MUDAS | MUSEU DE ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA

HELM (UK)

London-based experimentalist Luke Younger (a.k.a HELM) crafts powerful, innovative electronic soundscapes that take inspiration from the unlikeliest of sources. Younger’s music, while sometimes dark, never sets out to shock. A musician with over a decade’s experience in noise and experimental music, Younger’s sonic worlds have been getting ever more absorbing recently. His latest PAN album, Olympic Mess, is probably his best, hovering elegantly between industrial gloom and balmy ambience.

Lakker (UK/DE)

Lakker is the project of Ian McDonnell and Dara Smith, two producers who started out as overheated noise-blast collagists on their first album, 2007’s Ruido, and then spent a few years producing straight-ahead techno 12”s for labels like Blueprint and their current home, R&S. Since their return, in 2011, Lakker have become expert storytellers. They still wear their influences on their sleeves—techno, breakbeats, 20th century avant-garde electronic music, industrial, ambient—but the music now gels in ways that it didn’t before. Combining face-smashing electronics with choir-like vocals and ambient found sounds, this Irish duo breathe humanity into scorched-earth tracks that would sound right at home alongside a frenzied Mad Max death race.

Sonic Boom (UK)

Peter Kember, more usually known as Sonic Boom, and was a founding member of alternative rock band Spacemen 3. Since the disbandment of Spacemen 3 in 1991, Kember has recorded as Spectrum and E.A.R. (Experimental Audio Research) – the two projects have existed in parallel, and recordings under both names occasionally only feature Kember. Kember has also played and collaborated with a number of artists, including Stereolab and Yo La Tengo, and performed production duties on MGMT’s 2010 album Congratulations and Panda Bear’s albums Tomboy and Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper.

Zeena Parkins (US)

Multi-instrumentalist/composer/improviser, Zeena Parkins, pioneer of contemporary harp practice and performance, reimagines the instrument as a “sound machine of limitless capacity.” Parkins has built three versions of her one-of-a-kind electric harp and has extended the language of the acoustic harp with the inventive use of unusual playing techniques, preparations, and layers of electronic processing. Zeena has a particularly strong commitment to making scores for dance and continues to re-evaluate the nature and issues of the body’s imprint on sound and sound/music’s imprint on movement.

Peder Mannerfelt (SE)

While Mannerfelt’s solo work is hitting new peaks, the Swedish electronic musician also has a long history of engineering, producing and playing in bands like Roll the Dice, Fever Ray, and Blonde Redhead. While Mannerfelt evokes a gothic energy in his own music, he’s no goth, exactly – but his work is deeply informed by gothic literary tropes, and in his hands, electronic music’s habitual futurism looks a lot more like horror. Mannerfelt´s latest album, Controlling Body, has a sort of protagonist: the synth pop artist Glasser, whose voice binds the album together. Of course, Mannerfelt doesn’t settle for simply framing her voice with his asymmetric beats – instead, he weaves it deep into the fabric of his music.

Kassel Jaeger (CH/FR)

Kassel Jaeger is a Franco-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician. Based in Paris, he is a member of INA-GRM where he works as curator. He is also a writer and theoretician (The Order of Sounds, an sonorous Archipelago has been published by Urbanomic recently). He’s been collaborating with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Stephan Mathieu, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Rabelais and James Rushford.
Kassel Jaeger’s works are a complex balance between concrète experimentalism, ambient noise, and electroacoustic improv. He has released several well-received albums on various labels including the boutique CD imprint, Unfathomless, Senufo Editions, Shelter Press as well as Editions Mego. In his fifth record, Deltas, Jaeger explores geological associations with sound, a theme he expanded in an installation for the exhibition Multinatural Histories at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. He used eight channels in the mineral room to make mineral resonances audible.

Marina Rosenfeld & Ben Vida (US)

Known equally as a composer of large-scale performances and an experimental turntablist working with hand-crafted dub plates, Marina Rosenfeld has been a leading voice in the increasing hybridization between the domains of visual art and music. She has created chamber and choral works; a series of acclaimed “orchestras” for floor-bound electric guitars and other unusual scenarios; and since 2008, a series of works, often mounted in monumental spaces, like the Park Avenue Armory and Western Australia’s Midland Railway Workshops, deploying complexes of unamplified live performers and custom loudspeaker installations. Upcoming projects include new works for the 2016 Biennale de Montreal, and in 2017 Portikus (Frankfurt), Donaueschingen Musiktage, and the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College.

Ben Vida is a Brooklyn based artist and composer. He has been an active member of the international experimental music community for the past seventeen years with a long list of collaborations, bands and releases to his credit. In addition to his musical endeavors, Vida has exhibited his work as a contemporary artist in recent years.

Yves Tumor (US/IT)

Yves Tumor is the inspired, enigmatic and conflicted persona of Tennessee-raised producer/performer Sean Bowie, a conduit for a distinctly bold personal aesthetic that has wrought the entrancing Serpent Music LP (out now on PAN), and a burgeoning reputation for bruising, invigorating live performance. Evolved from a diverse and prolific creative history under an expansive plethora of covert aliases, plus strong ties with forward-thinkers such as NON and Mykki Blanco, Yves Tumor emerges as Bowie’s most personal and matured incarnation to date, with Serpent Music his strongest recorded statement. Painstakingly written from pieces developed upon since 2013, Serpent Music was initially composed as a soul record – based around delicate and emotive songwriting in various forms. The album spans sonically diverse and richly-textured pieces, formed from live, organic instruments, samples and various field recordings. Dreamlike lo-fi psychedelia sits alongside broken electronic experimentations, ambient compositions between abrasive noise offer insight into a haunting otherworld.