Preview of the line-up and more details coming in the next days.

“The concept behind the Sottovoce Festival is a simple one: London based [no.signal] split an appealingly grubby venue into acoustic and amplified spaces, book some appropriately polarised acts, then stand back and admire their work” […] “SV concludes with the audience perched precariously between ecstasy and cataclysm”

Sottovoce second edition (2009)

For a photo-gallery of the event please visit http://www.shot2bits.net/galleries/sottovoce (pictures by Shot2Bits agency)

The Wire on Sotto Voce second edition (2009) [as text]

Wire Review highlight: “a worthy conclusion an excellent programme”

Sotto Voce State 51, London, UK
The Wire - issue 360 - Sam Davies

Resisting British festival tradition, warm summer sun shone down on the second edition of No Signal’s Sotto Voce (dedicated to ‘improvised silence and noise’). The setting – a dilapidated warehouse in Shoreditch – meant it was glinting off grimy windows and speckles of broken glass amidst tufts of weedy grass, but then that served the sharp edges of Sotto Voce’s performers pretty well.

A baggage mishandling meant that Italian saxophonist Valerio Cosi was unable to perform with drummer Steve Noble, but Noble stepped in as a soloist and gave a typically thrilling breakdown of the nonstandard acoustic potential of the standard drumkit. With various tools he rubbed cymbals into sharply sonorous tones, stroked drumskins until they sang, and burst into explosive gamelan-like flurries that incorporated every available surface of his kit. The large metal pipe running down the wall only a foot or so from Noble was probably lucky to escape a thorough beating along with it.

Benedict Drew & Lee Patterson’s performance investigated a micro-spectrum of domestic sound, with Patterson amplifying the crackle of lit matches, a boiling kettle and Andrews Salts fizzing in a glass, while Drew brought the set to a close dragging a violin bow across styrofoam to produce a transfixing shriek. The pair’s kitchen-table field recordings were richly suggestive, half Foley artistry without a film, half Alice in Wonderland magnifications of the miniature.

An entirely different duo dynamic was established by John Butcher and Mark Wastell. Wastell, coaxing long, ever-shifting sound shapes from his tam-tam, remained all the while within strict confines: never exceeding a certain volume nor allowing individual mallet strokes to be heard. Butcher’s saxophone skittered over Wastell’s deep and luxurious bed of timbre, never quite coming to rest, never quite settling for whatever connections had been made.

Voltiguers, the duo of Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies, was thrilling and frustrating in equal measure. They struck up their twin guitar blitzkrieg with their backs turned, positioned as if they were part of the audience and their amps were the true performers. In a sense they were: a colossal block of guitar noise was instantly summoned, so loud it acquired a physical presence, yet phantasmal in the way that, submerged under the churning static, the actual effects of hands on strings could only be discerned dimly. And suddenly, only minutes later, it was over. That Vortiguers’ set was so loud but so brief gave it the most interesting angle on the festival’s ‘silence and noise’ remit. It subverted the general trend in much Noise towards grinding maximalist attrition. And who’s to say that the long silence which ensued before the next act was not effectively part of Vortiguers’ performance?

It was NEW, the improvising trio of Alex Ward (guitar) with John Edwards (bass) and Steve Noble (drums) which broke that quiet spell. Ward’s electric guitar playing is as fully alive to possible points of departure as his more familiar work on clarinet, and the three created a sawtoothed Tasmanian devil of sound, pitched somewhere between Last Exit and Ascension. The sheer difficulty of collective improvisation can lead to ensembles that consciously pursue internal contrasts, with players playing against each other to cover a lack of mutual understanding. But NEW were relentless in chasing down new ideas in tumultuous unison.

The evening ended with Alan Licht and Aki Onda in collaboration. Licht’s guitar pursued a long series of sinuous dreamlike detours from melody into noise, so that by the end he was managing the sound simply by tweaking levels on his array of pedals. Onda’s side of the dialogue was more fragmented and fractious, as he shuffled through a tabletop’s worth of his hoarded cassette tapes, laid out like wares at some eccentric village fête. While there were moments when his walkman and Licht’s guitar came together into a single fabric, there were passages of disconnect too. Perhaps a little more improvised silence would have helped; but the pair were nonetheless a worthy conclusion to an excellent programme.

we have been quite silent recently but it is part of our recent philosophy (since 2008) to concentrate on single yearly “big” events rather than giving you monthly gems like we used to do. Way too many people have praised our past efforts to create a totally DIY organization whose main purpose was bringing you the best experimental music having the artists and the music listeners (you!) as first priorities, so the only reasonable thing to do is to give you a new edition of Sottovoce festival for this year!

2008 was the year of “Approximately Infinite Universe”, a very successful U.K. tour with Kemialliset Ystävät, Islaja and ES from Finnish Fonal records joined by their america friends Skaters, Fursaxa, Blevin Blectum and Samara Lubelski. In 2009 the second edition of Sotto Voce was a success with Seymour Wright, Family Battle Snake, Valerio Cosi & Steve Noble, Benedict Drew & Lee Patterson, John Butcher & Mark Wastell, Voltigeurs, N.E.W (Noble, Edwards, Ward), Aki Onda & Alan Licht.

Now the time is ready for bringing you Sottovoce 3, third episode of the festival for improvised silence and noise. Please come back here for more updates in the next days.

All the best from Mexico and Finland

Eric & Enrico

http://no-signal.net/sottovoce2

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