Sonic Specters with Richard Skelton, Jung An Tagen and Firmament
Between Nostalgia and Anticipation
Sonic Specters with Richard Skelton and Jung an Tagen
Angewandte
Interdisciplinary Lab
Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Eerie atmospheres and flickering sound traces created by past audio sources and the coming times – for each event
of the new series Sonic Specters. Between Nostalgia and Anticipation two musicians track down what has ceased to exist and
what is yet to come. Firmament is the midst of the waters that divides the waters above from the waters below. It is
the past of the traveler that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies
in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Richard Skelton is an English
musician. Over the past seventeen years and over 50 albums & EPs, he has developed a signature sound, often comprised
of strings, piano and other acoustic instrumentation. Since 2013 he has increasingly buried these organic sources in layers
of detritus and static. The process, as he articulates it, is to use signal-degradation as a means of reflecting the processes
of decay and transformation in the natural world. His music has been placed alongside giants of experimental music, such as
Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Stars Of The Lid, William Basinski. A DIY advocate, most of his music has been self-released, either
via Sustain-Release (2005-2011) or Corbel Stone Press (2009+).
Renown for his expressive and innovative use of acoustic
instruments, his much-imitated treatment of strings — at once visceral and haunting — began in 2007 on the album ‘Box of Birch’,
and was later developed on his trio of ground-breaking recordings, ‘Marking Time’ (2008), ‘Landings’ (2009) and ‘Verse of
Birds’ (2011). His work has been lauded by Gramophone, Mojo, Q, Record Collector and The Quietus, among others, and in 2011
he was featured on the cover of The Wire magazine. In 2013 he was shortlisted for a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, and in 2014
he was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Award for Experimental Music.
Jung An Tagen invites us to reflect
on the diffuse but persistent term ‘experimental’ not as deviation from aesthetic orthodoxy, but as the design and implementation
of compositional systems that offer unpredictable results; ‘electronic’ as an annulment of the previous instrumental tradition,
and as a simultaneous reversion towards aesthetic openness; as the fragmentation of a theoretical or mythical musical syntax
by obsessive repetition, sequential motivic mutations, aleatoric arrays, pareidolic illusions and moiré effects; ‘electronic’
as the ultimate split, dehumanisation, mechanic strangeness.
Backed up by 2 decades of discographic activity under diverse
pseudonyms and multiple collaborations on labels such as Editions Mego and Diagonal, Stefan Juster performs tirelessly at
Festivals like Unsound or Sonic Acts, researching the boundaries of techno and dissociative computer music. Testing strategies
of physical disorientation and forceful sonic phenomena, encouraging minds and bodies to calculate and intuit their own place
in spacetime. It’s addictive music. Music in constant explosion.
The sound performance series Sonic Specters is
the first part of the program centering on AIL’s new topic: Haunted – Persistence of the Past. In cooperation with Struma+Iodine.ail.angewandte.at 
