Sculpture is an opto-musical agglomerate made up of Dan Hayhurst (music), and Reuben Sutherland (animation). The duo met in London by chance and decided to combine practices. Their first test hit upon a psychedelic palette, the sensorial intricacies of which they continue to explore. Performance is central to their work, and feeds back into all aspects of the process. There is a musical interplay between the different perceptual elements, each informing the other.

Sculpture’s output includes music, film and video work, and multi-sensory live shows.

Sculpture performances are an amalgam of electronic music, kinetic art, comic strips, abstract animation, audiovisual cut-ups – a mix of analog and digital practices – tape manipulation, samples, found sounds, aleatoric and algorithmic programming and live improvisation. Dan plays media devices and electronic instruments. Reuben plays video zoetrope turntable.

Sculpture’s new LP, ’Membrane Pop’, is released mid-May on Software, a label curated by Daniel Lopatin, AKA Oneohtrix Point Never.

Sculpture previously made two animated zoetrope picture disc LPs for Germany’s Dekorder records – Rotary Signal Emitter (2010) and Toad Blinker (2011). Their third LP, Slime Code, was released in 2012 on ultra-limited cassette by patten’s Kaleidoscope imprint and reissued by on vinyl by Digitalis. The duo’s self-released animated 7″ single, Plastic Infinite (January 2014), became an instant cult artefact.

Press Cuttings:

It’d be a mistake to conclude from the vintage of their gear that Sculpture are pursuing a retro analogue agenda. Their purpose is to explore perceptual thresholds…Sculpture hover at these sensory junctures, invoking the cortical feedbackmechanisms of the brain – The Wire

As with Nurse With Wound at their best, there is a manic energy and deranged sense of joy in these recordings (and indeed animations) that is absent from most of today’s Wire-approved left-fielders. It’s as if a hyperactive toddler had snatched the avant-garde and ran away with it, laughing uncontrollably. As a result, what could have been a dry and merely ‘interesting’ project turns out to be a hugely entertaining joyride – Freqzine

Like a kid armed with the Sonic Youth track “Providence” who then went out and bought a sampler instead of a guitar. Lots of tiny sounds moving forward and keeping you busy. Woozy samples at the wrong speed are always the quickest way to my busted, weird heart – Foxy Digitalis

A dose of lysergic hauntology patching pieces of Radiophonic tape music with freeform drumming, digitally mangled modular synth sounds and all manner of sample textures to pull off an album that sounds like Keith Fullerton Whitman jamming with Roj round at Bruno Spoerri’s place, or maybe People Like Us locked in a room with Black-to-Comm and a juicy bag of mushies – Boomkat

Adventurous DJs would know what to do with this curious record: spin two copies at any speed and make dozens of new connections – Tokafi

http://tapebox.co.uk
http://www.littlebig-agency.net/artists/sculpture
http://vimeo.com/8199610

COH is Ivan Pavlov, a Russian-born resident of Stockholm active in the electronic scene since 1998. COH was among the names recognizable in the wave of computer-based music that brought forth such European record labels as raster-noton and Mego. Over the last decade COH is also known to have produced joint works with other artists including Coil, Little Annie Anxiety, Cyclobe, Richard Chartier, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and with Peter Christopherson in a futuristic art project Soisong.

Tina Frank is a designer, visual artist, and professor at the University of Art and Design, Linz. Her main focus in teaching is on information visualisation, digital publications and synaesthetic experimentation. Managing the unversity’s department for visual communication Tina runs a series of symposiums on methods of combining visual communication with art and science. As an artist, Tina Frank performs live at various events festivals around the globe, also showing her abstract visual works in exhibitions and in the experimental section of film festivals.

