Rafael Toral has been deeply involved with rock, ambient, contemporary, electronic, and free jazz music in different periods of his life. In the last 15 years he’s been thinking and practicing an understanding of silence as “space,” with a clear function in music creation but also as a metaphor for social relationships and a statement on information and sensory overload. The resulting music, “melodic without notes, rhythmic with no beat, familiar but strange, meticulous but radically free – riddled with paradox but full of clarity and space,” has been described as “a brand of electronic music far more visceral and emotive than that of his cerebral peers.”
Currently, along the sound of slow motion harmonies over what sounds like an electronic rainforest in Jupiter, Rafael Toral picks up the guitar again to develop a new synthesis between several layers of past and future. An ambitious project beyond ambient, drone and electronic free-jazz, catching Toral’s “third phase” in its early stages. Performing solo or in numerous collaborations (including Jim O’Rourke, Sei Miguel, Chris Corsano, John Edwards, Evan Parker, Tatsuya Nakatani, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth, Rhys Chatham, Lee Ranaldo, Eiko Ishibashi, and many others), he has been touring throughout Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.
truth in the well is the ephemeral experimental project of multidisciplinary artist/musician Leigh Lugosi, featuring a rotating cast of collaborators. truth in the well runs the gamut of genre; it could be called shoegaze, country, trip hop, punk, folk or noise, depending on the time of day and what direction the wind blows. what remains constant is Lugosi’s commitment to exploring the ways in which genre’s soundtrack a cultural moment, a landscape, a social context. popular music is a funhouse of mirrors in which truth in the well stops to ponder their reflection every couple of feet. this is a practice in shapeshifting… nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed.
for send + receive v.26, truth in the well presents subliminal verse party mix 2024: a live mixtape/reimagining of popular music found in youth culture in winnipeg’s north end circa late 1990’s through early 2000’s. for this performance, Lugosi will be joined by Tim Alexander and Emily Sinclair (Virgo Rising).
“Wind Waves / Rumble Mumble” (2023) – 22:00
video: Katherine Liberovskaya / sound: Phill Niblock + Francisco Janes
“The last project we completed together with Phill in the summer of 2023 at an informal residency in Lithuania at the country residence of artist friends Francisco Janes and Jurate Jarulyte.
A single 22-minute long-sequence shot from a fixed point of the different wave patterns the gusts of wind were making on the surface of the water of a pond, as well as the life of the fauna and flora around it, on a very windy day, accompanied by a collage of sounds captured and mixed by Phill Niblock, assisted by Francisco Janes, in the surrounding area.
The fixed point of view of the video was from the veranda of the house on a pond of Francisco and Jurate in the Lithuanian countryside where Phill and I spent entire long August days with them and their young daughter Carolina. And the soundtrack was derived from audio recorded by Phill during long drives we took along the unpaved gravelly roads through the woods and fields of the environs that Phill and Francisco processed and mixed in Francisco’s studio there.
Originally we were each working on a piece of our own. Phill on a sound piece (Rumble Mumble), me on a video piece (Wind Waves). But when we both finished our pieces we discovered that they were the same length! and when we combined them they fit together so well ! Like some of the Cage / Cunningham collaborations… So this video-audio piece was meant to be: ‘Wind Waves / Rumble Mumble.'”
Katherine Liberovskaya is a Canadian intermedia artist based in NYC. Involved in experimental video since the 80’s, she has produced numerous single-channel video art pieces, video installations and video performances, as well as works in other media, that have been shown around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of moving image with sound/music in various both ephemeral and fixed forms (projections, installations, performances), notably through collaborations with many composers and sound artists in improvised live video+sound concert situations where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. For over 22 years she collaborated with composer/intermedia artist Phill Niblock on various live, video and installation projects. Other frequent collaborators include: Dafna Naphtali, Keiko Uenishi, Shelley Hirsch, Barbara Held, Mia Zabelka, Al Margolis (IF,BWANA), David Watson, among many others. In addition to her art work she curates events in experimental video/film, sound/music and A/V performance, notably the yearly Screen Compositions evenings at EI NYC since 2005 and, since 2006 the OptoSonic Tea salons (co-curated with Ursula Scherrer) in NYC and various nomadic locations in North America and Europe as well as on-line during the Covid pandemic. In 2014 she completed a PhD in art practice entitled “Improvisatory Live Visuals: Playing Images Like a Musical Instrument” at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. She is currently the artistic director of Experimental Intermedia NYC.
Phill Niblock (1933-2024) was an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60’s he was making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world. He made thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres generating many other tones in the performance space. He said: “What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.” Simultaneously, he would present films / videos looking at the movement of people working. Since 1985, he was the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York – www.experimentalintermedia.org – where he had been an artist/member since 1968. He was the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI from 1973 to 2023 and the curator of EI’s XI Records label until 2023. Phill Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode, Matiere Memoire, Room 40, and Touch labels. DVDs of films and music are available on the Extreme label and Von Archive. Until 1995 he was a professor of film, video and photography at The College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. In 2014, he was the recipient of the prestigious John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Francisco Janes is a Portuguese media artist and film-maker currently based in Lithuania whose activity includes site-specific installations, electro-acoustic composition, performance, photography, film and video. Conceptual in nature yet intricately related to (f)actual reality, his work is strongly grounded in an idea of experience, privileging perception over language. It has been investigating, among other things, notions of montage and duration akin to the preoccupations of contemporary cinema, however taking the indeterminate permutations of phenomena and the observer in time as the key element in the ontological becoming of spaces. He holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and was a Fellow at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York. His work has shown in galleries, museums and non-institutional spaces in Europe, Asia and the United States.
Presented in collaboration with GroundSwell.
ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION
There are twelve steps to the main entrance of the Sudanese Canadian Community Centre, but to the right of the stairs there is a street level entrance in front of a cutaway sidewalk and an elevator to the main floor and mezzanine immediately inside the doors.