Archive for April, 2010

Swans to headline Supersonic Festival

Folks it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for…
SUPERSONIC FESTIVAL 2010

First up – NEW FESTIVAL DATES!
22 – 24 OCTOBER 2010
Birmingham, UK

SWANS HEADLINE SUPERSONIC FESTIVAL 2010

Tickets on sale now from:
www.theticketsellers.co.uk
www.seetickets.com

To launch the 2010 edition of Birmingham’s acclaimed annual Supersonic Festival,  Capsule are over the moon to announce that Michael Gira’s massively influential NYC band SWANS will headline this year’s festival, which takes place from 22 – 24 October 2010. Tickets are now on sale! Their appearance at Supersonic Festival 2010 will be their first British show since they disbanded in 1997.

This rare and exceptional performance by SWANS marks the start of a series of line up announcements for Supersonic 2010, with many more exciting acts and artists to be revealed in the coming weeks and months.

Moving from its previous July weekend date to October from 2010 onwards, Supersonic will once again take place in and around the Custard Factory in the heart of Eastside of Birmingham, utilising converted factory warehouses and art galleries and offering up-close, intimate settings to showcase some of the most exciting music out there. Capsule’s passion for genre bending sound and performances is at the heart of all their events – there are not many places where you can listen to funeral doom, prog, folk, avant jazz and grindcore in one weekend.

For further info on hotel deals/travel/volunteers check :
www.supersonicfestival.com

Tagged – Guerilla Embroidery

Aged 16 – 19? Come along this Saturday, 10th April for the next Craftspace Collective event at the Custard Factory. Work with contemporary embroiderer Stewart Easton to create embroidered tags.

Look for the Craftspace Collective banner, No. 7, the Custard Factory (next door to Yumm), Birmingham B9 4AA

Starts at 1.00pm  until  4.00pm

Come along and be creative!  Hope to see you there!

Supersonic Festival coming soon

Here’s a little film which is a taster from Supersonic Festival 2009, produced and curated by Capsule. The festival has had rave reviews with audience from all corners of the UK and further a-field. In recent years Supersonic Festival has attracted such names as Italian horror movie soundtrack legends Goblin, Mogwai, Sunn 0))) and Krautrock forefathers Harmonia, early performances by Battles, LCD Sound System, Chrome Hoof and OM, and the first UK shows for many international artists including Harvey Milk (USA), Corrupted (Japan) and Goblin (Italy).

Tickets and initial line up news for this years festival will be announced tomorrow via www.supersonicfestival.com

We can hardly wait!

Grace Ndiritu Artist’s Talk at Eastside Projects

Grace Ndiritu Artist’s Talk at Eastside Projects

Introduced by Gavin Wade

Thursday 8 April, 6.30–8pm, £3 (free for Extra Special People)

To reserve a seat please email info@eastsideprojects.org

Eastside Projects presents an artist’s talk with Grace Ndiritu (b. 1976 Birmingham, UK, lives and works in London). Ndiritu’s practice combines advertising, documentary and music video strategies within the framework of performance video art, and her work is currently exhibited as part of Curtain Show at Eastside Projects: Still Life, 2007, is set in a large curtained area formed from West African fabrics from Holland, fabricated in China and available in Birmingham’s rag market. Ndiritu’s series of four videos use West African textiles in a sensual and, at times, unnerving physical performance by the artist to the camera.
Previous solo exhibitions include Still Life and Responsible Tourism, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2007, and the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. Recent group shows include Dress Codes, International Center of Photography, New York, 2009; Flow, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, 2008; Dakar Biennale, Senegal, 2008. Her work is housed in private collections in the USA and Europe and museums collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her films are distributed by LUX.

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Digbeth
Birmingham B9 4AR
www.eastsideprojects.org
www.facebook.com/eastsideprojects
www.twitter.com/eprjcts

Django Bates Pays Tribute To His Childhood Inspiration: Charlie Parker, Sat 10th April, CBSO Centre,8pm

Django Bates & The Beloved Bird Trio
Saturday 10th April
CBSO Centre, Berkley Street
8pm
£13 (£11 Members & Concessions) Book Tickets

www.birminghamjazz.co.uk

Django Bates reaches his 50th Birthday this year in October and his project for at least the earlier part of the ’significant year’ for him is a tour built around an album issued this year dedicated to Charlie Parker, whose music he heard as a young boy and who inspired him to take up jazz.  The album is called Beloved Bird and it is played by a trio led by Django on acoustic piano and featuring two young players from Copenhagen where Django has been teaching for the last few years in the splendidly named Rhythmic University.  They are Petter Eldh on bass (seen here last year in Dan Nicholls’ Hyderabad) and Peter Brun on drums.

