YARMONICS 2022
Festival of sound and new music, this year focusing on the theme of human and planetary health.
Various locations across Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
£FREE - donations welcome order tickets here.
Food and drink will be available from Hendee House on Saturday evening - CASH ONLY.
Fri 23rd / 19.00 - 22:00
talks:
Mark Peter Wright
Martin Scaiff
Ximena Alarcón-Díaz
performance:
NikNak
Sat 24th / 11:00 - 21:00
performance:
Alex Ward
Charlotte Keeffe
Ewa Justka
Hard Edges - info/take part
Mark Fell
Me, Claudius
Roy Claire Potter
Ryoko Akama
Sacred Sounds Gong Bath
Sue Tompkins
Sun 25th / 15:00 - 21:00
workshop, performance:
Phil Minton's Feral Choir - info/take part
Polly Wright & Sean Hancock
Gareth Smith - Vanishing
Sat 24th & Sun 25th / 11:00 - 16:00
installation:
Gijs Gieskes
Full Schedule
Thursday 22nd
10:30 - 11:30 (ticketed) 13:30 - 14:30 (drop-in) 17:30 - 18:00 (adult session)
Participation
Magic Acorns works to nurture, develop and value co-creative processes between artists, educators and our very youngest children.
Commissioned especially for YARMONICS, Magic Acorns present a very special sound and light garden for babies and carers. In amongst our usual array of beautiful things, we will add some cheeky, baby friendly, interactive technologies to make magic and wonder. Using touch sensitive objects babies and adults will be invited explore and create electroacoustic soundscapes while live animation floods the space with light.
Tickets for the 10:30 - 11:30 workshop are available here.
The 13:30 - 14:30 session is drop-in but places are limited.
The 17:30 - 18:30 session is for adults.
Friday 23rd
From rasping dissonance through mysterious melancholy to sweet sonority Hard Edges bring decades of improvising experience to this intriguing trio. Band members have performed with Keith Tippett, Louis Moholo, John Stevens, Paul Rutherford, Paul Jolly, Sylvia Hallett and Clive Bell to name but a few. Part of a loose collective of Norfolk-based musicians performing together in many ensembles Chris Dowding (trumpet), Dave Amis (trombone) and Ben Higham (tuba) celebrate texture and emotion with spontaneity and creativity.
Hard Edges will work with a range of wind-playing participants to produce a performance exploring drones and microtones. If you would like to join this project please sign up here.
AM Kanngieser is an award-winning geographer and sound artist, working through listening and attunement to approach the relations between people, place and ecologies. Over the past decade they have focused on experimenting with sonic methods and practices (including field recordings, radio building and training, sonic ethnographies, oral testimonies, songs, sonifications, composition, sound walks) for environmental-geographical research. These methods and their application have been developed through sound events with The Natural History Museum London, Live Art Development Agency, Sound and Music and 2 Degrees Festival/Arts Admin and been variously outlined in papers for interdisciplinary journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, WIRES Climate Change, Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning D amongst many others. AM will presenting a talk on sound and environmental crisis.
Ximena Alarcón-Díaz is a sound and listening artist researcher with 13 years of postdoctoral creative research experience listening to our sonic migrations: through voice, language, body, dreams and networking technologies.
Alarcón-Díaz improvises and creates telematic sonic performances to amplify our sense of place and sense of presence. She develop Interfaces for Relational Listening (INTIMAL), and currently work on the INTIMAL App© and teaches online and in-person Deep Listening® and Migratory Listening, in workshops exploring sense of place and presence via telematics.
She supports the INTIMAL Collective for women who wish to listen to their migrations through dreams and telematics.
The HomeSounds project was created by experienced musician, field-recordist and education professional Martin Scaiff. Initially drawing on Martin's ongoing research into the relationships between music, environmental sound, attachment and the placement stability of looked after children, the project also builds on Martin's development of educational projects with Recast Music Education CIC, for whom the HomeSounds project was created.
The project's primary aim is to provide activities for the public, specifically vulnerable young people, that introduce them to the creative, educational, health and well-being benefits of active environmental listening.
A woman with a highly impressive array of talents and skills, and a dynamic music creative with experimental albums and tracks/remixes on Come Play With Me, Kynant Records, OTONO, Reel Long Overdub under her belt, NikNak regularly redefines and expands upon her role as a ground-breaking multidisciplinary artist. Her debut album Bashi received acclaim from Resident Advisor, listed as one of their Best Albums of January 2021 as well as airplay on BBC Radio 3, Worldwide FM and Threads Radio.
Previously mentored by Shiva Feshareki, Anna Meredith and Supriya Nagaranjan, NikNak became the first Black Turntablist in history to win the illustrious Oram Award in 2020, has been featured in well renowned publications such as Mixmag, Resident Advisor, Yorkshire Evening Post, Electronic Sound Mag, and DJ Mag, and received support from Arts Council, Brighter Sound, Launchpad, Sound UK, Sound and Music, and PRS Foundation.
