Schedule
Day one
Jump to day two
Kate Armtage & co.
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kate Armitage and her entourage perform six improvised pieces across the Tectonics weekend: “Common sense will not prevail”. Ticket reservation is required on the day (see page overlead for details).
Sarah-Jane Summers & Juhani Silvola with BBC SSO
The Spirit Multitude:Pt.1: Nay, that I do not know?
Pt.2: Toothed to their tails.
Norway-based duo Sarah-Jane Summers (fiddle) & Juhani Silvola (guitar) combine Scottish traditional music from the Highlands with influences from Scandinavian traditions and experimental music. Nominated for a Norwegian Grammy in 2021, Songlines described the duo as “absolute masters of their instruments” and selected each of their four albums as Top of the World. This work takes as its starting point a Highland folktale fragment about the ‘sluagh’ (or Spirit Multitude) which was believed to descend on the Western Highlands and the Hebrides in the wake of the West Wind.
Eiko Yamada
Traces of Air (Kiseki気跡)Born and raised in Tokyo, recorder player, improviser and sound-worker Eiko Yamada has lived and worked in Germany since 1984. She has collaborated with visual artists, dancers and poets and, as a member of the Berlin-based group Ex Tempore, developed a type of music performance called ‘sound action’. In the time and space that Yamada shares with audiences, air becomes sound material by exploring, deepening and refining it using playing techniques developed by herself. This sound material then takes form in real time through the constant dialogue between Yamada and her instrument. Traces of air are left behind.
Marlo De Lara & Euan Currie
Baltimore-born Marlo De Lara works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction and film. Previously under the moniker ‘marlo eggplant’, their work aims to blur the definitions of the (un)intentional and the myth of permanence. Edinburgh-based Euan Currie cut his teeth in the early noughties with the group Muscletusk, described as a “psychedelic clatter team’s leatherboy tape-dirt party” (Giant Tank). More recently, he’s taken his solo sound collage and electronics project - Dead Labour Process – across Europe, Canada and Japan. Their live improvisation will draw on voices, electronics and field recordings. Expect an exploration of the miniscule properties of sound blown to senseless proportions, a sonic palette of unknown origins bonded in wordless dialogue across cluttered tables.Elaine Mitchener’s set will follow immediately in the Old Fruitmarket.
Elaine Mitchener
Olly Wilson Sometimes (1976)Elaine Mitchener Amazing Grace [Reworked] trad.
Elaine Mitchener Unknown Tongue II
Elaine Mitchener, “the UK’s boldest operatic voice” (The Guardian), is an experimental vocalist, movement artist and composer whose work encompasses improvisation, contemporary music theatre and performance art. “Coming to see what I do, you don’t sit back,” Mitchener warns. Sometimes is an electronic work for tape and tenor by a truly original American compositional voice, Olly Wilson - a moving interpretation of the Black spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’. Mitchener reflects and responds to the circumstances which birthed the centuries-old hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ and its contemporary resonances. And in Unknown Tongue II, there’s an exploration of where Mitchener’s voice leads her and the dialogues it has with itself.
Meet the Artists – Day 1
Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists and music performed in Day 1 of Tectonics, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson.BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1
Marc Yeats a point in the landscape (World Premiere)Salvatore Sciarrino Sei nuovi capricci e un saluto for violin solo (UK Premiere)
interval break
Mariam Rezaei/ 6 scenes for turntables and orchestra (UK Premiere)
Matthew Shlomowitz
Ilya Gringolts violin
Mariam Rezaei turntables
Ilan Volkov conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist and performer, creating music described as “high-velocity sonic surrealism’” (The Guardian). Alongside composer Matthew Shlomowitz, their co-created ‘6 scenes’ are a divine collision of lots of things they love with some allusions to conventions from opera and concerti.
“A true master of expression and exactitude” (Bachtrack), violinist Ilya Gringolts is as comfortable with the great orchestral repertoire as he is seeking out new musical challenges. Just shy of 50 years after the first renowned series of Capricci by Salvatore Sciarrino, Gringolts takes on this fresh set by the great composer. And each orchestral player is a soloist in Marc Yeats’s timecode-supported polytemporal work, which fluctuates between states of perceptual obfuscation and clarity.
