puce Mary, Merzbow, John Wiese, Dreamcrusher, Pharmakon."
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See event details
A
gig
held at Moor Beer Co
on Tuesday 12th November. The event starts at 20:00.
Tough Sell welcomes the peerless US sound artist Evicshen back to Bristol to rewire some more tiny brains with her intensely physical, wildly unpredictable approach to noise music. With needle nails, noise combs and bull whips, her sets ecstatically put her own body front and centre. Also resonating home-made mechanisms, London's transcendence technician Jack Dove engineers a stroboscopic fantasia, and 'musical response unit' MARCY (Dan Johnson and Annie Gardiner) unleash their kinetic, primal brand of conceptual noise-pop. Trust us, you don't want to miss this one.
EVICSHEN (San Francisco)
Evicshen is the nom de guerre of sound artist, experimental music performer, and inventor Victoria Shen (she/her). Based in San Francisco, Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favour of extreme textures and gestural tones.
Shen is notably the inventor of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable needles allowing her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. Shen's DIY approach extends beyond just instruments but also music releases. Her debut LP, Hair Birth, features copper album art that transforms the cover into a loudspeaker through which the record can be played. Recently, Shen has started releasing hand-made resin records embedded with found materials, each piece functions not only as playable music media but as unique art objects.
Jack Dove is a musician and artist from London, who sees himself as a 'pyrotechnician exploring composition'. He uses combinations of pyro, strobes, and other types of artificial light to interact with and control his homemade electronic circuits and mechanical machines, finding ways to generate unique sound textures and rhythm from responding resonating objects.
His debut album, Music for Fireworks, came out last year on Loose Trax. Recent live performances include Atonal Berlin, 3WD Festival and a car park outside Bern train station.
MARCY are a musical response and collaborative experiment unit formed by songwriter/producer Annie Gardiner (Hysterical Injury) and drummer Dan Johnson (EP/64).
Annie and Dan ran a successful Musical Response improv class (MRCE pronounced MARCY) at BIMM Bristol for 7 years, where musicians were invited to musically response to different situations for example; Pauline Oliveros' The Witness, Marina Abramovic's Artist is Present, Yoko Ono's Grapefruit book and items within it... to name a few.
They take these 'situations' and musically respond to them in the live performance setting. Their most recent show was a performance of '59:1', a piece that involved one riff/beat for 59 minutes and another for just 1, at an in-store show at Broadmead's HMV store.
They currently have an EP out on Crystal Fuzz Records / Liquid Library called 'Into the Parallel'.