focus: default#18 - 16.11.2024 with performances by Tzu Ni, Nick Klein & Makoto Oshiro, lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright)
In this focus newsletter, we would like to share with you more information on our upcoming program
default#18, Saturday, 16th of November, The Grey Space in The Middle, Paviljoensgracht 20-24, 2512 BP Den Haag
Tzu Ni, Nick Klein & Makoto Oshiro, lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright)
On Saturday, 16th of November, the sound series returns to The Grey Space in The Middle celebrating the special occasion of our two year anniversary featuring performances by Tzu Ni, Nick Klein & Makoto Oshiro, as well as lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright) - read more information on the performances below. This event will be accompanied by freely accessible talks by Nick Klein & Makoto Oshiro and Paul Abbott in the Central Library the day before - more information can be found here.
doors open at 19:30, performances start at 20:00
Tickets | €12.5 (student) / €15 (general)* You can buy tickets online or at the door (when still available)
*in case your current financial situation does not allow you to visit the event, but you are keen on coming, you can mail to info@defaultdenhaag.com and we can find a solution.
Tzu Ni
Tzu Ni is a sound and installation artist from Taiwan who has recently relocated to The Hague. In her work, she finds poetic junctions between spatial and sonic installation work, field recordings, the acoustics of objects, and computer-generated noises. In her latest 4-track release ‘4 methods of loci’ on Anne-F Jacques’ presses précaires label, she brings the previously noted techniques into play with a curious side-product interest in sound materiality - recordings of manufacturing sites, processed crackling of heated porcelain and auditory translations of wind shear, to exemplify a few. All bound together by her interest in the relations of “space to sound, sound to body, body to machine, machine to poetry, poetry to space”.
In her work, she aims to reassess the relationship between sound, gender, and space. She creates settings or environments where a listener or viewer might enter into an interstice, a momentary isolation; an intensely perceptible frame of one’s mind and body.
Nick Klein & Makoto Oshiro
The duo of Nick Klein & Makoto Oshiro will be presenting their work with Oshiro’s self-made electronic tools, such as self-oscillating amps, and radio transmitters-receivers working in relation to Klein’s synths and effects within a reciprocal system navigated by both. The performance follows up their last year’s series of shows, as well as their release ’Spaced’ on Superpang, with their collaborative work tending to be both dynamic and physical.
Throughout the last year both of the artists have been a part of exciting releases in their own right, such as Nick Klein’s, Adam Cambell’s and Diego Behncke’s collaborative record '2 RECORDINGS’ – exclusively available in limited amounts of CDR’s via Seoul’s Rope Editions – and Makoto Oshiro’s ‘Stacked’, as the final instalment of the ENXPL project (shared between labels Enmossed and Psychic Liberation), displaying a prominent usage of Oshiro’s 𝘬𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘪-𝘬𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘴 - small electro-mechanical devices generating sound by rapidly opening and closing relays.
Makoto Oshiro is a Berlin-Tokyo based performer and artist. He has developed an artistic practice spanning across sound, installation, field recording, language, instrument design, to name a few, for over a decade. In live performances, he uses self-made instruments based on electronic devices, everyday materials, and junk. His installation work handles sound as a physical and auditory phenomenon, and focuses on characteristics such as vibration and interference. Makoto has among others collaborated with Ken Ikeda, Rie Nakajima, Yan Jun, Tetuzi Akiyama, suzueri, and extensively with Takahiro Kawaguchi. He is also a member of the live installation / performance group The Great △(夏の大△) with Takahiro Kawaguchi and Satoshi Yashiro, and runs the label Basic Function.
Nick Klein, currently located in Berlin, is an artist working in sound and art and sometimes (begrudgingly) sound art with a lean towards the social potential in those modalities as they interact. Klein has recorded a large amount of music for tape, CD, digital file, and vinyl editions for music labels around the world, as well as running his own amorphous label project PL (primitive languages, Psychic Liberation, etc). Concurrently, to the best of his ability, he has shown work in visual art contexts. Klein is uninterested in the prohibitive ideological tropes and circumstances that both contexts offer, and focuses the intent of his work on trying to see what productive energy comes from the friction between the two. Klein likes loud volume, cooking, offline community building, records, bars, synthesizers, and comedy. He has operated a monthly radio show on Montez Press Radio since its inception, and is spending 2023-2024 developing a monthly invitational program at the Volksbühne Roter Salon. Klein has collaborated in various capacities and medial materializations with Wilted Woman, Audrey Chen, Hugo Esquinca, Jean-Louis Huhta, Philip Maier and many more.
lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright)
lll人 (pronounced /el/), the trio consisting of Daichi Yoshikawa (homemade assemblage electro-acoustic feedback systems), Paul Abbott (real and imaginary drums) and Seymour Wright (actual and potential saxophone). Still finding, twisting and hammering out an expanding musical universe balanced only by its own logics – lll人 performances are consistent radical negotiations of the emotional, physical, and social energies of the environments they sound out. Last March, lll人 released their new 2-CD record ‘VICTOR’ via Infant Tree, containing two recordings from their shows at Cafe Oto in 2016.