It’s a great album and it features some of the most famous tunes penned by Parker including Scrapple from the Apple, Billie’s Bounce, Moose the Mooche and other bop classics written by others such as Hot House. Reviews have pointed to the seriousness with which Django treats each piece and the avoidance of his normal quirkiness.  Mike Hobart in the Financial Times comments on Django’s clear ‘enthusiasm for bop piano’ and Ivan Hewitt in the Daily Telegraph describes the pieces as ‘true homages’.  John Fordham whose review you can read here describes the CD as ‘an astonishing achievement’ that in its creativity really delves into Parker’s psyche.

The trio comes to Birmingham’s CBSO Centre next week on Saturday 10th April at 8pm in a Birmingham Jazz gig.  You can buy tickets from the Symphony Hall Box Office on 0121-767-4050 or online here.

www.djangobates.com

James Langdon shortlisted for Grafik Design Awards

James Langdon, designer of the We Are Eastside identity has been shortlisted for the Grafik Design Awards 2010.

Ikon Eastside announces 2010 programme

Ikon Eastside has announced its programme of exhibitions for 2010, opening on Thursday 27th May with an installation from German sound artist Florian Hecker.

Florian Hecker installation at Chisenhale Gallery 2010

Florian Hecker
Thursday 27 May – Sunday 20 June
German sound artist Florian Hecker’s work is concerned with the manipulation of psycho-acoustic effects. He creates disorienting installations, developed out of close consultation with software engineers and scientists. For Ikon Eastside, Hecker proposes a trail of four newly commissioned sound pieces. Together, they create the impression that space itself is being sculpted; each work successively becomes more abstract, manipulating spatial perception.

Andrew Cross
The Solo
A film by Andrew Cross, featuring the music of Carl Palmer
Thursday 1 – Sunday 25 July
British artist Andrew Cross presents a new moving-image project exploring the relationship between music and milieu through a much-maligned musical form: the rock drum solo. Carl Palmer (who as a member of the 1970s ‘supergroup’ Emerson Lake & Palmer developed the status of the rock star drummer perhaps to its extreme) performs four new drum solos. Comprising sequences of tightly cropped images culminating in a full drum solo, Cross celebrates a remarkable virtuosity whilst provoking a consideration of the shifting nature of cultural value.

Sergio Vega
Thursday 5 August – Sunday 5 September
Born in Argentina and now based in Florida, Sergio Vega explores the mythologies of paradise underlying the culture and history of Brazil. For Ikon Eastside, he presents an installation of high definition video imagery, shot in the Brazilian state of Matto Grosso. Projections combine the forest, animals, insects and rivers with roads, towns and people. Such a symphony of nature, culture and their contradictions evoke everyday reality at once vivid and strange.

Jolyon Laycock
This Could Happen To You
11-12 September
A re-creation of Jolyon Laycock’s highly-politicised multi-sensory installation from 1974, part of Ikon’s 1970s retrospective of the same name. A randomly occurring collage of video projections and sound recordings, it critically explores the notion of hegemonic rule and Cold War anxiety. This work reveals uncomfortable parallels with today’s global political climate.

AVPD
Hitchcock Hallway
Thursday 23 September – Sunday 14 November
AVPD are Peter Doessing and Aslak Vibaek, Danish artists working in collaboration. Their practice is concerned with relationships between space and its human inhabitants, taking inspiration from literature, film and science. For Ikon Eastside, AVPD create a sequence of apparently identical interconnecting rooms, each linked by a door. However all is not what it seems. The artists also propose making a number of offsite projects around the city.

Curtain Show newspaper

Eastside Projects is pleased to present the new exhibition catalogue/newspaper for Curtain Show, designed by James Langdon. The catalogue features beautifully reproduced photographs of the show, texts by Tacita Dean, Hannah James, and curators Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade, and the most impossible to read barcode ever. You can collect a free copy of the publication when you visit Curtain Show, which continues until 17 April.

Eastside Projects is open Thursday 12-6.30pm, and Friday to Saturday 12-5pm.