With such a varied and deep wealth of experience and knowledge, time and time again NikNak regularly proves that she is one of the most productive music creatives working in the industry today, and continues to surprise everyone no matter the setting.
Saturday 24th
Tracey Musgrove is a Gong Practitioner and Sound Healer, having trained with the College of Sound Healing with one of the leading Gong Trainers in the UK, Sheila Whittacker. Tracey provides bespoke sound events across the region.
Join us in the Minster to start the day with a relaxing sound bath. Blankets and refreshments will be provided.
British musician, trumpeter/flugelhorn player Charlotte Keeffe’s passion for free improvisation, jazz and experimental music-making sees her performing regularly as a soloist and leading a variety of different ensembles, including her own Quartet.
She is part of the Mopomoso (the UK’s longest running concert series dedicated to freely improvised music) creative team, programming its concert series at The Vortex, London, and the online show, Mopomoso TV, which launched in June 2020. She was the Assistant Musical Director of the London Gay Big Band in 2019, before focusing more on her own music making.
Throughout spring 2022, Charlotte is thrilled to be part of a new concert series called Stranger Fruit alongside musicians Sharron McLeod, RENU and Roella Oloro. Stranger Fruit celebrates the legacies of jazz and blues women. Charlotte led a concert dedicated to Tiny Davis, who was described as the ‘hottest female trumpeter in the universe’
Roy Claire Potter has recently presented solo and collaborative work with MOSTYN Gallery, Llandudno; Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; Radiophrenia; BBC Radio 3; Salzburger Kunstverein; Collecteurs, New York; and Tate Britain, London.
Roy makes performance, text, drawing, installation and film, and often collaborates with musicians and sound artists to make audio for music festivals and radio. Across the wide range of their practice, Roy tells stories built from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. Roy’s interest in subtext and narrative sequencing is felt in the way they use fast-paced talking or reading speeds, and restricted or partial views of space. Complicated social or group dynamics, and the aftermath of violent events are common themes in Roy’s work and are usually treated with a dark, sometimes wilful humour.
They have published two books of experimental art writing, Round That Way (Ma Bibliotheque, 2017) and Mental Furniture (VerySmallKitchen 2014) and shorter works are published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Hotel Partisan, Tate Publishing, and CCA Derry-Londonderry. They have released audio with Cafe OTO, London; Sub Rosa, Belgium; Chocolate Monk; Brighton; and Fort Evil Fruit, Dublin.
is a composer, improviser, and performing musician. His primary instruments are clarinet and guitar, and he has also performed in public and on recordings on alto sax, piano/keyboards, bass guitar, and as a vocalist. He was based in Oxford from 1992-2000, and since then has lived in London.
His involvement in freely improvised music dates back to 1986, when he met the guitarist Derek Bailey. As an improviser, he was initially principally a clarinettist (sometimes also playing alto sax), but since 2000 he has also been active as an improvising guitarist. On both instruments, hIs longest-standing collaborations in this field have been with the drummer Steve Noble.
He has been a member of many other groups including ensembles led by Eugene Chadbourne, Simon H. Fell and Duck Baker, and has also done various work as a session musician and in collaboration with other media. Since 2005, he has co-run the label Copepod Records with composer/performer Luke Barlow. He does the recording, mixing and/or mastering of most of his own music, and for many of the groups he plays in.
A Japanese-Korean working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield, UK.
Her works sculpt domestic appliances and scrap wastes with invisible energy, especially interested in heat, magnetism and gravity, into kinetic contraptions. her works are site-specific, infusing both aural / visual occurrence as one entity, creating ephemeral situations that magnify silence, time and space. Interested in nature of relativity, culture and ecosystem, her artistic practice examines environment, architecture, immigration, conflict and fluidity of being.
She also composes and performs alternative scores and text works in collaboration with other artists and musicians worldwide. She is a member of the lappetites, electronic musician collective since 2000 and a member of the 9-piece band a.hop.
Sue Tompkins (b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard) lives and works in Glasgow. Working with fragments of language gathered from everyday encounters and experiences, Tompkins’ practice incorporates text, sound, installation, painting and performance. Tompkins graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1994 and has been involved in exhibitions and performances worldwide including solo exhibitions at Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg; Lydgalleriet, Bergen; Tenderbooks, London; The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow at Glasgow International; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Spike Island, Bristol; and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.
She has presented performances and been included in numerous group exhibitions including those at: Sonar2018, Barcelona; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Tate Britain, London; mumok, Vienna; Tramway, Glasgow; BBC Scotland, Glasgow, White Columns, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; the 29th São Paolo Biennale, São Paolo; the British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring; MACBA, Barcelona; ICA and the Tate Modern, London; and Artists Space, New York.
Tompkins was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2006 and received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011.
We will be presenting a recorded work - titled ‘Love Rocky’ - commissioned especially for YARMONICS.
19:00 - 19:45
Performance
In association with Ryoanji Records.