Day two
Brian Irvine & The Imaginary Orchestra
Born in Belfast, composer Brian Irvine’s unique musical world combines the known and the unknown, the free and the fixed, the schooled and the unschooled. His music-making is “spontaneous and irresistibly alive” (Washington Post). And for Tectonics 2024, he’s assembled musicians of all ages, instruments and abilities to be part of the beautiful, monster, music machine phenomena that is THE IMAGINARY ORCHESTRA. The only prerequisite for participants? A sense of adventure! Come and hear what they’ve devised in just a few hours, guided by the musical lunacy of this maverick composer.Kate Armitage & co.
Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kate Armitage and her entourage perform six improvised pieces across the Tectonics weekend: “Common sense will not prevail”. Ticket reservation is required on the day (see overleaf for details).
Koichi Makigami & Roger Turner
Avant-garde vocalist and theremin player Koichi Makigami is the leader of one of Japan's longest running underground bands, HIKASHU. He’s collaborated with the veteran improvising percussionist Roger Turner a few times in Tokyo since 2008: “we enjoy ourselves, but with voice and percussion no doubt the earliest instruments in the music of humankind. we don’t want to let evolution down. maybe we have the bones of song and dance to throw into the pot, but there’s city junk in there too… aaah yes, music of the modern era: a strange floating world indeed, stinging like a drone.”
Yaron Deutsch
Pierluigi Billone Sgorgo Y for electric guitar (UK Premiere)Andreas Dohmen FPP I (leçons du mardi) for electric guitar (UK Premiere)
Yaron Deutsch electric guitar
Yaron Deutsch is a guitarist and the Founder and Artistic Director of Ensemble Nikel, a chamber quartet that fuses electric and acoustic sounds into a unified sonic organism. Most often, he plays with Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Musikfabrik. Pierluigi Billone states that his 2012 composition Sgorgo Y (part of a triptych for solo electric guitar) was written for the left hand of Yaron Deutsch, and quotes Mokurai: “You can hear the sound of two hands when they clap together, now show me the sound of one hand”. It’s paired with a UK Premiere by German composer Andreas Dohmen, also written especially for Deutsch.
Ka Baird
New York based vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Ka Baird performs an extended solo version of their new release Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos. It’s been described by Boomkat as “a heady trip informed by their ecstatic live performances, rocketing classic Downtown minimalism towards far-flung galaxies.” Baird describes Bearings as a meeting of streams; where the theatricality and spirituality of art reckon with impermanence and embrace the cycle of life and death.Meet The Artists – Day 2
Your chance to meet and hear about some of the artists and music performed in Day 1 of Tectonics, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson.BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 2
Jack Sheen Lag (BBC commission, World Premiere)Carola Bauckholt Im Auge des Klangs (UK premiere)
Charles Uzor Breaking of the Vessels for orchestra and tape
(BBC commission, World Premiere)
Mirela Ivičević Überlala. Song of Million Paths. for violin and orchestra
(UK premiere, I&I Foundation commission)*
Ilya Gringolts violin
Ilan Volkov conductor
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Through its temporal uncertainty, Jack Sheen’s new BBC Commission explores uncanny glitches in our use of digital technology. Your expectation of how things may unfold is gently confounded by the notion of ‘lag’, in both obvious and imperceptible ways. The starting point of Carola Bauckholt’s ‘In the Eye of the Sound’ was the first bar of Mussorgsky's With the Dead in a Dead Language. A central aspect of her work is a fascination with the phenomenon of perception and understanding of music, noting that “just as complex connections can be built up from words in a story, this is also possible in music.”
More than two decades after his work Zimzum, Nigerian-born composer Charles Uzor revisits two existential questions: Why are we here? How did everything come to exist? His BBC commission explores the vigorous duality of good and evil, and chaos and clarity. Unrestricted, energetic, explosive – Mirela Ivičević is one of the most enthralling composers of her generation and works with ensembles including Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Nikel. Tense and anarchic, Ivičević's compositions resemble rebellious acts.