special events: Unofficial Channels

Mattin (Spain)
Mattin is a Basque artist working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing.

Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ''freedom'' and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre.

Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship.
http://www.mattin.org/

Masa Anzai & Anju Singh (Vancouver)

EDR (Vancouver)
An unholy poisoning of ambient, free-folk and pseudo psychedelic primitivism amid sweeping tides of noise, drone music worship, spastic panning, bent and decayed notes, and assorted digital debris meant to keep everyone off balance. Deceptively improvised, and/or intentionally contrived? An atypical journey through uplifting murk and lurid bliss.
http://ejaculationdeathrattle.com/

Hitori Tori (Vancouver)
In 1998 Julian La Brooy's four track recorder was tragically destroyed. A sound tracker completely changed everything and Hitori Tori was born. Julian first released several IDM tracks under the artist name Finch on the Omniscience Complilation (Sugarmonk/Interchill Records) in 1999 alongside artists such as Tim Hecker (Jetone) and Adam Shaikh. A full-length album under the artist name 'Fasp' was released on the Nishi net-label in 2002. As Hitori Tori, Julian has seen EP releases on net labels such as Fwonk, Panospria, Meta0 and Otherman Records. He was recently contacted for a personal interview by the developers of Renoise (a music software company), who were intrigued by his live 'controllerism' jams they had witnessed on Youtube. Hitori Tori's live performance videos have also been receiving positive feedback in publications such as Computer Music Magazine and Create Digital Music. Over the past few years Hitori Tori has been very lucky to share the stage with some wonderful electronic artists like: Venetian Snares, Bong-Ra, End.user, Himuro Yoshiteru, Dora Video and Techdiff.
http://hitoritori.tumblr.com/

Holzkopf (Vancouver)
Since 2001, Holzkopf has been developing a style of hypnotic and frenetic dance music made from a mishmash of homemade tape collages, blown out drum machine beats, dumpstered Chinese pop cassettes, raw data noise, barely controled feedback and smashed and grabbed found sounds.  The sound is remenicent of proto-industrial, disco, hip-hop, global psychedelia, gospel and breakcore synthesized into a complete unique whole unlike any one component part.  This is futurist and anarchist music made on cheap gear, recorded live to tape or dusty old hard drives.  It embodies the spirits of rotting architecture and 100 year old brothels, the wide open spaces of the Canadian prairies and the angst and anger of battling slum-lords, debt and panic.  More than anything else though, the music is a celebration. Celebation, after all, is the best form of protest.  Sharing the stage with Princesse Rotative, Cex, Electric Kettle, Andrew Duke, Venetian Snares, Fanny, Maladroit, Botborg, the Shearing Pinx, Sam Shalabi, Knurl, Emil Beaulieau and many others over multiple tours through Canada and Europe (in squats, clubs, backyards and under bridges), a Holzkopf performance is always a spontaneous, raw and one of a kind experience.
https://sites.google.com/site/holzkopf666/

Jim Carrico

Mattin
Mattin is a Basque artist working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing.

Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ''freedom'' and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre.

Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship.
http://www.mattin.org/

Gabriel Mindel
Gabriel Mindel Saloman is an American born artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. As a musician he has spent nearly a decade touring internationally and has released well over 50 recordings as a part of the experimental music group Yellow Swans. He has performed at numerous international music festivals including Sonar (ES), Open Circuit (BE), and Sonic Protest (FR) and was invited to join Art Council England’s Free Noise Tour in 2007. Simultaneously he has collaborated in a variety of relational artworks, most notably with Red76 where he has exhibited or been in residence at the Walker Art Center (US), CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (US), Creative Time NY (US) and the San Jose Zero1 (US) and Manifesta 8 (ES) Biennials. Recent projects include the Lower Mainland Painting Co. - a group of artists researching and engaging in questions of Art, Labour and Art Labourers; and The STAG - a gallery run out of the Strathcona home of he and his partner Aja Rose Bond. Saloman is currently pursuing his MFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts where he is seeking to explicitly merge the trajectories of his work in Sound and Social Practices, demonstrating that the resistant potential of noise can be brought to a critical state of praxis.
http://diademdiscos.wordpress.com/

Anju Singh

Moderated by
Jacob Hardy

Special performance by
Aja Rose Bond
Aja Rose Bond is an intermedia artist with solo and collaborative projects that include DJ Tapes, Diadem, Her Jazz Noise Collective, Textile Group and The STAG. She utilizes sound, performance, textiles, sculpture, drawing, collage, installation and social practice as tools in her diverse experiments. She has performed and exhibited at Vancouver New Music Festivals, Signal and Noise, Push Festival, the VAG's Fuse, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Artbank, Or Gallery and Western Front.

Mattin (Spain)
Mattin is a Basque artist working with noise and improvisation. His work seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing.

Using a conceptual approach, he aims to question the nature and parameters of improvisation, specifically the relationship between the idea of ''freedom'' and constant innovation that it traditionally implies, and the established conventions of improvisation as a genre.

Mattin considers improvisation not only as an interaction between musicians and instruments, but as a situation involving all the elements that constitute a concert, including the audience and the social and architectural space. He tries to expose the stereotypical relation between active performer and passive audience, producing a sense of strangeness and alienation that disturbs this relationship.
http://www.mattin.org/

Vancouver Electronic Ensemble
The Vancouver Electronic Ensemble (VEE) was created in 2010 to provide an outlet for the development of creative music with an ensemble of experimental musicians active in Vancouver. VEE is actively involved in performing and researching experimental electronic music (both historical and original works composed by the ensemble), that engage performers and audiences in aesthetic criticism through a wide range of activities. The ensemble wishes to fully embrace experimentation as a primary activity in order to establish creative practices that will construct models of new, possible musics.