Pictures (from top):
Zapoppin' © Zapoppin'
Iris Garrelfs © Peter Smith
Iris Garrelfs © M. Radinovic
CogJam Poster - please distribute
Come, join us for another CogJam! this time with special guests as well as CogJam regulars! It is part of the conference "Off the Lip 2015" and free for all delegates but also, for a small entrance fee of £2, open to anyone. So please invite your colleagues and guest and join us on 10 September from 7PM at the Exile Plymouth (8 Drake Circus, PL4 8AQ - right next to the University). This event is also on Facebook.
Catch them now in what may be there last gig in this formation! Wilfully atonal and playfully brash, Zapoppin’ are one of the most unconventional acoustic, folk and skiffle groups around. Their latest album is a 20-minute ‘short-player.’ It is a record of abject curiosity, awkwardness and darkness. Ugly Musick is the name of it. And ‘ugly music’ is what they play, through an overdriven banjo (played by Tom Sharpe) and an amped-up harmonium (played by Luke Richards) with the sound now bolstered by drummer Matt Collington.They are a fully-fledged, powerskifflin’, power trio. Irking the purists all the way.
Find more at Bandcamp, Facebook, and Soundcloud
Iris Garrelfs is a London based sound artist active across performance, installation and fixed media. In performance she often uses her voice as raw material for conjuring multilayered listening experiences where voice is transmuted into machine noises, intricate rhythms, choral works, pulverised into granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing as the Wire magazine put it. Her new album Breathing Through Wires is just out on Pan Y Rosas Discos. Moulding complex aural collages, her work has been compared to artists such as Yoko Ono, Henri Chopin, Joan La Barbara or Meredith Monk. Works have featured at Tate Britain, Science Museum London, Royal Academy of Arts and more. Elsewhere she is a lecturer at London College of Communication and commissioning editor of Reflections on Process in Sound. Garrelfs’ work further points toward a flow of sonority that leaves us further tuned to all that hovers in and around the voice. in doing so, she fully locates sound as an important route for reimagining the time and space of the contemporary environment (Brandon LaBelle, 2014, sleeve notes to bedroom symphonies).
More information on the website
My songs fall within the anti-folk genre with minimal guitar and vocal arrangements. I value simplicity in my melodies but to contrast this use a lot of imagery and metaphor when writing the lyrics. I would describe my songs as being grounded in reality but with elements of a fantastic and sometimes dark dreamscape.
More about her on the CogNovo Website. Also see an excerpt of her performance at Rumpus Cosy during Radio CogNovia.
I have played in various folk bands, recently I have been fiddling away in my bedroom putting some of my favourite poems to music and writing some of my own songs.
More about him at Soundcloud, Mixcloud as him being interviewed by Radio CogNovia, YouTube and his CogNovo Website.
This short audio-visual piece re-presents the stimuli used in a recent scientific publication examining the potentially recursive relationship between art and the viewer (McLean, Want & Dyson, 2015). Individuals were asked to make scribbling or stippling actions on paper with the resultant audio also being recorded. These stimuli were then experienced by a further set of individuals, who were asked to judge the aesthetic value of the collective audio-visual pieces. Here, the individual takes on the role of an informal scientific ‘participant’ but by taking the stimuli outside of the laboratory and repositioning it in the context of an art-piece, the presentation reminds us how context becomes a critical factor in the interpretation of our sensory experience: whether we are willing to submit our perception to aesthetic analysis or rather pass up an artistic experience in favour of a more quotidian interpretation.
What happens when we suspend all our actions to question them? What do we think about before performing a new gesture or encountering someone else? By making visible the immaterial layer of thoughts, the short film “Way out” aims to revealing the inner dimension of the dancer and to investigating the relationship between streams of consciousness and flow of movement.
The work is part of a research project entitled “I don’t know if you can see it from outside. An investigation into the cognitive components of optimal performance as perceived by contemporary dancers”, conducted in the frame of an MA in Dance Performance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire (London).
Catalin Brylla is going ot present film clips relating to "Cognitive Innovation and Framing in Documentary Film Practice"