Current/Upcoming – Project DIVFUSE

Sonic Pop Meditation : Janine A’Bear [Upcoming]

Performance :

29 January Saturday 2022 6-7pm [This event was rescheduled from December 2011]

Ticket: £5 . 10 seats only. To buy tickets, please email divfuse@gmail.com for payment information. There will be small choices of non-alcoholic drinks for sale on site.

Janine A’Bear will perform a deep meditative AV set of new and unreleased material in an intimate setting at Project DIVFUSE. Combining processed vocal loops, deep psychedelic arpeggiated synth patterns layered with unique rhythms and distorted recordings.

A’Bear is a multi continental avant synth electronic producer and DJ making cosmic inspired piqued out pop layered through with messed up frenetic beats. South African born, Australian raised, and London grown, Janine A’Bear’s music production and live performances encourage inclusivity and feminist utopia on the dance floor. Described by Resident Advisor as ‘wonderfully unhinged’, A’bear combines psychedelic polyrhythms with distorted bass lines and warped vocals. Trained in gong meditation A’Bear explores her deep connection with the chaos of sound leaving her unique imprint across diverse activities including: her regular radio show EastBlenders with Lia Mice on Threads Radio, on Bristol’s Noods and guest spots on Netil, New Rivers, NTS and Red Light radio; hypnotic live analogue synth club sets; and transcendental track releases on labels including Elestial Sound (USA) and Система (RU).

A Tape Recorder Quartet : Robin The Fog [Upcoming]

Live sound generation + Tape loop creation + Performance:

12th January 2022 Saturday 6-7:30pm [This event was rescheduled from December 2011]

Ticket: £5 . 10 seats only. Tickets are still available [Updated 19.12.2021]. To buy tickets, please email divfuse@gmail.com for payment information. There will be small choices of non-alcoholic drinks for sale on site.

Project DIVFUSE is pleased to present our second event under our curatorial series Sound Meta, which celebrates sound making through performances or workshops. Join us for a unique event where tape loops will take over the entire venue – and the audience will be expected to help hold it all together!

Robin The Fog is a Cumbrian sound artist and audio producer based in London. He is the founding member of Howlround, a project that creates recordings and performances entirely by manipulating sounds on a quartet of vintage reel to reel tape recorders, with all additional effects strictly forbidden – no samples, no synths, no pedals, no plug-ins. Howlround’s eighth studio album will be released in 2022.

RobinTheFog.com | Howlround.co.uk

Image by Victoria Hastings

Transects – Jardin du Luxembourg & Copenhagen : John F. Barber [Upcoming]

Sound Exhibition:

4 February 2022 Friday 3-7pm

5 & 6 February 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm

Free Entry

We are delighted to announce that the work of John F. Barber has been selected as one of the two pieces to exhibit at Project DIVFUSE micro media art gallery through the Open Call DIVFUSE Sound Archive, which puts a focus on work based on field recordings.

Transects is a sound art project collecting field recordings while walking through acoustic environments. Combined, these samples provide sound-based collages representing their place of origin. The desired end result is to promote immersive narratives of the overlay and interplay between sounds heard in an acoustic environment.

Transect: Jardin du Luxembourg

August 2013, Paris, France, John Barber

Begun in 1612 by Marie dé Medici, Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden), Paris, France, features fountains, terraces, gardens, tree-lined pathways, tennis and basketball courts, a theatre, brasseries, bands, and boles. All can be heard in this transect.

Transect: Copenhagen

August 2014, Copenhagen, Denmark, John Barber

This transect experiences walking through Copenhagen. Playing with a set of automatic doors and a corrugated cardboard wall covering, with a broken alarm in the background. Wheeled suitcases on cobblestone streets. A street crossing alarm. Automobile and horse carriage traffic. Metro announcements. Pedestrian ambiance around the Vor Frue Plads fountain, street sounds, a marching band and squad of soldiers passing on their way to a guard changing ceremony at the Odd Fellows Palace, the tinkling of a bicycle bell.

From Other Spaces : [ _ _ _ ] [Upcoming]

Sound Exhibition:

25 February 2022 Friday 3-7pm

26 & 27 February 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm

Artist Li Song will be on site Friday 5-7pm & Saturday 4-6pm. He will be joined in by Shuoxin Tan and Jia Liu online for an artist talk on Saturday 4-5pm. Please email divfuse@gmail.com to reserve a place for the artists’ talk. 10 seats only.

Free Entry

We are delighted to announce that the work of the ensemble [ _ _ _ ] has been selected as one of the two pieces to exhibit at Project DIVFUSE micro media art gallery through the Open Call DIVFUSE Sound Archive, which puts a focus on work based on field recordings.

Three members of [ _ _ _ ] have recorded in the field of traffic and acoustic signals in their own cities (London, Cologne and Karlsruhe) using binaural microphones. The concrete traces of urban networks are intertwined with the abstract electronic sound through the network music ensemble’s collaborative algorithm, which they developed in the programming language SuperCollider from 2020 to 2021 during the lockdown.

By live coding within their interactive system, exchanging information and sharing the signal flow, they’ve created this 30-minute sonic trip, on a route that does not exist.

The project was supported by Musikfonds (Neustart Kultur, Germany).

[ _ _ _ ]

“Three placeholders sitting in a room between empty spaces.” This is how the ensemble [ _ _ _ ] describes itself. It was founded in 2020 by the artists Li Song, Shuoxin Tan and Jia Liu, (to compose music for the network. Li Song is a musician and software developer based in London. He composes music for computers and acoustic instruments. Shuoxin Tan was born in Beijing and works as a composer and sound artist in Cologne. She researches algorithmic acoustics, sound ontology and Lacanian topology. Jia Liu is a composer and computer music performer. She lives in Karlsruhe and is currently working on algorithmic music and composition for autonomous systems.

London 26 and 28 March 2020: imitation: inversion : Caroline Kraabel [Upcoming]

Exhibition:

11 March 2022 Friday 3-7pm

12 & 13 March 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2-6pm

Free Entry

A sound-film by Caroline Kraabel

‘This 40-minute Ivor Award-winning film (Sound Art category), my first, started with shots of London during the first UK Covid 19 Lockdown (the strict phase of which began on 23 March 2020), taken on my phone during “permitted exercise” (cycling), so my children would have a record of the unfamiliar stillness of their city at a time we now have ingrained in our memories for its sudden difference, and for the surfacing of fear, grief, and love it brought about.

I kept coming back to these shots of quiet streets: who was missing, who was still there, what was revealed when the tide of sound and activity went out?

I undertook to make sense of these images by playing their sounds, and their absence of sounds:

The shots from 26 March are “imitated”. On the alto saxophone I have recreated as many as possible of the original sounds from the audio on my phone-shots, and thus replaced the original audio.

For the shots from 28 March I replaced the original audio, too, “inverting” it.

I aimed to make music that was in a definable way the OPPOSITE of the actual sounds recorded on my phone.

First I divided the original audio into six “strips”, covering six separate frequency ranges, from low to high. Then I recorded six “strips” of sax and bass chords, again from low to high, and matched the highest sax/bass strip with the lowest original strip, the second highest with the second lowest, the third highest with the third lowest.

I used the dynamics of the original “strips” to control the sound on the corresponding sax and bass strips, ducking out the chords where there was a sound on the original, and leaving the chords present when there was no sound on the original. Then I muted the original audio tracks for all but a few dramatic seconds of the “inversion” section.