The programme for Sunday 26 February is built around the premiere of Luke Fowler’s new film Electro-Pythagoras: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett, commissioned by Sonic Acts & Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. With the film Luke Fowler pays tribute to the work and musical ideas of Martin Bartlett (1939–93), a proudly gay Canadian composer who during the 1970s and 1980s pioneered the use of the ‘microcomputer’. Bartlett is hardly recognised, never mind canonised, in cultural life. He researched intimate relationships with technology and was particularly interested in handmade electronics where, as he states in one of his performances: ‘the intimacy of handcraftedness softens the technological anonymity creating individual difference making each instrument a topography of uncertainties with which we become acquainted through practice’. The screening of Electro-Pythagorus is accompanied by a conversation by Amy Cimini, Luke Fowler and Ernst Karel.
Together with sound artist Ernst Karel, Luke Fowler will perform Glyphs (Music from Martin's Tape Archive). Glyphs is a new surround diffusion work comprised entirely from unreleased and rarely heard reel to reels from the archive of Martin Bartlett, which were digitised by Luke Fowler as part of his research process in making Electro-Pythagorus.
Lastly Luke Fowler will team up with Richard Mcmaster for the AV performance The Mechanics of Dissonance. It is the first original film and sound collaboration by the duo Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster. A two screen 16mm film with multi-channel sound, the work centres around a new composition for the Russian ANS synthesiser. Designed between 1937 and 1957 the ANS is one of the most mythical electronic instruments of the 20th century, with only one surviving example left. The film was recorded on location the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow.
Tickets to this event are called "Sonic Acts at De Brakke Grond - Sunday 26 February".
ARTISTS/SPEAKERS
Fri 24 Feb
Stedelijk Museum
Amy Cimini is a historian and performer of music from the 20th and 21st centuries. She earned her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology in 2011 from New York University.
Amy Cimini
Tue 21 Feb - Wed 22 Feb
STEIM
Ernst Karel makes electroacoustic music and experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, and collaborates with filmmakers and artists in making audiovisual work.
Ernst Karel
Sun 26 Feb
De Brakke Grond
Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. He studied printmaking at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee.