On Sunday May 24th in Austin, TX  British musician Keith Rowe and Norwegian video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen will present an interactive and interconnected video and sound piece whereby video is audio generated and produced in real time with no pre-recorded images. The project deals with a precarious situation both artistically and technically resulting in a music/video performance that cannot be easily preconceived. 

British guitarist Keith Rowe, is one of the most influential electroacoustic free improvisors of the last 50 years. He has contributed to the very definition of a new vocabulary for guitar playing. His prepared “tabletop” guitar is plugged into a cacophony of “perfectly ordinary reality” and played in virtually every conceivable manner, with every possible tool. Rowe starts by exciting the strings of his prepared guitar with an array of eclectic objects, directly referencing the work of artists Duchamp and Rauschenberg. The use of objects including violin bows, iron bars, library cards, rubber erasers, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, steel wool, office supplies and other common materials are applied to the instrument in unorthodox ways. During his performance he also captures live radiograbs, shortwave and number stations creating electrifying radio sound collages which blend seamlessly together and offer startling musical commentary. His signature sound has been described by his fans as the quintessence of “noise” guitar music and “… dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien”. He was a member of the groundbreaking British improvisation group AMM.

Kjell Bjørgeengen’s live works feature the production of flicker videos, the flicker is sound given video sync, thus becoming video and revealing the self -identity of the two. The flicker image is perhaps the most simple and fundamental image we can think of, the oscillation between shades of light and darkness, given from the outside as a simple binary pairing of the visual experience. 

On Wednesday May 20th 2015 from 7pm-9pm Kjell Bjorgeenegen and Keith Rowe will be in conversation at Studium 908 E 5th St #106 Austin, TX. There will be a Q&A with the audience after the talk. Please come and join us! Talk is donation based.