Tuesday 21 August 2012

Hot Hail in Istanbul

Here's a bit of a montage from my trip to Istanbul in May (yes, it's taken me a little while to post the video).



I played at Arka Oda, a venue on the Asian side of the city, in a gig put on by Batur Sonmez. It was a great night of musical collaborations. The event started out with a set by another Turkish musican, Korhan Erel, who played a fantastic set that was quite acousmatically oriented. Next I played a solo Hot Hail set. After that, we went into a collaborative set, starting off with a duo between Korhan and me, then evolving into a duo between me and Batur. Batur's music is more from a noise background, with continuous generation of sounds, so I acted as the bridge between the two styles. A fantastic collaboration, and a great night!

Saturday 4 August 2012

Uaxuctum | Residency & Exhibition

Uaxuctum web flyer by Hot Hail
Monday sees the opening of my new exhibition, Uaxuctum. The project is part of a month-long residency in the virtual world of Second Life, running from 1st - 31st August. The residency is sponsored by the Linden Endowment for the Arts. The work was created under my Second Life name, Cajska Carlsson. To visit the exhibition, you will need a Second Life account, which is free to set up.

Opening Event
Monday 6th August | 3pm Second Life Time
Tuesday 7th August | 12am British Summer Time
Venue link: http://tinyurl.com/uaxuctum

Uaxuctum is a visual re-imagining of a piece by the 20th Century Italian composer, Giacinto Scelsi.

Scelsi was a highly eccentric composer, living mostly in isolation, apart from an assistant who would write his music down. In 1966 he wrote Uaxuctum, a piece about "the legend of the Maya city, destroyed by themselves for religious reasons".

The re-imagining is an exploration of structure and form, light and dark... a mythical structure that will be torn down to make way for something new. With the death of each civilisation, a new one is born. The world progresses through these revolutionary upheavals, but rarely does a society chose its own destruction. Uaxuctum is a moment of choice lost in time.

As well as the opening of the exhibition, I'll be running some other events at the site during the residency. I'll post more details as they arrive.