Noise Gate - Félicia Atkinson (FR), Luca Forcucci (CH/IT), W3rkH0f media arts (CH/US)

Event Dates: 
14 September, 2017 - 20:00

This autumn, HeK’s concert series Noise Gate explores current practices in field recording.

French musician and artist Félicia Atkinson creates mysterious and sometimes uncanny atmospheres, mixing feelings of anxiety and beauty convoyed by the presence of entrancing spoken words. Often whispered, the human voice acts as a guiding hand through the array of sounds produced with a variety of instruments – such as Buchla synthesizers, Rhodes pianos and electric guitars – sometimes complemented by the subtle presence of field recordings. In her latest release, “Hand in Hand,” Atkinson uses different sources for the lyrics of her tracks, including instruction books, science fiction novels by Ballard and Dick, as well as her own poetry, while incorporating sound recordings from the Arizona desert. Her compositions evoke unearthly, eerie atmospheres, combined with transparent and familiar sounds in which the human voice emerges as a gravitational point.

Luca Forcucci’s research and musical composition is informed by a long-term collaboration with cognitive neuroscientists. In this context, he is interested in the organization and entangling of memory, perception and consciousness. His recent release, “The Waste Land,” is originated from a six minutes field recording that the artist received as an invitation to produce the soundtrack of a documentary movie, while ignoring its origin or any other information concerning the recording. Other sources and footages are used in his compositions, including voices and noises from a coal mine, soundscapes from the coast of Normandy and urban environments in Paris, combined and layered to trigger mental images and movies. Forcucci’s compositions play with the elusive evocation of seemingly familiar places while inviting the audience to a deep listening experience.

W3rkH0f media arts (Jana Honegger, Kent Clelland) present their latest quadrophonic computer sound and vision experience. At HeK they will perform "apidae", "Treibenreif" and "Bismaerkli", composed using audio, video and photographic recordings from various locations in Switzerland, including a 150 years old smithy. Kent Clelland operates his handmade and self-coded audio computer software, “spinning gossamer sheets of frequency processing, created from intimate recordings of nature, technology and traditions into a concert of found sounds, live vocal processing, computer synthesis explicitly designed for quadrophonic enjoyment.” Jana Honegger produces visuals, processed in real time, characterized by a multitude of layers of images. “Her almost exclusively self-recorded source material is synthesized into sometimes psychedelic, sometimes programmatic, live video animations, always singular in their performance.”

Age: 18 years and older

Admission: 20 / 15 CHF

When: Thu 14 September 2017, 20:00

Where: House of Electronic Arts Basel, Freilager-Platz 9, 4142 Münchenstein / Basel