ARIEL 2.0

Hanne Lippard @ Bold Tendencies, Sep 9

8 September 2015

The third instalment of the Ariel 2.0 performance programme at London’s Bold Tendencies brings Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato and Dylan Spencer-Davidson, taking place on September 9.

The three artists, based in Berlin, Amsterdam and London respectively, work with performance: Lippard with text, Turato alongside a sculpture by Nicholas Riis and Spencer-Davidson via a music-driven lecture.

Hosted by Leo Liccini, the programme has featured the like of Cakes Da Killa@gaybar and Nkisi (reviewed here) since it’s launch in July and has a final event coming featuring Felicita and Tami Tamaki at the end of the month.

See the ARIEL 2.0 website for details. **

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Nkisi + Karen Gwyer @ Bold Tendencies reviewed

24 August 2015

Ariel 2.0 is a project running throughout the summer at Bold Tendencies, an auditorium space occupying the seventh floor of a multi-storey car park off Rye Lane in Peckham, South East London. Curated by Berlin-born, London-based artist/rapper Leo Liccini (aka Leo Luchini), the series features a number of international artists taking part in a programme of sampled speech, spoken word, and rap, embracing the performative voice and examining how it is altered by computers and online life. To that end they’ve already hosted a show with Cakes da Killa, with a performance from Felicita planned for the future. While Bold Tendencies occupies the entire car park, the performances themselves take place in a smaller space – a hut built out of hay bales – located deeper in the venue, beyond an installation from Amsterdam design collective Metahaven. Karen Gwyer headlined Ariel 2.0’s second edition, with support on the night coming from Nkisi.

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Nkisi @ Bold Tendencies (2015). Photo by George Howard. Courtesy Bold Tendencies, London.

Nkisi is the alias of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, an electronic music producer and visual artist raised in Belgium but now based in London. Alongside Cape Town, South Africa’s ANGEL-HO and Richmond, USA’s Chino Amobi, Nkisi is a founding member of NON Records, a new label/platform that presents the music of artists emerging from Africa and the African diaspora on their own terms. Nkisi is also a friend of Endless, a London party that takes over unoccupied and overlooked spaces around the city to create a place for new, cross-cultural club sounds to emerge, having played there regularly in the past. Her tracks carry titles like ‘WOC’ and ‘Collective Self Defense’, while one track on her Soundcloud (‘Inheritance Tax’) links to an article on the legacy of British slave ownership. All of which is to say that Nkisi’s music is politically engaged. It’s part of a wave of electronic producers and DJs around the world who are making positive, non-appropriative club music, while raising their voices against social injustices and rectifying narratives that overshadow, or whitewash, the contributions of non-Western, minority, and LGBTQ communities in  music.

Tonight, Nkisi plays against a sparse, unembellished background using a minimalistic setup (CDJs, Juno synthesizer and a microphone). Her set works because, even when divorced from its political context, it works on a simple, visceral level: by the end of the set, most of the audience is dancing. Between bursts of spoken word, she plays her own tracks, which are densely layered, high tempo, and hard to place. The rhythms feel unfamiliar and there are few traditional hooks, but there’s something euphoric – if occasionally unsettling – contained within the pummeling rhythms.

With releases for No Pain In Pop, Kaleidoscope, and Opal Tapes, Karen Gwyer has mostly been associated with the experimental music community, playing shows in art spaces like Café Oto and, indeed, Bold Tendencies. It’s a shame if Gwyer only plays these venues, because her set tonight – a noisy, all-hardware session that draws predominantly on house and techno – feels like it belongs within the walls of a small, dark club at 3am. **

Performance photos, top right.

Karen Gwyer + Nkisi, presented by Ariel 2.0, performed at London’s Bold Tendencies on August 14, 2015.

Header image: Nkisi @ Bold Tendencies (2015). Photo by George Howard. Courtesy Bold Tendencies, London.

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Cakes Da Killa @ Bold Tendencies, Jul 17

16 July 2015

To help launch their new programme ARIEL 2.0, summertime non-profit Bold Tendencies is bringing in rapper Cakes Da Killa for a live show at their London space on July 17.

The new programme brings together an international and eclectic lineup of, as they call it, “vocal articulations”, with everything from spoken word to sampled speech and rap, embracing the “performative voice that is guided by computers, informed by online life and shaped by the forces of the information age”.

As part of their summer launch party, Bold Tendencies invites critically-acclaimed rapper Cakes Da Killa, to perform a live set and show everyone why’s he’s accumulating so much praise all around. Da Killa will be accompanied by Berlin-born artist and rapper, Leo Luchini.

See the event page for details. **

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