Human Resources
410 Cottage Home St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
VOLUME and Last Visible Dog records are pleased to present Erika Bell, Astor, and a trio performance by Sean McCann, Matthew Sullivan, and Alex Twomey on Tuesday, October 23rd, at Human Resources.
Erika Bell will be presenting a new, four-channel work titled “Saint-Girons,” which was inspired by a recent field recording she took in a workshop led by Christina Kubisch. The recording captures both the electromagnetic sounds (via Kubisch’s headphones) and the acoustic atmospheric sounds of Saint-Girons, France in real-time. This field recording will be paired with, and accompanied by, a small ensemble.
Originally hailing from Australia, Astor’s music can range from claustrophobic to cosmic while incorporating a wide range of techniques spanning the history of electronic music. Their most recent solo album, 2018’s Lina in Nida on UK-based Penultimate Press, featured a spoken word contribution from Estonian artist Kris Lemslau alongside a proposed anthem for Britain during a potential invasion by ISIS. This event will be a rare opportunity for fans of field recordings, musique concrete, dark ambient, and fringe electro-acoustic music to experience this artist in a live setting.
Sean McCann, Alex Twomey, and Matthew Sullivan will perform as a trio, bringing together three highly notable LA-based artists involved in sacred and propane music. This will be their debut live performance, following the release of their cassette, The Bird.
Christopher Reid Martin will provide music between sets.
Tickets for the event may be purchased for $9.99 in advance or for $12 at the door.
About the Artists
Astor is an Australian publisher, event curator, and sound artist who is now residing in London, United Kingdom. Under this guise, they deploy a wide variety of techniques including field recording, musique concrete, electronics, and spatialisation. All of these forms are approached with a sense of bypassing the clichés imbedded within in order to coerce a sound world which is simultaneously contemporary, foreign, beautiful, unsettling and engaging. Astor has released 2 acclaimed LPs on Kye (USA) and has a third ‘Lina in Nida’ on Penultimate Press (UK).
Erika Bell is a Los Angeles-based composer and instrumentalist. Her work comes from a place of intuition, preference and the personal, with an emphasis on exploring the timbre of sonic realms. Bell often derives from found text, objects, and sounds, and juxtaposes strict notation with elements of openness in the use of time and material. With her work slowly and methodically unraveling she allows full immersion into the audible phenomenon of beating, cyclical melodic/harmonic loops, and washes of texture. Bell’s Sucking Stones (2017) for large-ensemble was performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. Phil’s 2017 Noon to Midnight concert. She has received commissions from the wulf., premiered her large-ensemble work < | > (2018) in Dog Star Orchestra’s fourteenth festival and will have a piece performed at the Göteborg Art Sounds festival in Sweden this September. Currently Bell is preparing two album-length audio releases of her music and an installation version of her large-ensemble work Moving Like Icebergs Against Each Other (2018).
Erika holds a BFA in music composition from California Institute of the Arts where she studied with Michael Pisaro and Laura Steenberge.
