Free Wire Music Workshop with Alastair Galbraith
6pm @ Gus Fisher Lobby.
The Kenneth Myers Centre
74 Shortland St
Alastair Galbraith
Alastair Galbraith is an experimental musician based in Dunedin and is one of the most admired musicians in the underground music scene worldwide.
Recipient of the 2006 Arts Foundation Laureate, he employs amongst his instruments, violin, bagpipes, softly spoken lyrics, organ, and backwards-guitar to create what has been described as "otherworldly" and an "unerringly emotional" sound. Noted American critic Byron Coley has said "his work is filled with beautiful darkness, worthy of classic designation".
His long, consistent career began in the early 1980s, as leader of The Rip, who recorded two EPs for Flying Nun. He later joined other prominent South Island musicians Peter Jefferies, David Mitchell and Robbie Muir to form Plagal Grind, whose self-titled EP is regarded as a masterpiece of extra-academic experimental music.
Alastair’s solo work has gained a growing international reputation and is known as a benchmark of excellence for the independent, idiosyncratic mode it operates in. His works have been heralded in critical journals and documented by recordings on prestigious American labels. In his recent work, alongside solo recordings, Alastair collaborates with Bruce Russell in the improvisational group, A Handful of Dust, and with Matt De Gennaro, with whom he creates distinctive wire music, using piano wires in a site-specific installation. This will be demonstrated in a workshop before the event.
In 2006 the prestigious North American label, Table of the Elements, archivers of such twentieth century musical geniuses as Charlie Patton and Tony Conrad, gave Alastairs solo work the status of contemporary classics by reissuing his albums Morse/Gaudylight and Talisman. Alastair’s album of song-based material, the 20-track Orb, was released on his own label Nextbestway, via Global Routes, early in 2008 and received a glowing full-page review in the February edition of icon UK magazine The Wire.
Later in 2008 the New York Label Azul Discographica will release his latest collaboration with Bruce Russell – (under the moniker Handful of Dust) – the album Panegyrics.
Alastair is presently constructing a glass ’armonica’, an instrument invented in 1761 by Benjamin Franklin. He is sourcing his materials locally and has already given several performances on the not quite complete instrument. He is also designing his second “glass tube fire organ”. The first is in the collection of the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui.
http://www.myspace.com/alastairgalbraithplagalgrindtherip
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Peter Wright
Over the course of a decade, Wright has etched his name in glass in the annals of drone-world superstardom. Alongside Phil Nilblock, Robert Horton, and Tom Carter, Peter Wright is on top of the drone music world, both in the sheer amount of astounding music he creates, but also the effortlessly way he makes sounds that are completely indecipherable but strangely familiar.
Words like atonal and avant-garde come to mind when contemplating Wrights sound but such terms are misleading when his music remains so accessible despite its experimental character.
Wright first started playing music semi-seriously in Christchurch during 1990, recording un-tutored noise-pop on a four track. Following several song-based solo projects Wrights music started to take a more abstract hue around 1996, finally culminating in a more refined guitar-based drone sound that he has worked with almost continuously since the late 90s.
After several self released CDrs on his Apoplexy label, Wright moved to the UK and had his first proper CD release in 2003 on US label Last Visible Dog, followed by a string of CDs issued on various US and European imprints.
http://www.distantbombs.com
