Current/Upcoming – Project DIVFUSE

Performances:

18 November 2023 Saturday

Session One : 3pm

Session Two : 5pm

£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Mute Frequencies presents two performances of a work in progress. Unthread is the chance meeting of a sewing machine and contact microphones on a dissecting table. The machine’s sounds are extracted for their rhythmic potential and further augmented by a bank of effects. While the ritualistic gesture of threading and operating the machine raises questions about fast fashion, domesticity and gendered work, the sounds themselves are thrown into focus to reveal the inner life of the mechanism.

Each performance will last approximately 20 minutes. Followed by Q&A.

Mute Frequencies is the sound art project of Ilia Rogatchevski and Laura Rogatchevskaia, both former members of the London post-punk band Sebastian Melmoth. The duo work within the intersections of sound, performance and visual media. They have installed work at various London galleries and performed at festivals including Radio Revolten, Supernormal and Open House. Svalbard Soundtracks, their film score project that premiered at DIVFUSE in 2022, is released by Flaming Pines.

Photo by Jonathan Crabb. Live at TACO! August 2023

Talk :

20 January Saturday 2-3:30pm

£5 | 12 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

A talk by experienced improviser Caroline Kraabel

Exploring her own practice, along with a wider view of improvisation and identity: even the world of freely improvised music can be experienced as an enclave that excludes, despite the perceived association of improvisation with limitlessness and freedom.

How do people who improvise feel and think DIFFERENTLY from each other on the subject? How do we avoid or alter any dominance of particular groups over the theory or practice of improvisation? Does the experimental nature of improvisation make it easier for members of élites to shine in the field, because they have more pre-existing socio-cultural capital? Or, does improvisation come more easily for outsiders who are already primed to find alternative paths? How are improvisers affected by their musical and cultural histories? How does a group, maybe a large group, of improvisers negotiate space and time, noise and silence in a musical and just way?

For improvisers who have experienced forms of oppression in music making and/or life, is the aim when making music merely to recapitulate existing power structures, but try to place themselves at the top? Or to create new and fairer structures?

References: Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, by George E. Lewis, Columbia University

Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender, by Ellen Waterman, University of Guelph

https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/845/1396

Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser, saxophonist, artist, conductor, and composer.

In 2022 Kraabel founded a large improvising group made up of all sorts of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers: ONe_Orchestra New. (https://oneorchestranew.com/)

Category: Current/Upcoming

Unthread : Mute Frequencies [Upcoming]

Listening and Improvisation : Caroline Kraabel [Upcoming]