Australian Art Orchestra with Nicole Lizee – Hymns to Pareidolia
New music, electronica, turntablism and experimental jazz
The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) presents a highly-charged program to open the 2016 Metropolis New Music Festival, featuring celebrated Canadian composer and turntablist, Nicole Lizée, traversing new music, electronica, turntablism and experimental jazz.
Nicole Lizée, from Montreal, has the world of classical music buzzing and in a relatively short career has already been commissioned San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, BBC Proms and twice by the Kronos Quartet.
Lizée fearlessly treads where most classical composers are afraid to go, bringing pop, MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and 1960s psychedelia into the realm of classical music. Famously, her piece for the revered Kronos Quartet, Death to Komische, has the musicians playing electronic devices and tiny ‘Stylophone’ toy instruments.
Lizée will perform for the first time in Australia with one of the most acclaimed contemporary ensembles this country has produced, the Australian Art Orchestra, which has commissioned a brand new work, 8-Bit Urbex, that pays homage to the way cities are represented in 1980s video games. The piece features a video component that will put the audience back in front of the Atari 7800 and early Nintendo games while the Orchestra creates a nostalgic yet strikingly contemporary soundscape using traditional and electronic instruments along with turntables, old tape machines, and various Foley elements.
The program, Hymns to Pareidolia, will also feature another video work that showcases Lizée’s utterly unique approach. Karappo Okesutura is based on the idea of a karaoke performance that goes wrong because of a glitching karaoke player. The singer (Gian Slater) holds on for dear life and manages to stay on a wild ride that mashes pop songs such as The Bangles’, ‘Eternal Flame’, ‘Endless Love’, and Devo’s, ‘Whip It’. This is fun but it’s also serious music that tackles the most unlikely themes with true deftness of touch.
This festival opening concert will also premiere a newly commissioned piece by daring Australian composer, trumpeter and AAO artistic director, Peter Knight. Knight’s work, Diomira, creates a perfect foil for Lizée with a hypnotic, minimal rhythmic repetition that refracts and disintegrates as we listen. The instrumentation of the chamber jazz orchestra is expanded with the unexpected additions of turntables, a reel-to-reel tape machine (which replaces the drum kit) and laptop computer. The sounds of acoustic instruments and voices are interwoven with field recordings, and are filtered and augmented as Knight plays with our perceptions of what we hear and what we imagine we have heard.
Hymns to Pareidolia will also feature some of the most well known jazz, classical and creative musicians in the country including: Andrea Keller piano, Tristram Williams trumpet/conductor, Vanessa Tomlinson percussion, Peter Knight trumpet/electronics, Gian Slater voice and Adrian Sherriff bass trombone.
Presented by Melbourne Recital Centre
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