Maggie Menghan Chen performed ‘深水 Undercurrents’ at Beijing’s X Museum on October 31, with the trailer for the live show (strobe warning) premiering on AQNB today. The Beijing-based artist & S/ash collective co-founder shared the uplifting ‘Body Building Exercise’ video back at the beginning of European lockdown in March, with music by felicita.
The London-born producer and composer returned to score the two-hour long show, featuring Chen herself, along with Kong Kong Du and Lawrence Dong, and comprising chanting, asana practice and dance. Also including marimba by Wang San, jewellery from Eva Wu Yang and costumes by fellow S/ash co-founder a1jewel, is described as “an invitation to a gathering and healing process that encourages the audience to build a private experience through active imagination.”**
THE BEGINNING AND END OF BRITPOP AS WE KNOW IT. ENTER THE NIGHTCLUB AND TASTE THE CONFETTI. WELCOME TO POP CITY.
The collective cut their teeth producing and performing live, along with associated act Sophie, in London at the JACK댄스 club nights and has since signing to Columbia Records. The ‘Pop City’ event carries on from earlier similarly-themed group events, including a special night at last year’s SXSWand the recent ‘Pop Cosmos‘ at the Scala in London in May.
London-based music label and collective PC Music is doing a showcase, called Pop Cosmos at London’s Scala on May 19.
The acts set to perform on the night include Danny L Harle, Hannah Diamond, GFOTY, Felicita, Easyfun, Spinee, and A. G. Cook, the latter of whom founded the PC Music label online around 2013, since partnering with Columbia Records. Cook has also worked with other artists of a similar focus on feminine-future aesthetics, like Sophie, together producing and developing music project and energy drink QT with performance artist Hayden Dunham(aka ‘Quinn Thomas’), as well as producing as duo called Lipgloss Twins with Felicita.
The Pop Cosmos press release comes accompanied by a short trailer video by SCOTTY2HOTTY69 and the following new-futurist affirmation:
“Lose yourself in an immersive journey to the end of time. See the stars up close. Buy your one way ticket to the Pop Cosmos.”
Copson inaugurates the new experimental and immersive event series at the Sackler Gallery The Magazine Sessions with his work.
A Woodland Truce is a play without actors, a scene with deer, lighting, live and pre-recorded elements and a fox called Reynard, who regularly features in Copson’s practice. The press release tells that the animals and elements come together in the woods, discuss their biological conditioning and try and undermine it.
The music for the event is composed by London-based producerFelicita, and choir Musarc will be performing live vocals, accompanied by Marcus Nasty.
The week-long multi-disciplinary event explores new international music and performance in a sequence of themed evening events including titles like ‘Capital Collective’, ‘To A New Definition Of Opera II’, ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ and ‘Requiem for Reality’.
Artists and performances worth looking out for include, Visionist, Poulomi Desaiand David Toop on December 11, John Cage, Morton Subotnick and Terry Riley on December 12, Tim Etchells andAisha Orazbayeva on December 13 and a screening ofRyan Trecartin‘s CENTRE JENNY (2013) alongside a performance by edges ensemble – including Lucy Railton, Sue Tompkins and others – on December 15.
There’ll be a presentation of Tino Sehgal’s Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000) and the European premiere of Norwegian composer Oyvind Torvund‘s Untitled School/Mud Jam/Campfire Tunes,with Islam Chipsy among its Plus Minus Ensemble performers, on December 16.
Most pertinently, though, December 17 will include contributions from Felicita and James Ferraro for the ‘Requiem for Reality’ programme – “Some call it Post-Internet Art” – while a number of artist talks, running at the Ace Hotel December 12 to 13, will include a conversation between Visionist and music critic Adam Harper.
Leo Liccini’s impressive Ariel 2.0 series has showcased a number of international musicians, producers and artists whose performative voices are being shaped by computers and online life, bringing the likes of Karen Gwyer, Cakes da Killa, and Hanne Lippard to the Bold Tendencies auditorium space of a multi-storey car park in Peckham, South East London. The programme’s final outing features Felicita, whose hi-tech noise music has been performed at club nights and art galleries alike, and Tami Tamaki, a Berlin-based singer and producer who writes dance pop songs with a candid take on sexuality at the forefront.
Although originally hailing from Sweden, Tami Tamaki has made a small impact in Berlin’s underground electronic scene and found fans online thanks to the inclusion of their song ‘I Never Loved This Hard This Fast Before’ in the soundtrack to Ester Martin Bergsmark’s 2014 queer romance Something Must Break. Tamaki’s set (a first for a UK audience) flitted between bright, colourful pop songs, sad-eyed robo-ballads, and big drop bangers. Lyrically the sorts of clichés you hear in top 40 radio pop are taken (“I never loved this hard this fast before / But then again I never loved a boy like you before”) and then flipped with a frank and often funny depiction of sex and sexuality (“You make my heart beat, steady as a clock / Your words touches deep, and so does your cock”). Tamaki adjusts and queers a vocal delivery through heavy processing, but the music is still rooted in conventional melodic pop song-craft and it’s precisely because it’s more visceral than intellectual that it works so well. Two songs into the set, Tamaki suggests that they’re not used to playing to a seated audience, and when the crowd gets up, they stay up.
Having attended South London artist Felicita’s WISH event at London’s ICA theatre earlier this year, I was on familiar ground with what to expect, even if his music is formally less straightforward than Tami Tamaki’s. Felicita presents his show like a typical live act: the artist is on-stage, they play their instrument (in this case, a laptop), and the audience faces them. But throughout the set, Felicita subtly circumvents established gig rituals and takes things closer to performance art, especially as he controls his production software through his smartphone. At times, the only light in the room comes from the glowing Apple logo on the back of his computer, and it’s impossible to know what’s going on behind that screen: Felicita could be in the middle of an elaborate Ableton live session, or he could just be hitting the space bar on iTunes.
One thing that is recognisably ‘live’ is the contribution of vocalist Chlo, who opens the set by directing an inane stream of consciousness into the microphone. Slowly, this spoken word is drowned out by Felicita’s bright, colourful take on noise music, clearing the way for a din of chattering voices, glitches, and loud digital synth blasts (with hints of garish pop songs surfacing occasionally above the clamour). Chlo’s contribution starts as something non-musical, but she returns at the end of the set and blasts out a song a capella that proves there is a formal talent that is previously, deliberately left unheard. At the end of the performance, the music cuts out and the crowd stands in silence, uncertain whether to clap, wait for the music to kick back in, or leave. **
Other acts include Berlin’s Soda Plains, Sad Boys producer Yung Sherman, experimental producer Darko, and the rising star Felicita make this line-up too.
London’s NTS radio presents the sixth edition of their Parallel Visions series with Felicita and new live show WISH at the ICA on June 4.
NTS has been running Parallel Visions in collaboration with the ICA throughout 2014, with six hosts curating interdisciplinary nights of live music and performance informed by their individual tastes.
The sixth edition features an a cappella appearance by Kero Kero Bonito (London’s Sarah Gus Jamie), as well as a “micro-climates” by Lipgloss Twins (who appear, the description says, as “real-life humans at the ICA bar”) and Lil Data (who will “take over” your smartphones”).
