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Festival of sound and new music

Residencies - '24-'25

THREE NEW COMMISSIONS BY...

SHORTWAVE COLLECTIVE // NWANDO EBIZIE // MARIAM REZAEI

Multiple venues across Great Yarmouth
Festival of sound and new music

In 2024 and '25 we are extremely excited to be working with Shortwave Collective, Nwando Ebizie, and Mariam Rezaei to create three brand new works. Each Artist and collective will work with local community groups including Feathers Futures, Great Yarmouth Refugee Outreach and Support, Age Connects and Red Herring Press and spend an extended period in Great Yarmouth, connecting on a deeper level with the place and its people.


The residency artists will present work - either in concept, progress or completed - at the festival on 21st September. Also during this day of celebration, a number of invited musicians and sound artists will give site-specific performances, including Ecka Mordecai, Fritz Welch, Dirty Electronics, Rie Nakajima and more.

Artists

NWANDOEBIZIE

Nwando Ebizie is a constellation point for a spectrum of multidisciplinary works that call for RADICAL change.

She challenges her audience to question their perceived realities through art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception (inspired by her own neurodiversity) and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice.

Works include her immersive sensory environment Distorted Constellations, her pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension!) and the building of her long-term operatic experience, Hildegard: Visions. This award winning work has toured across the world. She has performed in Tokyo (Bonobo), Rio de Janeiro (Tempo Festival), Berlin (Chalet), Latvia (Baltais Fligelis Concert Hall) and Zurich (Blok) as well as across the UK from Home MCR to the Barbican and Southbank Centre.

Nwando works across media, genre and artforms creating mythopoetic metanarratives and alternate realities. Her work is a drawing together of the pieces that she is in a frozen moment of ever-living infinite regress.

Always political and grounded in a mytho-scientific perspective she invites viewers and participants to join her at the Crossroads. At the crossroads where you can choose to pass through the cosmic mirror and touch alternate realities. The realities of what could have been and what should have been and what may possibly be. She works with speculative fictions, possible dreams and lucid worlds.

Nwando will be working with members of the community that have sensory impairment, as well as young people currently engaged with educational activity at Red Herring Press. The work will explore how we perceive sound and the environment, specifically with hearing, and listening practice.

MARIAMREZAEI

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist and performer. She previously led experimental arts project TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH, and in November 2022, she received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists, in recognition of her contribution to music composition. Her music has recently been described as ‘genuinely ground-breaking’ (London Jazz News 2022) and ‘high-velocity sonic surrealism’ (4* TheGuardian 2022).

Recent release BOWN (Heat Crimes) charted no.6 in The Wire and no.10 in The Quietus’ best albums of 2023 and was The Quietus album of the week. Boomkat described it as ‘harnessing extreme technical prowess-phenomenal stuff’. Recent performances include Turntable Trio with Evicshen and Maria Chávez at Counterflows and REWIRE festivals 2023, Donau and Archipel festivals 2024; new band The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (with saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, trumpeter/electronics Gabriele Mitelli and drummer Lukas Koenig) at Café Oto London 2023 and REWIRE 2024 (forthcoming gigs at Festival Meteo and Berlin Jazz Festival 2024); solo at Jazz a Poitiers, Dublin New Music, Faun Brno 2024; duos with Valentina Magaletti at Café Oto, Farida Amadou at BoZar Brussels, Mette Rasmussen at Only Connect Oslo 2024; forthcoming duos with Okkyung Lee, Evicshen, Will Guthrie, Edward George and Lasse Marhaug at Café Oto. Soloist with Frankfurt Radio Orchestra for the closing concert at IM Darmstadt 2023, Brussels Philharmonic for Forces In Motion 2023, Norwegian Radio Orchestra for Only Connect Oslo 2024, BBC SSO for Tectonics Glasgow 2024. Soloist with London Sinfonietta at HCMF 2023 and Taipei Biennial 2023 in a quartet with DJ Sniff, Rex Chen and DJ Slow Pitch Sound.

For her three-day residency Café Oto in November 2023, Mariam premiered three new projects: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, a string trio with Angharad Davies (violin), AtziMuramatsu (cello)and Semay Wu (cello), and a duo with fellow turntablist Edward George.

Mariam will work with members of Age Connected, building connections with those in old age and living with dementia to understand their relationship to music, their musical heritage, and having a dance. The building of relationships through conversation around music, and listening to recorded music will form the basis of a new composition and performance.

SHORTWAVECOLLECTIVE

SShortwave Collective is an international group of creative practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines (sound and radio art, activism, social science, media and artistic research) brought together by an interest in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. As a collective, we have a desire to learn together and to open a space to learn together-with-others as equal non-experts.

We spend time in each other’s company making, testing, listening and sharing; sometimes ‘failing’, but more often laughing our way into serendipitous results that lead us to new practices and new situated ways of listening.

Part of our feminist ethos is ‘learning through doing’. This is a way to de-mystify aspects of technology, which enables us to share our experiences more easily with each other, and with others. The collective’s approach aims to create an inclusive, collaborative, tech-based learning environment, one which acknowledges and attends to gendered education gaps and one that purposefully removes potential hurdles, such as unexplained components lists that assume knowledge.
Festival of sound and new music

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