SPIL 038 welcome guitarist Yoshitake EXPE from Japan to join our monthly experimental music series! Local musicians Ng Chor Guan (theremin), Yong Yandsen (tenor sax) and Kok Siew-Wai (vocals) will join the session. Mark your calendar and come meet Yoshitake-san!
Date: Wednesday, 4 Oct 2017, 8:30pm
Venue: RAW Art Space, No. 8, 4th floor, Jalan Panggong, 50000 Kuala Lumpur
Admission by suggested donation RM20
https://www.facebook.com/events/1897191190600741/1901934966793030
ABOUT THE MUSICIANS:
YOSHITAKE EXPE is an extraordinary guitarist from the city of Osaka , Japan whose backbone can be found in a Funk Band in the 90s accompanied by American musicians. With the use of numerous compact effectors he has established a unique Space guitar sound whilst processing sound with a story-like flow like that of a DJ with influences found in P-funk , Electro Techno , with a Brian Eno vibe and sensibility of Brazilian music , at times playing the guitar percussively creating improvised robotic house music , at times playing a sensual guitar solo , but at times very organic with a soothing acoustic sound and is guaranteed to take you on a space odyssey. He has collaborated with varying types of artists from visual artists and painters , avant-garde , improvisational , jazz , techno , hip-hop , world music , music for film and soundtracks and is also highly regarded as a club DJ and continues to expand his musical horizon . He has also held an exhibition of sound installations accompanied with a 100 hour performance in art museums. Nutron s debut album was voted “best album of the year(2003)” by Music Magazine and made an appearance at Fuji Rock Festival in 2004 .For the past 5 years he has been playing over 150 shows annually with his solo project. His current projects involve a Space Funk duo with world class drummer Takashi Numazawa , Space Dub Funk with dub mixer Naoyuki Uchida and also formed a Super-Unit PARA together with Seiichi Yamamoto. Amongst many collaborations his performance with the treasure of Brazil , Marcos Suzano is especially memorable.
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.
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 O’Reily, 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, Asian Meeting Festival (Japan), Choppa Experimental Music Festival (Singapore), Playfreely Festival (Singapore), RRRec Fest (Indonesia), E-Poetry Festival (USA) and more. Her video text + vocal improvisation performance piece “Language of Self” is collected by He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, China.
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://web.facebook.com/groups/klexfest/