Tough Sell and Liquid Library Join Forces to bring you an evening of performance straddling the borders between conceptual art and experimental music: Broken Violins, Broken TV Broadcasts and Broken Rhythms.

MARIJA KOVAČEVIĆ: MUSIC FOR BROKEN VIOLINS (New York)

Serbian born, New York City based violinist Marija Kovačević works in classical, experimental and improvised music and theatre. 

'While working as a violin teacher at the Brooklyn Music School in 2020, Kovačević came upon a storage closet full of broken violins and took them home, imagining that the discarded instruments might have an afterlife as an installation for experimentation by non-musicians. Playing around with them herself, she soon discovered a heterogeneous world of rich sounding potential within the unpredictable, once-precious objects.

Learning how to work with and from each broken violin and bow, Kovačević has since developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary of dragging strings, playing cracks, bowing broken bodies, wrapping loose hair, and creaking pegs. In performance, there is a minimalist, ritualistic structure to her unembellished studies, as each instrument is approached in procession, with silence in between each visceral deviance from the accepted technical norms.' (Adrian Rew, Ergot Records)

https://marijakovacevic.bandcamp.com/

SPEED ARCHER (Bristol)

aka Matthew Olden/I Am The Mighty Jungulator is a computer artist who makes interesting things by programming his computer. He makes a wide range of computer programs that make music, do visuals and manipulate data. He’s very interested in what he can find out by re-ordering data.

The films are made by implementing the Rogalsky process. The Rogalsky process removes the noise from popular culture until all we have left is the silences between the words whilst the actor performs a speechless mime. The background noise of the body speaking. Imposing a monk-like disciplined silence causes no inner peace here, the space in which thoughts are perceived are as noisy as the chattering between.

The process reveals the emotion and shibboleth inferred by the pauses, stutters and vocal ticks, a hidden world obscured by words. Reactive tokens that make the stories become less specific and more universal.

https://matthewolden.co.uk/

ROBIN FOSTER (Bristol)

Robin Foster is a musician and performer based in Bristol. Through the performance practice of rummaging, he uses found objects to explore ideas relating to viscerality in performance, and the relationship of humans to the things we surround ourselves with. Exploring the sounds of found objects, rummaging asks that we consider the sonic potentials inherent in everything around us, and by doing so suggests that we might be able to rethink our relationship with the material world. It abandons notions of technique or virtuosity, instead encouraging the idea of listening with our hands, that we might be able to create a direct connection between body and sound.

https://fractalmeat.bandcamp.com/album/junkpolitik

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£10 standard / £7 concessions (NOTAFLOF - please email toughsellzine@gmail.com if money is a barrier)