Worm Eats Bear - a Special Evening of performances by the Tapeworm

Date:

20/10/2011

Times:

7:30-10pm

Website:

tapeworm.org.uk

Address:

The Bear Pit, Bear Gardens, SE1 9EB London

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A special evening of Bankside performances curated by The Tapeworm, as part of the Merge Festival

London Town's finest cassette-only label, The Tapeworm, presented its third annual event in the Capital. Exemplary music and much excitement is to be expected from a line-up of the label's mates.

Mr Ken Hollings, a writer of note, read some text from the first Bookworm publication, to be launched on the same night. Sweden's BJNilsen flew in and making a splendid noise for all. A second Swede, CM von Hausswolff (he's a King, dontchaknow…) shared a stage with Touch's Mike Harding, in a reading of Edgar Allen Poe like none before… Cult vs. occult - former Medicine Head man Peter Hope-Evans and illustrator Savage Pencil whipped up a dark blue storm. Mr Pencil's fine drawings were also on display. Hopping on the bus from Elephant & Castle was Zerocrop and his band; pop perfection from a local lad. And finally, a London eye - video installation by Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us.

Ken Hollings

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. He is the author of the books Destroy All Monsters (Marion Boyars) and Welcome to Mars (Strange Attractor Press); and his work has appeared in a wide range of journals, reviews and anthologies. He has written and presented critically acclaimed programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, NPS in Holland, ABC Australia and Resonance FM and has given talks and lectures at the Royal Institution, the British Library, the ICA, Central St Martins, the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Berlin Akademie der Künste.

CM Von Hausswolff

Since the end of the 1970s, CM Von Hausswolff has worked as a composer using the tape recorder as his main instrument and as a conceptual visual artist working with performance art, light- and sound installations and photography.

His works are pure, intuitive studies of electricity, frequency functions and tonal autism within the framework of a conceptual stringent cryption. His audio compositions consist essentially of complex macromal drones with a surface of aesthetic elegance and beauty. Lately he has also developed a more conceptual form of audio art overlooking subjects such as architecture and urbanism, rats and maggots.

Hausswolff's music has been performed throughout Europe and in North America and Asia. In these concerts a very physical, almost brutal, side of Hausswolff’s aesthetics has blended with a droned and polyfrequential beauty. The audience very often fall into a form of trance, dosing away in their seats. Other times people experiencing the events has thanked him “for the massage” or has expressed a “feeling that the flesh came off the bones” due to the vibrations of the low frequencies used. His music is published by Touch Music, London.

Mike Harding

Mike Harding is a curator & producer, lecturer and music publisher. He has been running Touch [UK-based audio-visual publishing house with Jon Wozencroft since 1982 and started the sister label, Ash International, in 1993 with Robin Rimbaud.

He is the UK Ambassador of Elgaland-Vargaland - [http://www.elgaland-vargaland.org], a member of freq_out and THE FREQ_OUT ORCHESTRA [http://www.freq-out.org] and a member of Field with Lasse Marhaug & Jana Winderen [http://www.field.nu]. He started the project 'Spire' in 2004, which links and develops organ and electronic music, including Fennesz, Philip Jeck, Charles Matthews and others. He has overall responsibilities for running Touch, dealing with artists, websites and general management.

Mike also oversees Touch Music, the publishing part of Touch which deals in the marketing and exploitation of the Touch Music catalogue, which includes works by Christian Fennesz, Chris Watson, Philip Jeck, BJNilsen, Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley and many others. He also curates TouchRadio on behalf of Touch.

BJNilsen

BJNilsen has been active with experimental music for over 20 years. For the past 10 years he has been releasing albums on Touch, making music and sound design for documentary film, television and commercials. He is focused on the sound of nature and its effect on humans, field recordings and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound, often electronically treated. BJNilsen has collaborated with Chris Watson, Hildur Gudnadottir, Philip Jeck and Stilluppsteypa amongst others.

People Like Us

Since 1991 Vicki Bennett has been making CDs, radio, and A/V multimedia under the name People Like Us. By animating and recontextualising found footage collages Vicki gives an equally witty and dark view of popular culture with a surrealistic edge. People Like Us broadcasts an ongoing experimental arts radio and podcast show on WFMU, called "DO or DIY", which, since it began in 2003, has had over a million "listen again" downloads.

Vicki has shown work at, amongst others, Tate Modern, The National Film Theatre, Purcell Room, The ICA, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Sonar in Barcelona, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Barbican, Maxxi in Rome, the BBC and Channel 4. She has also performed radio sessions for the BBC's John Peel, Mixing It, and also CBC, KPFA and many more in the US. There have been features in The Observer, The Wire, NME and BBC website. People Like Us have been commissioned by The Arts Council England, The BBC, Sonic Arts Network, Forma, LUX and Lovebytes amongst others. A new People Like Us CD "Welcome Abroad" was released in May 2011 on Illegal Art.

Zerocrop

Zerocrop is the pseudonym of London based musician Parker, an independent artist who has been releasing albums through the website www.zerocrop.com since 2000. The music is hypnotic mix of vocal melodies and spoken word sequences on unsettling themes, set against a rich backwash of pedal steel, guitars and electronics. Zerocrop has remixed, written songs for and performed with the incomparable Billie Ray Martin and regularly creates the show music for award winning milliner Justin Smith.