Monday, August 29, 2011

Presenting -- En Attendant Artaud: a Psychic Rally to Murder Magick

By St Stephen
The 3 September, 2011 is Antonio Artaud's birthday, an Anniversary of sorts. He would be 120 years old. In honor Artaud's life & work, Júlio Mendes Rodrigo is helping to put together a special event, with some quite intriguing performers, VortexSoundTech, Magenta Interior, and Sektor304.

In order to promote this event, which I feel would go otherwise unnoticed in the States. It probably will anyways, at least for the most part. I mean, who among you is into the Portuguese electronic scene? Or is aware of the work of Magenta Interior? Or even of the work of our guest of honor, Artaud? Well, not yet at least, but perhaps by the end of this blog all that will change. That is why I have decided to re-post the concert information, which was graciously provided by Rodrigo and company, not only because I have a deep respect for Artaud's work, a man that has made me laugh harder and say, "yes," more often the when i am having sex with the tooth fairy (for those who don't know its your mother who puts the money under your pillow; well, sometime its your father).

As an FYI, we, of Thee Uncondemning Monk, have been asked to make one of my weird little videos for in between the sets. It's no big thing, but for us it is quite an honor.

To be able, even in the smallest of ways, to bring more to light on the dark topic that is the life and work of Antonio Artaud, who is most famous for his impossible Theatre of Cruelty, is indeed our pleasure, and somewhat of a duty. Instead of attempting some impossible or inadequate summery of Artuad's work or of the impact that he and his writings have had, and continues to have on culture writ large.

Instead we shall examine a small, easy to ingest, piece of Artaud's corpus. We would say that we hope that it does not upset the reader's sensibilities and cause nausea, which usually starts with pangs in the head, but will ultimately end up moving into the stomach, upsetting an ulceration as it goes, until one is force (once again) to spill its contents on the floor; this is that floor...but that would not be the truth or respectful to our birthday boy. From Artaud's, Notes from a Theatre of Cruelty:
I employ the word "cruelty" in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor, an implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness; it is the consequence of an act. Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt.
So mote it be Artaud, so mote it be (which is just like saying, Amen brother, Amen).

After the event, our video will be re-posted on our blog site, Thee Uncondemning Monk (perhaps bookmark all relevant pages, as it sounds as if our east-coast readers might have some busy days ahead of them). It may well go on to be posted else where, but at this point we just do not know.

As we understand it, the concert will record and streamed live, perhaps via Ustream or Google+, so if you are interested in catching what we feel will be a quite memorable event, please visit their webpage; click here.  Now, without further ado, the performers. Taken in slightly augmented form from the blog-site, Die Elektrischen Vorspiele, we bring you the musical/visual performance and the celebration of Artaud.

En Attendant Artaud: a Psychic Rally to Murder Magick

When: 3rd ov september 2011 at 09:30h pm

Hosted by: Galeria Gabinete

Located: Rua Alfredo Pereira, 3 / 4560-502 Penafiel – Portugal




VortexSoundTech is an Portuguese electronic music project, founded in 1999 by nRv in Braga. Their work covers many areas of electronic music, such as drum and bass, industrial music, original sountracks for plays and movies, and often involves extreme experimentation. Since 1999, the direction of their main work goes to the composition of original soundtracks for plays: Psicose (2001), Gretchen (2003), Sorrisos de Bergman (2004), Fiore Nudo (2007), Otelo (2007), O Café (2008), Emilia Galotti (2009), Maria Stuart (2009), Paraíso Perdido (2009), Antígona (2010), working with directors like Nuno M. Cardoso, Nuno Carinhas, Ricardo Pais, Cristina Carvalhal and Manuel Sardinha.They have also worked with movie multi-award-winning director JacktheZipper and Edgar Pêra.



VortexSoundTech has made two major studio releases, several EP´s and contributions for compilations. “Fiery Silence” was their debut album in 2008 which received the best critics all around Europe by is mysterious compositions. The latest album “The Death Of Us All” was released in 2010 featuring the contribution of other artists.

download their highly recommended album The Death Of Us All

Magenta Interior creates stories sometimes as visual performances and some other times as texts. She plays with all possible colors of the chromatic palette, all genders between feminine and masculine and all emotions of her heart in the stories she tells. Magenta is inspired by popular and secular ways of passing knowledge, through story telling. These stories are neither prose nor poetry, between reality of every day life and fiction. Live performances are result of improvisation, resulting in surprising visuals for the audience but also sometimes for the performer.

Magenta Interior was born in Hungary. While working as chef in a restaurant of Lisbon (Portugal) Magenta made four friends. Soon left the job in order to focus on the start of her path towards enlightenment through art as the singer and lyrics writer of the punk band Punk-ex-Party (band constituted with her unique four friends at the time). At the same time she also started to write stories for comics. In 2004 Magenta Interior took her ideas through new paths, first with a collaboration on a net art project and soon after as visual performer. Magenta started playing with visuals for her pleasure and for love of art.
Image from the screen, Monkeytown, NYC (USA), January 2008
In the quest for new adventures and stories to tell, Magenta left Lisbon in the summer of 2005 to go to Berlin, where she spent most of her time smoking cigarettes, drinking cafe and drawing new strategies to convince others that she doesn’t exist. Is in 2007 that Magenta starts to be a drifter, traveling in groups or on her own, sharing stories with people on the streets or at closed public spaces. Magenta plays now visuals everywhere, wherever she may be at the moment.

Sektor 304 was born in July 2007 by João Filipe, percussionist in several projects such as Eskizofrénicos, Karnnos, FRICS ou Hhy & the Macumbas among others, and André Coelho, who dedicated to sound processing and composition in Profan ou Sparagmos.



The path and concepts established in the 80′s by bands like Test Dpt, Einstürzende Neubauten, SPK were soon explored, mixing heavy electronics to the sounds extracted from scraps, garbage and debris. This allowed to apply into the composition sounds taken from real objects, that were amplified and processed in a game of scales and sound modeling, repeated to exhaustion.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

1 comment:

  1. For the live streaming of the event see this link (sat. night): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/en-attendant-artaud

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...