The trio has been active since 2012 and has played a great number of shows in London – where the project was initially established – as well as internationally. After a pause, the trio got together on July 2024 in London to play their first concert in years, and will bring their distinctive, by moments dense and extreme, but always detailed and precise performance style to the 18th edition of default.
lll人’s recent album is a part of many outstanding records from 2024 featuring either Seymour Wright or Paul Abbott or both, including X-Ray Hex Tet’s s/t record on Reading Group, involving some of the most adventurous artists in and around London’s contemporary music scene – Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott, Crystabel Riley, Pat Thomas, Billy Steiger, and Black Audio Film Collective founding member Edward George; ‘YESYESPEAKERSYES’ by Kavain Wayne Space & XT, Seymour's and Paul's collaboration with the Chicago Footwork founder also known as RP Boo; أحمد [Ahmed] (Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip, and Antonin Gerbal)’s ‘Wood Blues’ and ‘Giant Beauty’; Paul’s solo release ‘Knees, Elbow Bag’ via Party Perfect!!!; and yPLO’s – Paul and Michael Speers – ‘ob TRU’.
Daichi Yoshikawa is a Japanese sound artist based in Paris. Yoshikawa's distinct sound comes from feedback systems generated between homemade assemblages of speakers, contact microphones, and various found objects. Developing his ability as an improviser through years of attendance at AMM co-founder Eddie Prevost’s weekly workshops in London, Yoshikawa nurtured the facility of wielding electronic feedback as an instrument capable of both dialogic potential and genuine musicality in a group setting. Yoshikawa’s electroacoustic practice creates brutalist landscapes of sound from the space between noise and silence. Yoshikawa has collaborated with Jean–Luc Guionnet, Joel Grip, Antonin Gerbal, Samo Kutin, Lee Patterson, and Rie Nakajima.
Seymour Wright is a saxophonist. His work is about the creative, situated friction of learning, ideas, people and the saxophone – music, history and technique – actual and potential. Seymour's solo music is documented on three collections - ‘Seymour Wright of Derby’ (2008), ‘Seymour Writes Back’ (2015) and ‘Is This Right?’ (2017), and last year’s fourth 4-CD solo record ‘RITES (Seymour Wright alto-saxophone solos 2003-2023)’. Other current projects include: XT (the duo he forms with Paul Abbott); XT with Pat Thomas; XT with Anne Gillis; @xcrswx with Crystabel Riley; abaria with Ute Kanngiesser; GUO with Daniel Blumberg; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble; a trans-atlantic duet with Andy Guthrie, and, with Jean-Luc Guionnet a project addressing an imaginary lacunae in Aby Warburg's “Atlas Mnemosyne”.
Paul Abbott is a musician and drummer. He plays with real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. He explores music as an ecology: in which the interaction of sounds, signs and the physical body grow real and imaginary music. His work is often concerned with creating practical and fictional structures to facilitate improvisation and experimental musical play. Besides earlier mentioned projects, recent and ongoing collaborations include: F.R.David, "very good*" & Rosmarie with Will Holder; film sound for Keira Greene; Rian Treanor Duo; The Creaking Breeze Ensemble with Nathaniel Mackey and performances with Cara Tolmie. In 2022 he completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Florian Hecker and Nikki Moran, synthesising the rhythmic emergence of sound and sign through embodied drum kit performance and creative writing. He was a co-founder and co-editor of Cesura//Acceso journal for music, politics and poetics.
default#18 is financially supported by The Municipality of The Hague and the Konrad Boehmer Foundation.
About Us
default den haag is a non-profit curatorial initiative focused on the presentation of creative contemporary sound and performance in the Hague, curating and organizing their nomadic sound series with an international focus on experimental music and sound art performances since 2022, next to occasionally hosting accompanying talks and lectures. - read more