JGT in Kaliningrad, Russia for Sound Art festival

JG Thirlwell will be in Kaliningrad, Russia from May 24-26 2012 for the Sound Around Kaliningrad Festival, an International Festival of Experimental Music and Sound Art. JG will have a new six channel sound installation on display, entitled  “Otitis Interna”. In addition he will do a performance and lecture.

Describing “Otitis Interna”, Thirlwell said : “When I was presented with the image of the room in Kaliningrad where my sound installation would be housed, I felt it evoked a sonic landscape of wood and organic matter, of work and anxiety, of memory and loss trapped in the grain and the walls. I sought to examine and paint these ideas with sound. I sourced and arranged a sonic palette into a six channel spatial environment/composition of musique concrete to convey these ideas into the space. Adding blacklight as the sole source of illumination in the room added a twist of disorientation which is meant to invoke an x-ray.”

Other participants in the Festival this year include Jacob Kirkegaard, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Jana Winderen, Kiwa, Greta Christensen & Camilla Sørensen a.k.a. Vinylterror and Horror,Mats Lindstrom, Robert Piotrowicz, Vladimir Tarasov, Maksims Shentelevs, Hanna Hartman, John Grzinich and Jelena Glazova, as well as Kalinigrad musicians Kratong, Danil Akimov, Nikodim, Sergey Sorokin, Kraynost, Not a mind, StirliTZ and more. The festival will take place in many sites around the city, including the Kaliningrad Zoo. There will be concerts, performances, installations, workshops, screenings, audio broadcasts, interventions in public spaces and an open record library.

Manorexia European Tour Dates Postponed

We regret to announce that due to severe mismanagement most of the Manorexia European tour has been postponed.

Manorexia will be playing the following dates
April 12  ATP presents Union Chapel, London
April 13  Roadburn Festival, Tilburg, Holland
April 14  Extrapool, Nijmegen, Holland

The ensemble will be Angharad Davies (violin), Tim Parkinson (piano), Dan Gresson (percussion), Jessica Cox (cello), Rachel Steadman (violin) and Nozomi Cohen (viola), with the composer, JG Thirlwell, on laptop

The other shows in the tour will be rescheduled for a later date. Sorry for any inconvenience and disappointment.

Nino Ferrer Revisited

Optical Sound, the label that brought you the Hydroze Plus 10″, has released an album of interpretations of the seminal late singer Nino Ferrer on April 2, 2012. Entitled Objets Noirs et Choses Carrees : Nino Ferrer revisited, the album feature JG Thirlwell’s rendition of Ferrer’s classic La Rua Madureira. Other artists covering Ferrer on the album include Norscq, Étienne Charry, The Garçon, Bernard Szajner, Complot, Klimperei, Molypop, Les Hautsdeplerfond, Les Denise Glaser, La Kuizine, David Fenech, Cocoon, Toupidak Limonade, Non Finito Orchestra. Palo Alto featuring Laurent Pernice and Lefdup, Lefdup and Lefdup featuring Arthur Ferrari and Charlie Cole.

Nino Ferrer was a popular French singer who began his career in the mid 1960’s. He committed suicide in 1998.

JGT meets Zola Jesus at the Guggenheim

JG Thirlwell is working with Zola Jesus on a performance of her works at the Guggenheim Museum on May 10, 2012. The performance by Zola Jesus will feature string quartet and electronics as a departure from her regular instrumentation, and JG Thirlwell has composed the string arrangements for the concert and will act as musical director. The string players will be the Mivos Quartet, with Manorexia alumni Elena Moon Park guest substituting for Mivos’ Olivia DePrato. The performance will be part of Divine Ricochet, a Guggenheim Music Series.

Manorexia London show announced

JG Thirlwell’s Manorexia will play a rare London show on April 12 2012 at Union Chapel. The show is being presented by All Tomorrow’s Parties in conjunction with the First Contact agency. The ensemble will include previous Manorexia UK stalwarts Angharad Davies, Tim Parkinson and Dan Gresson, along with former alumni Jessica Cox and Rachel Steadman. The instrumentation of the ensemble is two violins, viola, cello, piano, concert percussion and laptop. Tickets are on sale now via Gigantic, See Tickets and HMV. More European Manorexia dates will be announced soon. The latest Manorexia album is the acclaimed Dinoflagellate Blooms, which is available in stereo and 5.1 surround sound .

Mivos Quartet Play Thirlwell

On Feb 29 2012, this extra day of the year, Mivos Quartet will be hosting their first fund-raising event at the gorgeous new Issue Project Room space on 110 Livingston, Brooklyn. Mivos will play three sets, presenting works by JG Thirlwell, Annie Gosfield, Tristan Perich, Patrick Higgins, Alex Mincek and Elliot Sharp. They will also be joined by Ned Rothenberg on clarinets, Timucin Sahin on guitar and vocalist/composer Sasha Siem, performing their own works.

The fundraiser is aimed at covering Mivos Quartet’s travel and lodging to Darmstadt in Germany this year.

They will perform a string quartet version of JG Thirlwell’s classic Manorexia track, “Zithromax Jitters“. Mivos Quartet includes Manorexia / Steroid Maximus alumni Olivia DePrato and Isabel Castelvi, along with Joshua Modney and Victor Lowrie.

The Cinema of Transgression exhibition in Berlin

YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is the first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression. The films are being displayed as an installation, and many of the key players from the movement will be making appearances, leading talks and discussions.

The “Cinema of Transgression” a term coined by Nick Zedd, describes a loose congregation of filmmakers in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980’s, including Zedd, Richard Kern, Cassandra Stark and Tommy Turner. JG Thirlwell scored many of Kern’s films, as well as contributing to the films of Turner and Stark.

To quote the exhibition catalog : “Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from the Lower East Side in New York went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low budget films reveal social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the films contain strident analyses of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. Even though the movement has remained largely unknown, the Cinema of Transgression has been a significant influence for later generations of artists.”

February 19, 2012 – April 9, 2012

KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststr. 69
D-10117 Berlin

DJ Food album featuring JGT out now on Ninja Tune

The new DJ Food “The Search Engine” album is released this week in the US on Ninja Tune. This stunning album includes the track“Prey” featuring vocals by JG Thirlwell. The album will also feature Thirlwell compadre Matt Johnson, on a DJ food cover of a The The track “Giant”. It’s available from Amazon, ITunes, Bleep and other fine retailers. If you look hard enough you might even find the deluxe limited comic book version which contains the album on CD and a flexi-disc. Check out Strictly Kev / DJ Food’s incredible blog.

Thirlwell's installation works with Anne Katrine Senstad

JG Thirlwell has been working in an ongoing series of collaborations with Anne Senstad over the last eighteen months.Her video projections are site specific installations merging and intervening with architecturally unique spaces such as St Brigid’s deconsecrated Cathedral and The Locker Plant in Marfa, Texas, and even out amongst nature as in her projections in Xilitla, Mexico.
Their first piece together was Color Kinaesthesia, where JG created a four channel audio work to accompany Senstad’s color and light video projection of the same name. A reworking of the audio, simply titled “Kinaesthesia”, appears on the Manorexia album Dinoflagellate Blooms  in stereo and surround sound. For a further color and light meditation, Kinaesthesia for Saint Brigid, JG made a four channel reworking of the Manorexia classic “Chloe Don’t Know I’m Alive”.  In a further iteration, The Locker Plant Projections also uses the “Chloe” soundtrack, and consists of a filmed projection of the Color Kinaesthesia piece, reprojected onto Donald Judd‘s famous building in Marfa, TX , The Locker Plant.

Senstad’s latest piece is The Sugarcane Labyrinth . This is a film document of an agricultural Land Art project in which Senstad leased some farmland in Louisiana and grew a field of sugarcane. She then chopped a maze out of the dense growth, and documented the entire process on film, including leasing a helicopter and filming it from above. Thirlwell composed an original score for this work.

The works have exhibited at Thisisnotagallery in Buenos Aires, Utsikten Kunstsenter in Norway, St Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Stiftelsen 3,14 in Bergen, The Museum of Modern art of Ukraine and elsewhere.

The Locker Plant Projections will travel to Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in April.

“The exhibition The Infinity of Color represents Anne Katrine Senstad’s new body of work focused on light, color and sound. She has created a labyrinthian space of projections and sound that examine the phenomenology and the notions of sensorial aesthetics and experiences of light, color, sound, ocular perceptions, spatial relations and awareness of the process of perception through multi channel projections and the dimensional properties of surround sound. The piece is meditative, pulsating and hypnotic in its simplicity of light, color and sound environments.” – from exhibition catalog, Thisisnotagallery, Buenos Aires.

Thirlwell cuddles Eno's Warm Jets

JG Thirlwell will appear at a concert recreating Brian Eno’s seminal album Here Come The Warm Jets  on Jan 8, 2012 at Joe’s Pub in NYC. The album will be lovingly performed by such luminaries as Joan Wasser (Joan as Policewoman) and Jim Sclavunos (Bad Seeds, Grinderman) with support from Vernon Reid (Living Color) and Travis Morrison (The Dismemberment Plan), Sohrab Habibion (Obits), Paul Duncan (Warm Ghost) and many more TBA. The already sold-out evening will be hosted by John Schaefer from WNYC. The evening is produced by Rob Christiansen, who transcribed the album and will also perform. JGT will provide a small electronic interlude at the end of the song “Dead Finks Don’t Talk”.