focus: default #11 – 16.11.2023 with Sydney Spann, Theodore Cale Schafer, and McGuire & Nat
Our upcoming event takes place on Thursday the 16th of November with performances by Sydney Spann, Theodore Cale Schafer and McGuire & Nat.
On Thursday the 16th of November, we return to the Grey Space in the Middle to present performances by sound artists and musicians Sydney Spann and Thedore Cale Schafer, following up the release of their latest LPs earlier this year. Furthermore we will present a special collaboration by the Hague-based composers Lawrence McGuire and Amarante Nat, who share an interest in exploring vocality by either fusion or juxtaposition of a synthetic with a natural voice.
In this focus newsletter, we would like to share with you a selection of works made by the artists set to perform at default#11.
** practical information:
•doors: 19.30 •first performance: 20.30
•tickets: 12,5 (student), 15 (general)*
*If your current situation means that you can’t afford that & you would still like to attend, you can send an e-mail to defaultdenhaag@gmail.com and we can sort something out with you.
Sydney Spann
Sydney Spann, originally from Baltimore, MD, is a sound artist and musician based in New York. They work with synthesis, electronics, and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in studio compositions and live performances. Their recent LP ‘Sending Up A Spiral Of’ was released with Recital in September 2023 and follows full-length albums on Reading Group and She Rocks!. They have performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, Bar Laika by e-flux, Performance Space New York, Center for Performance Research, Cafe OTO (London), KM28 (Berlin), and other venues throughout the US. They were a 2022 Artist in Residence at ISSUE Project Room (NY) and hold an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College.
Their latest release, encapsulating their body of work thus far, reacts to themes of family systems and care work. A 16-page artist pamphlet accompanied the LP, along with a digital PDF of ‘Sending Up A Spiral Of: A Musical Epistemology Made Through Care Work’.
Sydney states that people who have done care work —nannies, sex workers, therapists, nurses—, may posses their own musical knowledge, developed over time through particular modes of voicing practiced to achieve a desired outcome in their labor. Attending intimately to these ways of voicing and listening, and bringing them into a sound practice, could be a way to legitimize a less recognized kind of musical knowledge. ‘Sending Up A Spiral Of’ explores this unarticulated expression through sound and song, manifesting in expressed and disguised lullabies.
a selection of works include:
Sending Up A Spiral Of
(Recital, 2023)
Oceanic/E.L.M.
(Reading Group, 2021)
Attached Or Detached (partial disappearance)*
(ISSUE Project Room, 2021)
* This piece was part of ISSUE Project Room's 2021 With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood. It was premiered on April 29th 2021 and is archived on the ISSUE project Room website.
Theodore Cale Schafer
Theodore Cale Schafer is a musician. After a long history of producing cassettes on various labels and self-releasing audio files, Schafer has most recently released works including ‘Trust’ (Students of Decay), ‘Our Blood for .S’ (Daisart) and ‘It's Not a Skill, It’s a Curse’ (Longform Editions). Schafer’s music often confronts the tropes of ambient, drone, field recording and, recently also, chamber music to arrive at his own style of concrete music—fusing elements of auto-biography, an open ambivalence to instrumentation, and self-reflexive composition structures. Informed by his work as an audio engineer, his work combines digitally sourced audio and manipulated self-recordings to create its own unique fidelity—equally informed by Playstation OSTs, modern classical composition, confessional narrative, and spoken word. Recently, he has collaborated with Natalia Panzer, Angelo Harmsworth, and Claire Rousay, participated in the ‘Neo-Pastiche: Changes in American Music’ Festival at the Black Mountain College Museum, and curated the ‘Casualism’ mix series with Retreat Radio in Malmö, Sweden.
The arrangements that his two latest records consist of, released in short succession in June and July earlier this year, feel like they bear the mark of a change in scale in Theodore’s music; not abandoning the private, diaristic sensibility of his earlier work so much as imbuing it with a charged atmosphere of slow-blooming intensity. The music on ‘Trust’, tightrope-walks between drama and austerity, narrative and abstraction. ‘Our Blood for .S’, shows on its turn works that scale into both miniature and empyrean vistas - big skies and small rooms; hybridizing his penchant for documentation and “minor music” with a clear ear for writing for ensemble.
a selection of works include:
Our Blood For .S
(Daisart, 2023)
Trust
(Students of Decay, 2023)
Trouble In Mind
(self-released, 2021)
liner notes: ‘Text sourced from various "post-hardcore" bands that I like.
Voices: Angelina Nonaj, Natalia Panzer, Matthew Sage, Me’
Other releases include Fingerspit (2022), It’s Not a Skill, it’s a Curse (2021), Patience (2019), It Isn’t So Bad To Be Alone (2020), FaceTime (2017), Family Columbidae (with Matthew Sage, 2017), Tucked Behind Your Ears Like Wings Part 2 (with Angelo Harmsworth, 2020) and Japanese Whisper (2016).
McGuire & Nat
McGuire & Nat is a collaboration between The Hague based composer Lawrence McGuire and vocalist and composer Amarante Nat. For this special occasion, they will present a revision of their performance ‘Enokian Soupe'.
Their collaboration started in early 2023 and is based on a shared interest in exploring vocality by either fusion or juxtaposition of a synthetic with a natural voice. These perceptual fusions are investigated through various phonemic and non-speech materials. During this continuous process of morphing the synthetic with the natural, hybrids of a voice emerge, resulting in a mental image richer than the sum of its parts.
a selection of information and works from both artists:
Lawrence McGuire is a composer, curator, and artistic developer based in The Hague and Brussels. His work can be considered as a sonic alloy of computer music, sound poetry and various vocal practices that either get presented in a live or fixed-media setting. He mostly produces music under his moniker hogobogobogo. He also co-curates the internet label ‘In Unison’ on which he released the EP 'pepsi/coke: An Electronic Sound Poetry Transmission' earlier this year, which was premiered at the first instalment of default den haag, back in November 2022.
pepsi/coke - An Electronic Sound Poetry Transmission
(i.u, 2023)
Everything got smaller except the trees
(i.u, 2022)
Amarante Nat is a composer and vocalist exploring sound and timbre through delicate instrumentation and approaching harmony as a sound phenomenon, form in relationship to the transcendence of space and motion as a function of time through the unfolding of a plurality of lines. She mainly composes for acoustic instruments such as organ, brass, voices, strings and orchestra.