NAWR #54

Friday, June 16, 2023 - 19:30
Tangled Parrot Swansea
222 High Street, Swansea
£7
Facebook Event: 
Tangled Parrot and NAWR present / yn cyflwyno
 
NIA DAVIES
RHODRI DAVIES - LUIGI MARINO - MICHAEL THIEKE
DEAF GERMAN
FERN THOMAS
 

Nia Davies

Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance and intermedia. Her current research and practice focuses on embodiment, ecology, sexuality,  movement and Cymraeg. Her first book-length collection of poems All Fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was shortlisted for the Roland Matthias Prize for Poetry in the Wales Book of the Year awards (2018) and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for First Collection (2019). She was editor of Poetry Wales (2014–2019) and has published several pamphlets and collaborative publications. Nia has also worked on international literary and translation projects and has performed, collaborated and curated around the world. Her second collection will be published by Bloodaxe in 2024.

 
Fern Thomas - Artist & Writer
 
Fern's practice is based within the field of Social Sculpture - a territory of arts practice which explores transdisciplinary creativity and vision towards the shaping of a humane and ecologically viable society - with a focus on re-imagined histories, ritual, place-based knowledge, alternative pedagogies and future-oriented questions around our climate. The work can manifest as object, text, spoken word, sound, performative gesture and participatory forms.
 
Speculative fiction or alternative narratives are central to her process, where imagined histories and dream-induced futures merge and become a catalyst for a process of transformation. Fern often uses place, archives or an historical object - often rooted in Welsh culture and history - as a starting point for opening up new perspectives. She has a particular interest in divinatory tools and the necessary conditions for telling the future.
 
Fern is becoming more and more drawn to the vibration of things.
 
 
Deaf German
 
'Deaf German' is the experimental music project of artist Ioan Humphreys. They have released two EPs (2018's 'tyres EP' and 2021's 'mute whore' EP), with the 'tyres' EP being a collaboration with Lancastrian experimental spoken word artist 'Equinox'. According to Humphreys, "Deaf German is an outlet where the bounds of minimalist noise experimentation can be pushed".
 
Luigi Marino
 
Luigi Marino is a musician based in Bristol. His work focuses on networks able to display relationships between human and nonhuman actors, and especially on how intuitive decisions can derail a pre-existing order. He is an active improvisor performing on both electronic media and percussion, in particular zarb and bowed custom cymbals extended with DIY portable circuits.
 
He holds an MFA in electronic music from Mills College where he worked as teaching assistant for John Bischoff and Chris Brown, and a joint PhD in composition from University of Birmingham and De Montfort University funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. His teachers include Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, James Fei, William Winant. He studied zarb with Mohssen Kasirossafar.
 
As a performer or composer his music has been presented at festivals and venues such as Rainforest World Music Festival (Kuching, Malaysia), San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Cafe Oto (London), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), Intonal Festival (Malmö), Auditorium Parco Della Musica (Rome), IEM (Graz), Seoul International Computer Music Festival, BEAST FEaST (Birmingham), Acousmatic for the People (Malmö), Sacred Realism (Berlin), Interpenetration (Graz), Sowieso (Berlin), Rhiz (Vienna), Iklectik (London), Hundred Years Gallery (London), Km28 (Berlin), Offene Ohren (Munich), WIM (Zurich), ImprovvisaMente (Lodi), ICMC (Athens).
 
Michael Thieke
 
The Berlin-based clarinetist/composer/performer Michael Thieke is equally at home across a broad range of musical environments, such as experimental song forms, collectively composing projects, improvising collectives, and music on the fringes of jazz. He is exploring the minutiae of sound, timbre and noise, with a particular interest in microtonality and related sound phenomena. The qualities of slowness are another field of his research. He has a preference for long-term collaborations and collective work.
 
Some of his current Projects are: The International Nothing (with Kai Fagaschinski), Voutchkova/Thieke Duo (with Biliana Voutchkova), The Pitch (with Boris Baltschun, Koen Nutters, Morten J. Olsen), Der lange Schatten (with Håvard Wiik, Antonio Borghini), Splitter Orchester, Magda Mayas Filamental (with Magda Mayas, Angharad Davies, Christine Abdelnour, Zeena Parkins, Rhodri Davies, Aimee Theriot, Anthea Caddy), Porta Chiusa (with Paed Conca, Hans Koch), The Clarinet Trio (with Gebhard Ullmann, Jürgen Kupke), The Magic I.D. (with Christof Kurzmann, Kai Fagaschinski, Margareth Kammerer), Marino/Thieke (wth Luigi Marino), Nashaz (with Sharif Sehnaoui, Andrea Neumann, Michael Vorfeld), Warteland (with Lena Czerniawska, Emilio Gordoa)
 
He played on festivals such as Novas Frequencias (Rio de Janeiro), Borderline (Athens), Ring Ring (Belgrade), Wien Modern, Uppercut (Bordeaux), Klub Katarakt (Hamburg), Irtijal (Beirut), Ftarri Festival (Tokyo), Meakusma (Eupen), Seanaps (Leipzig), Festival International de Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville), Taiwan Improvised Music Festival (Tapei), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Musikprotokoll (Graz), Klangspuren (Schwaz), Trans Art (Bozen), Music Unlimited (Wels), Jazz Fest (Berlin), MärzMusik (Berlin), Borealis (Bergen), Musica Estranha (Sao Paulo), ctm (Berlin), Crak (Paris), Darmstädter Ferienkurse Für Neue Musik (Darmstadt), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Taktlos (Zürich), Metéo (Mulhouse), Angelica (Bologna), Alternativa (Prague), Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf), Musiques Innovatrices (St.Etienne), artacts (St.Johann), Experimental Intermedia (New York), Long Arms (Moscow), Controindicazione (Rome), Moers Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, ZJFT (Groningen), Jazz em Agosto (Lisbon), PiedNu (LeHavre)
 
Rhodri Davies
 
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
 
For the last ten years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing eighteen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
 
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.