Me, Claudius. Experimental music. End-of-the-Line-Folk. Some Welsh, lives in England. Hates all her clothes.
The dog, very displayed, The dog displayed a chance. A chance birthday, the dog attentive. We all tasted chance, You can eat outside.
Ryoanji Records is a new label for experimental and electroacoustic music, founded 2021, based out of Norwich and Great Yarmouth. One of the founding principles of Ryoanji Records is that we will be releasing and representing a minimum 50% of music by women, female identifying or gender minority composers, and have music by Ingrid Plum, Me, Claudius and Alëna Korolëva on the way, alongside releases by Leo Magnien and Bill Vine. Ryoanji Records are proud signatories of the Keychange Pledge. Supported by Arts Council England, following our upcoming slate of releases this year, we hope to expand further in 2023.
Ewa Justka is a Polish electronic noise artist, self taught instruments builder and electronics teacher based in Glasgow.
Justka’s main field of research is based on exploration of materiality of objects, vibrant, ontological systems (human bodies, plants’ bodies, electronic circuits: varied range of micro and macro environments and relations between them) and an investigation of modes of quasi-direct perception through noise performance actions, interactive installation, DIY electronics, hardware hacking, plant-molesting, breaking, deconstructing and collaborating. In her artistic work Ewa attempts to explore the concept of materiality of the hidden.
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield (UK). After studying experimental film and video art at Sheffield City Polytechnic he reverted to earlier interests in computational technology, music and synthetic sound. In 1998 he began a series of critically acclaimed record releases on labels including Mille Plateaux, Line, Editions Mego and Raster Noton. Fell is widely known for exploring the relationships between popular music styles, such as electronica and club musics, and typically academic approaches to computer-based composition with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. Since his early electronic music pieces Fell’s practice has expanded to include moving image works, sound and light installation, choregoraphy, critical texts, curatorial projects and educational activites. He has worked with a number of artists including Yasunao Tone, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Okkyung Lee, Luke Fowler, Peter Gidal, John Chowning, Ernest Edmonds, Peter Rehberg, Oren Ambarchi and Carl Michael Von Hausswolff.
Sunday 25th
Phil Minton comes from Torquay in the UK. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 60s- then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later part of the decade. He returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s. For most of the last forty years, Phil has been working as a improvising singer in groups, orchestras and situations, in various locations worldwide. Some composers have written pieces that especially employ his extended vocal techniques and improvisations. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher and ongoing duos with all the above.
The Feral Choir project is a series of vocal workshops with non-professionals, leading up to performances. It originated in the late 1980’s when I was asked to do some workshops with ‘non-singers’ in the Musik Centrum Stockholm. The success of these led me to develop the idea further. The choir consists of a three day workshop and performance, not only for singers but for anyone who takes a delight in the freedom to experiment. I encourage participants to take a vocal leap and explore all vocal possibilities through exercises and improvisations, over the workshop period, leading to a concert.
This workshop is open to people of all ages and abilities, and relies on no previous musical experience. Sign up here.
15:00 - 15:45
Performance
Gareth Smith - Vanishing presents ‘55°N, 5°E’
On the night of 21st October 1904, out in the Dogger Bank area of the North Sea, Russian warships mistook a fleet of British fishing trawlers for enemy Japanese warships, and opened fire. One of the fishermen killed that night was George Henry Smith, great-grandfather of Gareth Smith, the lyricist & artist behind Vanishing. ‘55°N, 5°E’ reawakens this history.
Scored for electronics, saxophone, violin and spoken word, three musicians and three dancers shift through five movements in a cycle. The music is part Throbbing Gristle soundscape, part Vaughan Williams folksong, part John Cale drone. Febrile noise, enveloping sub-bass, fusillading drum machines, resplendent strings, and expressive intonations surge and subside, capturing the brutality and havoc of the Dogger Bank incident, and the untold loss endured.
Reimagined for YARMONICS, Gareth Smith will be joined by saxophonist, Karl D'Silva.
The culmination of the afternoon’s workshop, join Phil Minton and festival participants - the YARCESTRA - for a special Feral Choir performance.
Sean Hancock is a specialist in vintage video camera gear, creating performance and installation which incorporates projection mapping, 3D model making, and live processing. Polly Wright is a Musician, Writer and Film-maker. She creates distinctive, atmospheric music for theatre, installation, poetry, fashion and dance and has performed headline, sold-out shows at The National Portrait Gallery and Hoxton Music Hall.
For this new collaboration Sean and Polly have created an immersive audiovisual work that takes audiences on a journey through a series of historic buildings and landmarks from in and around Great Yarmouth.
ALL weekend
Gijs Gieskes is an industrial-designer from the Netherlands specialising in the design of electronic devices for audiovisual use. Some of these devices are often sold as kits but some are pre-assembled. More information of his devices and inventions on his website. For YARMONICS Gijs has created a series of solar powered devices that are designed to excite drums, create an array of sun-powered scattergun percussion.
YARMONICS 2022 was funded by:
