Concrete turbulences

Nick Dunston is a composer based now in New-York after spending times in Berlin. An “indispensable player on the New York avant-garde" (New York Times). In between improvised, surrealistic, electroacoustic, phonetic games and concrete music. He collaborated with numerous artists as Marc Ribot, Dave Douglas, Vijay Iyer, Armirtha Kidambi, Elliott Sharp, Mary Halvorson and many others. 6 albums as leader, included a live at Roulette, and his last one  "colla voce", which is called by himself an Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera. Reminding for me, by the spirit but in another genre, the first dadaïst Soft Machine' LP, as well the 'no wave' DNA band of the 80s; styles, ideas, instrumentations, voices, way to generate sounds... 60 years later, everything had changed but the brain background remains the same.

'Anti-Opera’ is not an outright rejection of a particular medium, but an audacity to confront it, and  to subvert and turn it inside-out -'colla voce'  literally means ‘with the voice’. Moving with the voice, breathing with the voice, working together with the voice, all voices. There are four practitioners of it to whom I must express gratitude for the opportunity to work with directly: the Turkish singer Cansu Tannkulu, Sofia Jernberg, Isabel Crespo Pardo, and Friede Merz : all of them  adventurous vocalists with hyperpersonality.

"For me deciding who I want to be a part of a given project is in itself a compositional decision... and then building a world around that is when I really get into the meat and potatoes of it all." Nick Duntson (The Wire - july 24 issue)

 

 

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Nika Son works as a musician, artist, film composer and dj.
Her compositions are built from deformed and fragmented concrete sounds, interweaving with analogue synth lines, broken rhythms, rare voice scraps and filtered tape layers.

Her last album "Aslope" is build as a collage with spoken words, concrete sounds and extracts from various intallations, landing somewhere between the surrealist sound poetry of Nozomu Matsumoto, Arthur Lipsett’s abstracted film works and Michèle Bokanowski’s acclaimed scores for her husband Patrick.  

Another album "Drift"  (**) is capturing the essence of this cinematic encounter through sound, where Nika Son compositions allow the water itself to become a storyteller.

 

a complete review of "Aslope" in The Wire - july 24 issue

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