Between The Lines: Joviale |Bunny

Between The Lines: Joviale |Bunny

Wednesday, 28 September 2022, 8.00pm

Serious is proud to announce the full programme for Between The Lines, its festival of boundary pushing and genre-defying artists.

Created by the producers of the EFG London Jazz Festival, Between The Lines began in 2019 as a two day series in Corsica Studios, then pivoted to hybrid socially distanced and online editions in 2020 and 2021, featuring artists such as Coby Sey, Gazelle Twin and NYX, Hatis Noit, Leafcutter John, Loraine James, Maria Somerville, and Sarathy Korwar.

Now it returns to its first fully live edition post-pandemic, taking place across the month of September in East London and featuring collaborations and projects from some of the most innovative and uncategorisable artists in UK music – rooted in both western and non-western traditions, creating sounds both acoustically and electronically.

Beginning with producer/composer Beatrice Dillon (1 Sept), building on the collaborations from her critically lauded album Workaround to present a full set with Indian tabla player Kuljit Bhamra, with support coming from collaborative duo Exotic Sin at the beautiful EartH Theatre

The series continues with a double bill of duo performances from some of the most lauded composer-performers in contemporary music (16 Sept), featuring British-Iranian turntablist Mariam Rezaei and Iraqi soprano and improvising vocalist Alya Al-Sultani building on their collaboration at Café Oto in 2021, while Jennifer Walshe and Neil Luck present their “experiment in technological occultism” Wack at St. Matthias Church in Stoke Newington

Finally, multidisciplinary artist Joviale performs their biggest headline show to date in MOTH Club (28 Sept), hot on the heels of their performance at Glastonbury and single release UW4GM,and following endorsements from the likes of Pitchfork, Crack, Fader, Benji B, Jamz Supernova, and Gilles Peterson, with support coming from up-and-coming producer Bunny.

Put together, the series presents an entire spectrum of artists that challenge conventions and represent the cutting edge of modern music, in an experimental, thought-provoking, but accessible set of performances.

Full details on each performance can be found below:

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Beatrice Dillon ft Kuljit Bhamra | Exotic Sin 
Thursday 1 September - EartH Theatre, London N16

London-based composer Beatrice Dillon explores a peculiar no man's land between UK bass, house and contemporary music. Her unique style is rhythmically complex, very transparent and both danceable as cerebral. Her latest album Workaround was The Wire Magazine's best album of 2020.  

The album sees Dillon work with musicians like Lucy Railton, Laurel Halo and Kuljit Bhamra. Bhamra is a British tabla player and composer, and one of the pioneers of 'bhangra', a popular musical style from the Punjabi diaspora in the UK. His nimble-fingered percussion seamlessly interweaves Dillon's complex rhythmical structures.  

Having played Tabla on Dillon’s Workaround LP (PAN 2020), the pair rejoin to present a playful, in-development collaboration exploring shared interests in rhythmic pattern, synthetic and acoustic percussion. The performance features Tabla Touch®, a new instrument designed by Bhamra and his team at Keda Music Ltd.  

Support comes from Exotic Sin, a collaborative duo made up of artists and musicians Kenichi Iwasa (of Krautrock Karaoke fame) and Naima Karlsson (of the Cherry family). Improvisation and live recording are at the core of their collaborative process, integrating simple acoustics and electronics to play with the contrasts and cohesions of natural, digital and intuitive sound.

Supported by Somerset House Studios. With thanks to Emma Hannon, Marie McPartlin, James Rand. 

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Jennifer Walshe & Neil Luck present WACK 
Mariam Razaei & Alya Al Sultani 
Friday 16 September – St. Matthias Church, London E9

Between The Lines presents two unique duo performances by some of the most innovative composer-performers in modern music. 

Dramatic soprano, composer and improvising vocalist Alya Al-Sultani joins experimental turntablist and composer Mariam Rezaei to bring their duo performance back after its debut in Cafe Oto in 2021. Eschewing stereotypes, their unique collaboration warps and weaves elements of opera, hip-hop, noise and free improv together. Al-Sultani and Rezaei play with Middle Eastern poetry, vocal improv and instrumental samples in a free-form collaboration that will push at the boundaries of two turntables and one microphone. 

Mariam and Alya come from different but overlapping disciplines. After growing up as a classically trained pianist, Mariam has built a reputation over time as a prolific turntablist, DJ and improvisor, never shying away from interdisciplinary and experimental projects. Alya meanwhile is a British-Iraqi soprano, but has spent the last few years integrating improvisational techniques, microtonal ideas and Eastern influences in her music.  

Their last performance together was recorded and released on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku label – one of the highlights of its catalog of 200+ lockdown era albums. Together their dexterous lungs and nimble fingers birth forms that dance in and out of each other: shifting, soaring, dipping, diving, but never sitting still. 

Meanwhile in an experiment in technological occultism, Jennifer Walshe and Neil Luck use arcane and modern sound recording technology, projections, voices, objects and texts to divine meanings, messages, and narratives from the detritus of everyday informational noise.   Jennifer has been hailed as “The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), having received fellowships, prizes, and commissions from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra, among others. Most recently she was appointed Professor of Composition at University of Oxford, and had her work profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker. 

Neil Luck has written for a range of soloists and ensembles in the UK and abroad, and presented work at music venues, festivals and galleries internationally including the ICA, Kings Place, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, LSO St. Lukes, BBC Cut&Splice festival, in Lithuania and Denmark as part of their Capital of Culture celebrations, the Tokyo Experimental Festival, and on BBC Radio 3. He is the founder of the music-theatre ensemble ARCO, and co-founder of squib-box alongside Adam de la Cours and Federico Reuben. 

For their collaboration WACK, the audience is invited to experience the performers dredging gnomic readings of real and artificial matter from new and old words, deep audio files, and personal belongings. 

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Joviale |Bunny 
Wednesday 28 September – MOTH Club, London N16

Joviale is a multidisciplinary artist from North London making otherworldly, immersive music that plays with “minimal textures, killer interjections and vocals that are equal parts restraint and rage.” (The Times) Looping these high vocals with heady, emotional chords, they weave a screen around the listener, pulling them into chaptered, strangely sweet variations of the artist, divided out across albums, and designed to generate a performative atmosphere, both on stage and through the recording.

 Following their debut EP Crisis, in which Joviale wielded narrative and storytelling to build a dreamy, silk-wrapped universe across songs such as Dreamboat, and Taste of the Heavens, 2021 saw the release of the artist’s second EP Hurricane Belle. Created in collaboration with the producer Bullion, and widely supported by the likes of Pitchfork, Crack, Line of Best Fit, Fader, Benji B, Jamz Supernova, and Gilles Peterson. 

Joviale belongs to a generation of artists with a strong sense of collaborative, interdisciplinary practice, carrying a deep interest in the connection between the arts, ecological sciences, and semi-fictive encounters, as well as the wider London scene. Following appearances at Glastonbury, Pitchfork Festival in London and Paris, and their recent second sold out headline show in Venue MOT in May, they make their biggest headline appearance to date at MOTH Club for Between The Lines, with support from up-and-coming producer Bunny.

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Published by Journal of Music on 7 July 2022

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