Zebulon Café Concert
2478 Fletcher Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039
VOLUME and Last Visible Dog Records are pleased to announce the debut live performance of Korea Undok Group, alongside sets by Glochids, Erika Bell, and Shelter Death.
An artist collective and cassette label based in Winnipeg, Canada, and founded in 2015, Korea Undok Group has steadily gained recognition for their understated, haunting, and compelling approach to tape music. Their prolific output includes 21 sold-out cassettes self-released under a variety of names, including Sargasso Sea, Purple Circles, and Angel’s Egg, and an eponymous LP on UK-based label Penultimate Press. Defying ready classification, their music inhabits a sonic territory that evokes comparison to James Rushford and Joe Talia’s Manhunter or the more downtempo, drone-heavy work of The Dead C. This evening will present a unique opportunity to experience their first-ever, and potentially only, live performance.
This rare, once-in-a-lifetime event will be accompanied by performances by California-based artists Glochids, Erika Bell, and Shelter Death. Combining a diverse array of influences and approaches to sound, from musique concrète and vocal-based work to noise and performance art, their work highlights a number of fascinating and vital directions in contemporary experimental music.
This will also be the tape release event for Shelter Death‘s “I Cannot Hear the Filthy City” on LA-based label Crystalline Morphologies. For this performance, Christopher Reid Martin will be joined by New Zealander Andrew Scott for the latter’s final Los Angeles performance before relocating to the Bay Area.
Special thanks to Gregg Kowalsky and Suzy Poling for generously lending equipment crucial to the production of this show.
About the Artists
Korea Undok Group is a collective artist/label based in Winnipeg, known for releasing under-the-radar cassette editions from other unknown or uncredited Canadian artists. Piano driven, tape-heavy music. This performance marks the first live outing of KUG, and will be performed by a single representative of the group.
Originally from the Sonoran Desert, the interface of raw nature is Glochids and abstract electronics. With releases on Weird Ear, Ascetic House and Phinery, the work is sound collage of James Roemer. Currently based in Oakland, California; composed synthetic & concrète.
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.
Shelter Death is the audio/performance project amongst many by Christopher Reid Martin, sound, video, and performance artist now residing in Los Angeles. Initially started strictly as experimentation with sound in Orange County, unorthodox recording methods and unconventional sound sources such as broken amps and manipulated radio signals were used to produce a handful of cd-rs and tapes released on Via Injection, Irrational Tenttent, and A.C.T.I.O.N. Rarely performed live, Shelter Death has played a handful of west coast shows from 2012-2015 incorporating ladders, overhead projectors, and sound into a subversively narrative expressive performance. Los Angeles experimental label Crystalline Morphologies will be releasing S. Death’s I Cannot Hear the Filthy City in August of 2018 marking three years since the last release.
