Happy Lunar New Year! Serious Play Improv Lab (SPIL 030) on Friday, 12 Feb, 8:30pm @ Findars! We are pleased to feature special guests from Norway, Christian Meaas Svendsen (double bass) and Berlin-based Ignaz Schick (turntables, live-electronics)! Also on the bill are locals Ng Chor Guan (theremin, laptop), Tan Jen Wei (double bass), Sudarshan Chandra Kumar (electronics/vocals), Yong Yandsen (tenor sax) and Kok Siew-Wai (vocals). See you there and bring your friends!
*We’re going to have two SPIL labs this month, the next one will be on 17 Feb, featuring a special guest guitarist from Japan, Yoshitake EXPE!
Date & Time: Sunday, 12 February, door opens at 8pm
Venue: Findars Art Space, No. 8, 4th floor, Jalan Panggong, 50150 Kuala Lumpur.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1075719759217686/
ABOUT THE MUSICIANS:
CHRISTIAN MEAAS SVENDSEN is a Norwegian bass player playing in constellations such as Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit, Momentum and Duplex. He is also leading his own ensemble Nakama as well as being initiator of the collective label Nakama Records. At the age of 28 he has participated on over 20 records in a combination of player/composer/producer/designer. He is aiming towards becoming a distinctive yet flexible musician, and can be summed up as a challenging and innovative bass player. Although he is a firm believer that any creative output stands strong on its own terms, he also feels that music is a powerful tool to make a change in this world. His concept of music is not defined by genre, and he aims towards connecting the classical, contemporary and the free, rhythmic music tradition and to reach beyond the various imaginative borders created by human society and modern culture. Christian solo music can be boiled down to three words: Bass, Body, Bow. Within that seemingly small framework there is an entire universe of sound to explore. Sound and music is, on so many levels, relations. This musical universe is one of energy, one of utilizing all of one’s capacities and one of treating hearing and seeing as an incorporated experience.
www.christianmeaassvendsen.com
www.nakamarecords.no
IGNAZ SCHICK is a Berlin-based turntablist, sound artist, performer, composer and visual artist, with a background in free jazz, avant rock, sound art and experimental music. He has been also prolific as curator (Festival für Andere Musik, Erase & Reset, Time Shifts, TITO, Echtzeitmusiktage 2010, …) and runs the experimental music label Zarek. Schick has toured worldwide solo or with groups like Perlonex, Phosphor, Berlin Sound Connective, Nighthawk Kitchen, Tree People, Splitter Orchestra, Ilog and many more. He has released music on several labels like Absinth, Boomslang Records, Charhizmha, Irrah, Le Petit Mignon, Mikroton, Nexsound, Non Visual Objects, Potlatch, Staalplaat and his own imprint Zarek and collaborated with more than a hundred international sonic artists – amongst others with Mwata Bowden, Don Cherry, Sven-Ake Johansson, Paul Lovens, Toshi Nakamura, Charlemagne Palestine, Andrea Parkins, Keith Rowe, Akira Sakata, Matthias Spahlinger or Martin Tetreault.
NG CHOR GUAN is a Malaysian composer, sound designer, active thereminist, improviser, educator, and co-founder of the singular contemporary arts collective, Toccata Studio. A familiar face in many international arts festivals across the continents, Guan is a prolific artist whose diverse body of work is rooted in the contemporaneous currents of technology and yet proves to transcend categories in the performing arts. An artist with a scientific bend, Guan’s work has always culminated in a contemporary blend of art and science. His most recent project with Toccata Studio, titled ‘2020’, is a project five years long: a multidisciplinary performance powered by the concepts of multiple futures and time travel, 2020 is both a meditation on the future and an active progression into the future. As an internationally acclaimed composer and artist, Guan’s film music was awarded the Grand Prize in both the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France (2009) and the Art Film Fest in Slovakia (2010). Guan was invited as musical director of Dancenorth Australia’s 30th anniversary production, Twilight, which was staged in Townsville, Australia. In the same year, Guan was selected and then participated in OneBeat, a program organized by the federal government of the United States, and is now officially a OneBeat fellow.
TAN JEN WEI is a session bass player based in Kuala Lumpur. He picked up the double bass in the highschool orchestra has been performing actively in various musical ensembles during his teenage years. After high school, he studied at the UCSI University, Kuala Lumpur as a Music Composition Major. Currently Jen Wei serves as the backbone of many actively performing groups in Kuala Lumpur. The wide range of music that he ventures into including Jazz, Rock, Folk, Indian classical, Chinese traditional, Latin, Brazilian, Electronic Dance, Free Improvisation etc. The names that he had the pleasure to share the stage with including well known Jazz musicians in the scene Michael Veerapen, Julian Chan, Tay Cher Siang, Teriver Chung. Legendary Indian Percussionist Anandan Sivamani. Malaysian singers Yudi Yap and Adibah Noor.
SUDARSHAN CHANDRA KUMAR has performed for the CHOPPA Music Fest (Singapore), Playfreely (Singapore), Switch On (Malaysia) and KLEX Festival (Malaysia). He participates in Serious Play Improv Lab (SPIL) regularly, a monthly experimental music series in Kuala Lumpur. Sudarshan has contributed vocals and live electronics to the following bands: HKPT, Takdir, Sorry and Think!Tadpole!Think!. Working with music for theatre, he is the music facilitator for Main Wayang (2015-2016), a children’s theatre workshop which emphasizes on the basics for orchestrating D.I.Y multimedia performances and has directed and scored music for his musical “The Propitiation of Fundamentals” (2015).
YONG YANDSEN is an improvised saxophonist. He has played at the Kuala Lumpur Contemporary Music Festival, Asian Meeting Festival (Japan), Mosaic Festival Singapore, Choppa Eclectic Improvised Music Festival (Singapore), Turn Around Free Jazz & Improvisation Festival (Singapore), Music Matters Festival (Sri Lanka) amongst others. Yandsen, together with Darren Moore and Brian OíReily, form an improvised trio called Game of Patience. They have toured to Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand. They released debut CD album “Trial and Error” and a vinyl album “The Bad Sleeps Well”.
KOK SIEW-WAI is a vocal improviser, artist-organiser and video artist. She has performed in festivals such as Kuala Lumpur Contemporary Music Festival, SoundBridge Contemporary Music Festival, Choppa Experimental Music Festival (Singapore), Playfreely Festival (Singapore), Asian Meeting Festival (Japan), E-Poetry Festival (USA) and more. Siew-Wai is the co-founder, co-curator and director of the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival (KLEX).
SERIOUS PLAY IMPROV LAB (SPIL) SERIES:
SPIL is a project of the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival (KLEX) launched in May 2014. It aims to create exposure and understanding, and to facilitate local, regional and international collaborations and exchanges for experimental and improvised music in Malaysia.
More info: [email protected]
https://klexfestival.com/spil/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/klexfest/