LCMF 2019: On Hauntology

Eva-Maria Houben
‘A peaceful, silent place’ (2019)
(world premiere)(LCMF commission)

Maggie Nicols
Live

Susan Hiller
‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ (1984)

Rosemary Brown
Selected piano works

Performers:
Eva-Maria Houben
Maggie Nicols
Siwan Rhys

‘Sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny – a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there.’ (David Toop, ‘Sinister Resonance’)

A night of technomancy, glossolalia and divining the dead. We present rarely heard works composed in the 1960s and 1970s by Liszt, Schubert and Beethoven as dictated to spiritual medium Rosemary Brown, witness the extraordinary, almost possessed, vocal improvisations of Maggie Nicols, and screen a classic video piece by artist Susan Hiller, ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’, that transforms the TV into a primitive hearth, inviting us to see ‘the TV set [that] exists in everybody’s living room as a potential vehicle of reverie’.

To end a 45-minute new commission for organ and piano from one of the leading members of the Wandelweiser collective of composers, Eva-Maria Houben, in whose works you feel like you’re eavesdropping somehow on the past, teetering on the edge of the sounding present.