On the evening of Friday, November 5th, we are delighted to present via our Twitch channel live-stream and prerecorded performances of drone/noise/dub/experimental electronic musician Nigel Ayers (UK), interdisciplinary artist/composer Pauchi Sakaki (Peru), producer/composer/multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid’s (ORD) Fire-Toolz project, experimental composer and computational scientist Danielle Rager, and Jeff Central (CMH) and Chris Phinney’s (TN) experimental electronic music project Skull Vacuum. The live-stream will begin promptly at 8:00pm. Donations of $5-$20 via paypal.me/thefusefactory are warmly accepted.
Our Frequency Fridays 2021-2022 season is supported by the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, the Columbus Foundation, and the SBA.
About the artists:
Since the late 1970s, Nigel Ayers (b. 1957, UK) has cut a bracing, subversive path through the contemporary underground, bridging DIY industrial enthusiasms with multimedia experimentation to form a singular body of work. Co-founder of the groups The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions (along with brother Daniel Ayers and then-partner Caroline K), Ayers has been a contributor to and proponent of industrial music’s high-water marks, his Sterile Records imprint disseminating not only NE sides but also defining work from Lustmord, SPK, Maurizio Bianchi, and others between 1979 and 1986. In 1987, Ayers inaugurated the Earthly Delights label with the now-canonical Caroline K recording Now Wait For Last Year, and the imprint has since served as Ayers’s primary outlet for releasing new work, whether as Magnetizdat, Spanner Thru Ma Beatbox, or Nocturnal Emissions, a going concern to this day. Earlier drone/noise/dub/experimental electronic countered the nihilistic and serial murder / fascist obsessive tendencies from so many contemporaries. Nigel Ayers continues to transmit a socialist abstract dissonant (sometimes) transgressive aesthetic.
Pauchi Sakaki‘s interdisciplinary approach integrates musical composition with the creation of multimedia performances, the application of new technologies, and the development of self-designed instruments. She was selected for The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative by composer Philip Glass, the Ibermúsicas grant for sound composition with new technologies at CMMAS in Mexico, the Goethe-Institute’s artist residency in Brazil and Berlin, Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination Fellowship, and the Prince Claus Fund. Commissions include ACO/Carnegie Hall, Silkroad Ensemble, Pan American Games Opening Ceremony Lima 2019, among others. An active film scorer, “Pauchi Sasaki’s effective scores” [Variety 2015] are featured in more than 30 feature and short films, having received four “Best Original Score” international awards. Her work has been presented at international venues and festivals as the Tokyo Experimental Festival, Venice Biennale, Carnegie Hall, Cannes Film Festival, Walt Disney Hall, MET, The Kitchen, Gran Teatro Nacional del Perú, Festival Cervantino, the Art Basel Miami week, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Over the past two decades, producer/composer/multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid has willed a vast ecosystem of music into existence at a rate that somehow seems to intensify as time goes on. Various solo monikers, collaborations, and band memberships stand as monuments in the landscape, focusing in on certain styles associated with each project — the Weather Channel jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast, or the hazy vapor nostalgia of Mindspring Memories, to give a few of many examples. The music of Marcloid’s flagship project Fire-Toolz sits as the bottomless pit in the center of the lush environment, drawing ideas and signifiers from all corners into its depths. In keeping with Fire-Toolz’s role as the outlet for Marcloid’s most overloaded and audacious compositional gambits, Eternal Home enters the catalog as the longest and most ambitious Fire-Toolz album to date. Clocking in at close to 80 minutes, Marcloid improbably maintains the attention to detail and the crushing density that has come to define Fire-Toolz from its inception, treating the expanded canvas as an opportunity to both dive deeper into genre-obliterating chaos and to tighten the reins around more direct, even accessible styles of songwriting. The album joins the Hausu Mountain roster of Fire-Toolz releases including Drip Mental (HAUSMO55, 2017), Skinless X-1 (HAUSMO73, 2018) and Rainbow Bridge (HAUSMO99, 2020). While Eternal Home builds on the omnidirectional compositional styles that Marcloid explored on those previous LPs, the album gains power and momentum from its sheer overwhelming mass, becoming a statement of purpose that showcases all the reliable strengths and unpredictable left turns that Fire-Toolz continues to refine with each new work.
Danielle Rager is an experimental composer and computational scientist. Her solo music project {arsonist} collages raucous electronics that are algorithmically manipulated using tools like TidalCycles with orchestral textures and her own violin performances. Together these elements kindle a unique symphonic form of computer music that The Wire Magazine praised as “digital soundscapes that step into the fantastical.” Rager’s neuroscience research career drives her interest in multisensory integration and creation of real-time, immersive audio-visual experiences using openFrameworks and GLSL. Prior to a recent move to Portland, OR, she co-directed the Pittsburgh-based online radio platform and A/V event production collective Cosmic Sound with Kevin Bednar.
Skull Vacuum is the duo of long-time collaborators Chris Phinney (Memphis, TN) and Jeff Chenault (Columbus, OH). Both are 30+ year veterans of the homemade music cassette culture underground, with Chris having run the Harsh Reality Music tapes label and Jeff with the I.T.N. label, which morphed into the Exoteque Music label. While Jeff and Chris have known each other since 1986 and have recorded four albums together, Skull Vacuum is their latest effort. Their first release Burn Sees Dark was released on CD by Exoteque Music in 2020.This livestream performance will be the first under the Skull Vacuum name. Jeff has assembled the original tracks by Chris Phinney and will be manipulating them live. Interspersed throughout the set will be forthcoming tracks from a long-lost fourth collaboration between the sonic duo that has been specially prepared for tonight’s performance.