Ivan and Tina had worked numerous times on COH album covers, striving to achieve an implicit connection between music and image. COH & FRANK is a new live collaboration where the video image is generated and manipulated from sound output of the mixing board.

http://www.post-pop.org
http://www.tinafrank.net

GhostHunt

Multi instrumentalists Pierre Bastien and Eddie Ladoire bring their intimate sound contraptions for a concert named Phantoms. Take place and take a close look at what happens on the stage floor, and on the screen as well. Pierre admires the great names in contemporary dance. He had the chance to work with two of them, the late French choreographer Dominique Bagouet and the prolific Spanish dancer Roberto Olivan. Eddie just likes ballerinas. Imagine a phantom ballet, with the music score in the foreground. The musicians have collected old movies: figures and gestures from ancient times ranging from native american rituals to Russian ballets through African tribal dances, Chinese lion dance for lunar new year or Indian kathakali. Mostly silent films that are edited, organized and looped to serve the musical composition and give it some unexpected turns. No body limits for this universal choreography: the composition ends up with an animation film by Auguste and Louis Lumière the very inventors of cinema, a skeleton cakewalk that emphasizes and completes this phantom ballet.

Phantoms is Eddie Ladoire keyboards, electronics and Pierre Bastien trumpet, mechanics, video

Pierre Bastien

Pierre Bastien (born Paris, 1953) post-graduated in eighteenth-century French literature at University Paris-Sorbonne. In 1977 he built his first musical machinery. For the next ten years he has been composing for dance companies and playing with Pascal Comelade. In the meantime he was constantly developing his mechanical orchestra. Since 1987 he concentrates on it through solo performances, sound installations, recordings and collaborations with such artists as Pierrick Sorin, Karel Doing, Jean Weinfeld, Robert Wyatt or Issey Miyake.

The French composer and multi-instrumentalist Pierre Bastien played first in some collective bands (Operation Rhino, Nu Creative Methods, Effectifs de Profil), and with the Dominique Bagouet Dance Company.

Around 1986 he started participating in Pascal Comelade’s Bel Canto Orquesta. At the same time he created – and literally built – his own orchestra called Mecanium : an ensemble of musical automatons constructed from meccano parts and activated by electro-motors, that are playing on acoustic instruments from all over the world.

“A composer’s dream : a fail-safe orchestra at one’s fingertips obeying ever so gently to his every command : a timeless sounding orchestra, both futuristic and slightly dada, conjuring ancient traditions in its surprisingly sensuous music. This is, in a nutshell what Pierre Bastien’s “Mecanium” is all about, a daydream of sorts that he has successfully pursued since 1976. The musicians of his orchestra are machines. And the idea behind it is simple, efficient and poetic : to have traditional instruments (Chinese lute, Morrocan bendir, Javanese saron, koto, violin, sanza, etc.) played by a mechanical instrument made of meccano pieces and recycled turntable motors. These hybrid and self-playing sound sculptures perform a series of short pieces, charming and hypnotic. ” (Michel F. Côté)

In the nineties the mechanical orchestra developed up to 80 elements. It took part in music festivals and art exhibitions in Norway (World Music Days’90), Australia (Tisea’92), Japan (Artec’95), Canada (Fimav’95, Sound Symposium’98), Poland (Warsaw Autumn’95), United States (Flea Festival’96)…

In the recent years, Pierre Bastien and his machines collaborated with video artist Pierrick Sorin, fashion designer Issey Miyake, British singer and composer Robert Wyatt, Trottola circus company, musicians Alexei Aigi, Steve Arguelles and Phonophani. The most recent compositions were released on Western Vinyl and Rephlex.

http://www.pierrebastien.com

Eddie Ladoire

Eddie Ladoire lives and works near Bordeaux, France. After a double career path in decorative arts and electroacoustic music at the Bordeaux Conservatoire, he is now both a visual artist and a musician, composing electroacoustic music and creating sound installations. Cities, landscapes and everyday life are for him fields of experimentation and a source for inspiration.

As an artist/activist, he is equally comfortable with his exhibition projects, where intimacy is omnipresent (Mademoiselle, Piano Piano…), as with his sound productions, in which he invites us to rethink our relationship to sound, to listening, to space.

http://www.unendliche-studio.com