Rashad Becker Announced To Tour New Zealand

Berlin-based electronic innovator Rashad Becker will be performing throughout New Zealand for the first time this April, as part of the Audio Foundation's long-running Altmusic series of tours by international experimental artists. Releasing his adventurous works via Bill Kouligas’s PAN label, Becker is world-renowned for both his immersive, detail-rich abstract recordings and legendary attentiveness as mastering and cutting engineer at Basic Channel's Dubplates & Mastering studio. These shows are sure to be a treat for your eardrums, check out the info below...

Rashad Becker (Berlin): Aotearoa – NZ Tour 2018

Wednesday 25th April – Auckland, The Wine Cellar w/ Clinton Watkins and 3 Chocolatiers
Thursday 26th April – Wellington, Meow w/ UMU and Pom Pom
Friday 27th April – Christchurch, darkroom w/ IRD and Smith
Saturday 28th April – Dunedin, The Anteroom w/ Kerian Verain and Sewage

Tickets available HERE via UTR

Listen to 'Dances V' from Rashad Becker's 2016 album Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II...

Press release:

The Audio Foundation is proud to present one of the leading artistic voices in contemporary electronic music, the master of mastering, Rashad Becker.

With his recent releases, Traditional Music of a Notional Species vol. 1 & 2 , Becker has established himself as a pivotal artistic voice within the current historical moment, carrying the history of electronic music forward into an uncertain present with total mastery. Becker approaches this work in relation to an imagined species, with a dexterity honed over years as engineer for the renowned Berlin mastering studio, Dubplates & Mastering.

Sculpting his sonic pallet for an audience on brink of being and non-being, existing as much in speculation or metaphor as in actual fact, Becker injects a sense molten movement into his compositions, before polishing them to a point where a shimmering impression of an alien alloy is instilled. The resulting music is deeply mysterious, sitting uncomfortably in relation to interpretive absolutes. Wavering between synthetic artifce and the productions of organic, if otherworldly, hands Becker's music is an amalgamation of grotesque, polyphonic sweeps and swells which render notional the profound ecstasy, cathartic practices, and sublime frequencies of humanity’s far-fung traditional musics. Within these shimmering sonic forms, at times recalling bowed surfaces, Becker distills the obsessive timbre of synthesis into pulsing, microtonal drones and the fltered tapping of small handheld drums.

Close listening to this insectoid court-music lays bare the necessarily speculative foundations upon which all new art is founded: the base fact of looking forward, toward a future audience which is yet to exist.