FRIDAY 20th from 9pm
Riot Act 2012 Night: Sculpture Presents
An incautious amalgam of mutant electronic forms, mechanical and digital animation techniques, computer sequencing and analogue tape edits, the avant-garde and looney tunes.
Dan Hayhurst plays digital media devices, reel to reel tape recorder, sampler, effectron and walkman.
Reuben Sutherland plays video zoetrope record deck.
Psychophonotropic picture discs printed with intricate visual patterns animate when videoed, beaming looping fragments of surreal, luridly coloured imagery into eyeballs and brains at 25 frames per second – Victorian mechanical imaging technology combined with digital video.
Sculpture’s second zoetropic picture disc LP, Toad Blinker (Dekorder 058) was released in October 2011 and made numerous best of year lists including Boomkat and Wire magazine.
badass Boomkat
like WALL-E, this music portrays business as usual for the rogue unit in a dead world, free to go about and do what it wants, forever Still Single
inhabits the technologically bipolar soundworld of steampunk…the sound design perfectly complements [the] animation….a small revolution The Wire
visually and sonically this is clearly a labour of love 5/5 Norman
Their first audio-video picture disc LP, Rotary Signal Emitter (Dekorder 046) appeared in September 2010 . It was a Wire magazine Top Outer Limits Release of 2010. Arthur magazine described it as the coolest object since the Buddha Machine. Brainwashed said: an act of vinyl alchemy not easily surpassed.
Press:
It’d be a mistake to conclude from the vintage of their gear that Sculpture are pursuing a retro analogue agenda. Their purpose is to explore perceptual thresholds…Sculpture hover at these sensory junctures, invoking the cortical feedback mechanisms of the brain – The Wire
Like a collab between an ADHD Boards Of Canada and a noisier Andrew Douglas Rothbard on LSD. Some crazy shit in here. It’s a techno glitch madhouse with ’50s avant garde electronics & sci-fi sounds, ’60s psych, and ’70s film score snippets….all manner of awesome thrown into a blender, soundtracking the only kind of club I’d ever want to go to. Digital music that most certainly belongs on the turntable – Antigravity Bunny
As with Nurse With Wound at their best, there is a manic energy and deranged sense of joy in these recordings (and indeed animations)…as if a hyperactive toddler had snatched the avant-garde and ran away with it, laughing uncontrollably. As a result, what could have been a dry and merely ‘interesting’ project turns out to be a hugely entertaining joyride – Freq
A dose of lysergic hauntology patching pieces of Radiophonic tape music with freeform drumming, digitally mangled modular synth sounds and all manner of sample textures to pull off an album that sounds like Keith Fullerton Whitman jamming with Roj round at Bruno Spoerri’s place – Boomkat