A night of extremes: Joining us from Athens, Greece, sound artist ILIOS returns to the Bay Area after 20 years to reunite with R. Jencks and Michael Gendreau in an onslaught of subsonic frequencies, noise, and astounding vibrations.
ILIOS (Athens, Greece)
https://soundilios.bandcamp.com/
http://www.siteilios.gr/
Instagram: antifrost_sound
Active since the early ‘90s in sound art and image, ILIOS has been exploring the extremes of sound and image derived phenomena. Through constant change in his sound palette touching and surpassing the limits of the sound spectrum, flirting with the opposites from ultra-orthodox silence to ultra-catholic noise ILIOS advocates for an anti-career. Some of ILIOS’ recorded output has been regarded by the media as: “the sound of death” or “the most enervating record imaginable.”
By 2024 ILIOS has presented his work live more than 400 times in various venues and festivals in 38 countries in Asia, Europe, Oceania, South and North America, pushing the space and body resistances to a hard test pursuing a state of alert for the human senses. ILIOS has run the Antifrost label since 1997, and is also half of Mohammad (MMMD) band.
Releases on: Antifrost, PAN, Entr’Acte and many other labels.
Curatorial works in Spain, Greece, and South America.
Music for multiple film, dance, and theatre works.
R. Jencks (Oakland)
Instagram: thanateros66
Oakland, California based Experimental / Industrial Noise artist. Since the late ‘80s performing as Azog, SIXES along with Southern California rhythm and noise outfits Crash Worship, Pure and Physics through the 90’s. Also Deathroes, Serpents, Sadistre, Summons, Carrion, Preyers, several years moonlighting with Burmese, Dispirit, Sutekh Hexen and solo as Cruor Incendia and R. Jencks. Numerous collaborations over the years have included Dave Ed (Neurosis), Scott Arford (Radiosonde), Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant), John Wiese (Sissy Spacek), Gerritt Wittmer (in Deathroes), Daniel Menche, Smegma, and Zbigniew Karkowski, while catapulting and contributing to several other projects as well. Also the impresario/curator of underground venue event space in Oakland: Terminal (International Unlimited) and the imprint Terminal (Industries Unlimited) 2000-Present, as well as Pure Studios (San Diego) 1994-1999.
Michael Gendreau (San Francisco)
https://www.michaelgendreau.net/
Instagram: michael.gendreau
“All structures on the surface of the earth vibrate, nothing is at rest: each place or building vibrates differently, depending on its material properties, dimensions, and peripheral components, as well as the sources around it. Every building speaks a unique language.” As a composer and performer, Michael Gendreau chooses to work with or against a venue. His live performances are physical and sensory experiences. They are the result of different phases of research and recordings, such as formal design and structural analysis of the room and its environment, as the composition material is drawn from the concert itself. – Francisco Meirino
Gendreau will be driving the concert space using mechanical feedback from the structure, and the building’s natural structural and acoustical resonant frequencies. The latter are recorded before the concert and developed as its specific and preferred language. If you have heard him do this before, this time it will be different. We all experience pure sound and vibration differently, according to our unique physical and constitutional character, and he will be making real-time decisions to personalize this experience. This is living attention to, and interaction with, the performance situation, not just his own, but that of the building and its occupants. Reacting, interacting. He has forms and frameworks he likes to work within, but the decisions about the matter of the sound and vibration, conscious and not, from one moment to the next, constitute an open work.
Michael GENDREAU has composed and performed solo, as well as in several group configurations, since 1979. His former group Crawling With
Tarts (1983 – 1998) used ideas revolving around elementalism and pre-language states. Gendreau has elaborated on these ideas while adding concepts based on his studies in physics, and philosophies attending to temporal and environmental persistence, applications of parataxis, and experiments with small motors and turntable mechanisms.
His performances have involved sounds from one-off transcription discs cast by others in the middle of the last century, and those cut in his studio using a decrepit lathe. More recently, Gendreau has sought to extend these later studies, and to use buildings as speakers. He records the infrasonic vibrations of the performance space and in the
concert, and he uses the structure’s resonances as an additional instrument in his site- specific compositions. These practices are based in part on his current work as an acoustician, working primarily on low-vibration and noise design for buildings.