focus: default #5 – 20.05.2023 with Ulla, Nexcyia & Lucie Nezri
Our next event is happening on Saturday the 20th of May with performances by Ulla, Nexcyia & Lucie Nezri.
Our upcoming event is happening this Saturday and therefore we would like to share with you a selection of works made by the artists set to perform. This focus newsletter highlights works by Lucie Nezri, Nexcyia and Ulla.
Lucie Nezri
Lucie Nezri is a composer, artist, and performer born in Hyères (FR), currently based between The Hague (NL) and Berlin (DE). Her work bridges different contexts and disciplines pertaining to musical composition, tuning theory, computer science, and, at times, choreography. In her music, Nezri combines algorithmic techniques of composition based on probabilities, and a care for harmony and the sensory presence of sounds.
Lucie’s works have been performed in a diversity of venues such as OCCII (Amsterdam), GRM (Paris), Orgelpark (Amsterdam), Abbaye de Royaumont (Paris), GMEA (Albi), Studio Loos, (Den Haag), PAS (Berlin).
At default#5, she will present a few electronic music experiments that were the starting point for composing pieces for acoustic instruments: violin, harpsichord, guitar duo, string ensemble. Some of these experiments indeed became parts of actual pieces for acoustic instrument(s), some remained electronic studies, and others are still in progress, existing in her imagination and having the potential to eventually stand on their own.
Lucie shared with us about these pieces: “in general, what i was testing in those pieces was questions about rational tuning systems. i was experimenting with different ways of drawing trajectories in these rational tuning systems or 'harmonic spaces' by using probabilistic processes applied to the microscopic level (stochastic synthesis) or on a more macro level (melodies).”
a selection of highlighted works include:
for blandine & maciej
(self-released, 2021-2022)
for blandine & maciej is a piece for harpsichord & computer consisting of a probabilistic transition between two very close tunings. One tuning is played on the upper manual of the harpsichord, the second one on the lower manual of the harpsichord. For Lucie, the piece raises questions about transcription, interpretation & performance; and about the merging of algorithmic/probabilistic and early music logics. The composition is inspired by Couperin's 17th century unmeasured preludes notations, in which the duration of each note is left to the performer. This is notated by using long groups of whole notes, that are connected by long curves, as you can see at this example below.
for experiencers
(self-released, 2022)
for experiencers is a piece for ensemble (harp, guitar, cello, violin, trombone, alto saxophone, two flutes, accordeon, percussions) & electronics and was commissioned by GMEA — Centre National de Création Musicale d'Albi-Tarn (FR) as part of their project experiences.
Similar to for blandine & maciej, for experiencers consists of a probabilistic transition between two very close tunings and is based on an unmeasured notation. Lucie writes about this piece on her website:
the performers were responsible for continuously re-creating some momentum in pacing, variety and expressivity in their way of playing, both on an individual and a collective level. most importantly, they had to listen to each other. the piece thus depends on a synergy between the different instrumentalists.
for edgars
(self-released, 2021)
Considering music primarily as an experience to be shared, nezri composes her pieces as invitations to 'play' and dedicated to loved ones. The work above is dedicated to and played by her friend Edgars Rubenis.
for edgars is composed for electric guitar and stand-alone/live computer program for sine tones. Situated in the lineage of computer music & drone-music, for edgars combines considerations of randomness in music and tuning systems based on the harmonic series. Working independently, the interactions between the guitar and the electronics are never taken for granted. Throughout the piece, nodes of resonance are continuously and delicately being built, discovered, and interrupted between the computer, the performer and the listener, in such a way that Lucie’s music evokes fragile modes of perception.
other works include once racing ceased, essentially the old 166 renumbered (2019) and untitled something for two organs (2019) Lucie also contributed to the 2022 Free Percussion/Water compilation of Italian sound-art/improv label tss tapes.
Nexcyia
Nexcyia is an African-American/French sound artist and experimental ambient musician based between London and Paris. Nexcyia aims to create sonic experiences akin to an augmented reality through sound collages, installations and manipulated video work. Working with found sound, Nexcyia weaves together harsh sound design and swooping soundscapes into works that bridge many moods, emotions and places through noise, granular synthesis, textures and rhythms.
Recent audio works include 4U&4ME (2023, self-released), Origin (2021, Takuroku), Crawl EP (2020, Alien James) and the two self-released singles hydro (2022) & motion man (2020). He has performed in various venues/festivals such as the Barbican Centre, Cafe OTO, Primavera Sound (Barcelona), IKLECTIK and more.
a selection of highlighted works include:
4U&4ME (self-released, 2023)
In an interview in The Wire Magazine (July 2022), Nexcyia stated about his relationship with submerged listening “As a kid I could never fall asleep without my headphones. I remember falling asleep listening to Jay-Z and Kid Cudi: it became ambient to me.”
Informed by these submerged listening modes, 4U&4ME reveals Nexciya's soundcraft, meditating on place and time by wandering through floating layers. His works can feel both soothing and alienating, with his latest release leaning more towards the former. On his latest release, Nexcyia balances between the real and the imagined, through synth swells, muffled field recordings, car honks and subtle moving textures.
hydro (2022) motion man (2020)
We would like to also highlight the two singles above, which preceded 4U&4ME but feel as if they could be accompaniments. Wandering through augmented realities with a prominent, captivating rhythmic character, even more pronounced on the 2022 single Hydro, the singles create something undulating and haunting.
audiovisual work:
Besides music, Nexcyia also has a practice in fine art and research. Here he focuses on the notions of alienation and otherness in the African-American experience and explores this through sculpture, installation, painting, sound, and moving image. Nexcyia is drawn to what he calls “Afro-surrealism: focusing on the now, rather than the future. What’s happening in the world sociopolitically right now.” (The Wire Magazine, July 2022). For him, Afro-surrealism is about the actual lived experience of black people, but includes elements of the metaphysical or the mystical that are present within the culture. This exploration started with Texas 2005 (2021) which naturally culminated into a series of videos such as Origin and Human (un_fold). The videos use the same footage capturing the notion of a multiverse – “I spent the better part of the year composing and mixing the music while collecting archival family footage from my family in Texas and Los Angeles.”
