S.Glass and People Skills (USA) announce 2023 Aotearoa Tour!
24 October - Auckland – Audio Foundation with Ducklingmonster
25 October – Wellington – Pyramid Club with P Wits
27/28 October – Dunedin – Lines of Flight Festival
02 November – Lyttleton Coffee Company with Bruce Russell & Luke Shaw
The elements of what is very broadly thought of experimental music have long ceased to be confined to the works of serious composers and academia. From rock musicians such as Frank Zappa and Sonic Youth, through soundtracks for mainstream thrillers and sci-fi, and TV shows about paranormal, to more recent cultural phenomena like ASMR (a kind of NPR-style update on Pauline Oliveros’s “deep listening” concept) and the TikTok’r known as There I Ruined It (who electronically manipulates short excerpts of popular musics), this surprisingly inclusive genre can now be appreciated not solely for its processes and the rigors of performing demanding compositions, and has an audience, with their ears now trained and their aesthetics stretched, that can enjoy it according to “how it feels” and other subjective criteria. The austerity that was once posited as inherent to this music’s nature has been stripped away.
S•Glass’s audio collages combine tape music, processing, voice, found sound, electroacoustics, and chance operations. Each show is a live mix of prerecorded audio. Live voice and objects are sometimes incorporated (dental floss, aluminum foil, wind-up toys, lunch box, cabbage), accompanied by self-shot video (wobbling textures, out-of-sync layers, general disorientation). S•Glass is a founder of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, Glands of External Secretion, This Is Yvonne Lovejoy, and was the main driver behind Bananafish. Cesspool of the Angels LP (Minimum Table Stacks, NYC), and CDRs Thinking of You, Naked and The Butcher of Valencia (l’Esprit de l’Escalier, SF) are his most recent releases.
People Skills is the solo project of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, artist Jesse S. Dewlow. In the mid 2000s he began to document his experiments in improvised song and sound collage using only found, free materials. The recordings usually take the form of simple songs, most often employing slow pop formulas to caricature listenable music. His practice however is informed by deconstructive post-structural and Fluxus theory and conceptually pulls at the space between automation, art and amateurism.
Blending budget collage and negligent songcraft, Dewlow’s work is defined by inconspicuous dis-ease more than by genre. People Skills is his sonic altar to the awkward, isolated reflections of the human experience.
People Skills material has been released by Siltbreeze, Blackest Ever Black, I Dischi Del Barone, Alien Passengers, Digital Regress and Kashual Plastik among others.
DUCKLINGMONSTER is an audio visual artist from Onehunga, New Zealand. She
reimagines out-of-bounds areas through a range of practices, including music,
video, comics, and performance, with a focus on disruption. Publicly, her work has
predominantly been in noisy sound, most notably in groups The Futurians, O-Pus and File Folder and as a solo artist. Sonically she utilises hand-built and broken electronics, field
recordings, presets, drum machine, keyboard, and vocals.
