Performance + Conversation
Session One : 28 November Saturday 3pm
Session Two : 29 November Sunday 3pm
£10 | 8 places per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
The Orbit is a decagon shaped instrument played by two musicians simultaneously. The body is spun by one set of hands, as the other hands hold a bow to the ten strings. As the two musicians work together the Orbit leads them into a cosmos of dynamic, pitch-shifting drones and harmonic rhythms, invoking lunar cycles and planetary time signatures.
The Orbit is an instrument created to be heard and seen in person. Across an intimate weekend of performance and conversation, we will gather to consider the architecture of the Orbit — its construction, its logic, the physical and sonic decisions that shape how it sounds. Across the weekend’s short performances we will explore four distinct tunings, each one reorienting the instrument’s voice and opening up different relationships and harmonic possibilities. After each performance there will be time to share more about the methodology, construction and lineage behind the instrument.
“Between the players and the played there is an attentiveness to being-with that is explicit in ways other playing is not. Through the artists attunement to their instrument, to one another, to the spaces and times of their performances through deep listening practices, we are offered an utterly new sono-social experience that surpasses and/or renews many historical traditions, opening and inspiring new musical and aural possibilities to current and future artists.” Jol Thoms, Radio Amnion
Blanc Sceol are an artist duo who compose, perform and record experimental music, and perform with the ‘Orbit’, a unique self-made two player instrument. They instigate participatory gatherings, connecting their sound practice with environmental awareness and creative actions on behalf of the more-than-human, exploring healing modalities as tools for collective transformation. Their compositions, interventions and performances express situated experiences of Place, with deep commitments to reimagining landscapes and ecologies. Their work is a spiral within the space-time continuum.
As certified Deep Listening® practitioners they regularly run workshops and sound walks exploring listening and sound making in public spaces. They have performed at a variety of cultural institutions, platforms and festivals, including Ashmolean Museum, The Royal Academy, Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Oxford Contemporary Music, Anti-university, Fort Process, FatOut Fest, New Trad Fest, Supersonic festival, EnCounters (Soundfjord & Oto Projects), Radio Amnion, Three Rivers Bexley, the Listening Biennale.
www.blancsceol.co.uk | @blancsceol
Photos by Duncan Stingemore