Texas 2005 (self-released film, 2021)
In 2021, the film Origin succeeded Texas 2005, exploring belonging, alienation and amnesia and accompanied the EP with the same name, released on Cafe Oto’s TAKUROKU. “Nexcyia has chopped and screwed his own past into a disorienting blur”, wrote Rob Turner in The Wire Magazine in their July 2022 issue. In the same article Nexcyia explains, “My family are scattered between LA and Paris, but we hold reunions in Texas. The video looks at what it means to live in a Black household, unable to get out of a city that’s quite derelict. The footage is inverted, in slo-mo and distorted, but this is what we shared, and what we experienced: it’s a kind of collective memory.” The film speaks to those who have been othered, and faced with haunting memories, while also aiming to narrate a sonic foretelling of the future. It can be found here.
Other releases include Red Water (2020), Replica (2019) and Crawl EP (2020).
Ulla
Ulla (Ulla Straus) is an artist by ways of Kansas and California, but currently based in Philadelphia. She has released music on an array of labels such as Quiet Time, Experiences Ltd, West Mineral Ltd, Motion Ward, BAKK, and Lillerne Tapes and collaborated with a number of other artists, including Perila, Pontiac Streator, Exael, and Ben Bondy.
From 2017 onwards, Ulla has been involved in a vast amount of unique releases, both in different collaborative settings as releasing her acclaimed solo-recordings. Since then, she has positioned herself as a pivotal figure in the contemporary ambient scene, moving from her early subtle undulating ambient waves (see Big Room, Tumbling Towards A Wall, Floor and the existential inside means inside me) towards her saxophone & guitar driven compositions, as can be heard on ‘Limitless Frame’ (Motion Ward, 2021) and ‘Hope Sonata’ (Longform Editions, 2022). Her latest record foam, released on Berlin’s 3XL in the end of 2022, brought a fresh glitchy sound of fluttering, sample-driven bliss, pushing further her recognizable warm, intimate and personal sound.
a selection of Ulla’s works include:
foam
(3XL, 2022)
foam, her seventh solo release in five years time, is unlike anything she has released before. With fourteen brief, mostly fragmented songs, Ulla juxtaposes romantic, stuttering cut-up voice, chopped samples, piano and guitar. They are shaped into more sturdier structures than in her earlier work, but the form of both the segments and the record as a whole, entails at the same time a certain instability and uncertainty. The evocations of shoegazy, broken ambient-r&b songs, are interrupted and alternated by more whole, instrumental sections that almost feel like playful and simple melodic exercises using one single brush. The record as a whole is glitchy, smudgy and digital, and by moments alienating and turbulent, yet Ulla’s latest effort feels very human, characteristically warm and real.
hope sonata
(Longform Editions, 2022)
Throughout her whole discography, Ulla’s elegant compositions tend to be stripped down to their essence, everything balanced out, leaving room and space while transmitting a kind of comfort. Music critic Joshua Minsoo Kim once wrote that Ulla’s best works “emanate serenity [...] they seem like they’re doing nothing but simply existing. [...] This effect recalls that special feeling of being so close to someone that their mere presence is enough to provide solace”.1
While this is surely present in the earlier, more synthetic side of Ulla’s sound explorations, Hope Sonata seems to invite you even closer to her music and, this time, also to her process. Released via Longform Editions in February, 2022, it marked a different approach to time, structure and material. The twenty three and a half minute track sounds like we’re listening more to her recording than to her recordings, containing four guitar and saxophone driven sections, accompanied by some sparks of fainted ambience and traces of the space it inhabits.
Almost like a lullaby, Hope Sonata is like an open window to an early evening breeze, coming to gently calm you down after a long, difficult day.
artist notes:
saying goodbye leaves a residue.
in the presence of intangible things;
lies the longing that gives me hope.
inside means inside me
(Boomkat Editions, 2020)
Originally released as a tape as part of Boomkat’s Documenting Sound series, which started in 2020, enfolding in parallel to tumultuous months of quarantine & covid. ‘inside means inside me’ was later re-released on vinyl in 2021. Pieced together from airspun recordings made in Philadelphia during spring 2020, this existential diptych slowly floats through interrupted conversations, soft ambience and dreamy summer night nostalgia.
to be in a cage, connected by wires, to be out of the cage connected by dreams.
Recordings of candid conversations, a walk to the river, a call from my mom.
Other solo highlights include Limitless Frame (2021), Tumbling Towards A Wall (2020), Floor (2017) and Big Room (2019).
Our favorite collaborative projects include: no ice can be found (as part of The Blessed Kitty, 2020), blue heater (perila & ulla, 2020) and Silence Box 1 (perila and ulla, 2020), LOG ET3RNAL (as part of LOG, 2020) and the debut album of virtualdemonlaxative (2020), a digital grindcore project formed together with Pontiac Streator, exael and Special Guest DJ.
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https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ulla-limitless-frame/