Tuesday 19 February 2019, 7.30pm
Since the debut of QUEST in the beginning of 2014, a concert that originated an album in the same year released by Clean Feed/Shhpuma, Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes have maintained a regular collaboration that merges piano and electronics.
The album release was followed by several concerts in the main concert halls in Portugal, Novas Frequência Festival (Rio de Janeiro), MADEIRADIG (Madeira), Rooster Gallery (New York) and Book Fair (Praia, Cape Vert). In recent years, the duo has made two soundtracks - "The Glory of Filmmaking in Portugal” (2015) by Manuel Mozos and “Penúmbria" (2016) by Eduardo Brito - and a version of "Music for Amplified Toy Pianos" by John Cage for the series "Old New Electronic Music Sessions ", promoted by Digitópia / Casa da Música (Porto). With artist and cellist Ricardo Jacinto, they created HARMONIES, an experimental tribute to the life and work of Erik Satie, in the form of a show and a record (Shhpuma, 2016) commissioned by four Portuguese leading cultural institutions. In the context of BRG Collective, the trio made concerts in Berlin, Valência and Dumfries.
In 2017, responding to a comission by the Westway Lab Festival, they composed an original work for piano, electronics and ensemble, that was premiered in April with the local orchestra (Orquestra de Guimarães). The orchestration and arrangements by José Alberto Gomes amplified the sonority that characterizes QUEST and the orchestra was taken out of its comfort zone. This work, titled “at the still point of the turning world” - a verse of poem “Burnt Norton” by T. S. Eliot -, that was released as an album by Australian label Room40. In July they presented the concert in CURTAS, Short-film Festival of Vila do Conde - Portugal with visuals by Miguel C. Tavares.
Yoshiki Ichihara is a composer, improviser and sound designer. He works within several genres such as electroacoustic, noise, ambient, sound art and Rock. He studied composition under Jonathan F. Lee and Yuriko Kojima, Max/MSP under Takeyoshi Mori and won CCMC MOTUS prize in 2015.
https://yshk-chr.bandcamp.com/
Noa Segev is an architect, an artist and a designer based in London and Tel Aviv. After she completed her architecture studies at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, she was invited by the academy to be a teacher assistant. She received an honorable mention for her team proposal in the “Tel Aviv Housing Competition 2017”.
Currently at the final stage of MFA studies as part of the Spatial Design and Performance programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
Noa and Yoshiki started their collaboration last year. They joined forces to work on Noa's final MFA project in spatial performance and design at the AA school of architecture, which will premiere in late February this year.
The project, "Schweig und Sprecher " named after Noa's grandparents' surnames and meaning "Silence and Spokesman," will embody the complex relations between speech, silence, sound, history, and architecture in space mainly through the use of music and glass.
The installation will be made out of drinking glasses from Noa's great-great-grandfather factory and will emphasize different layers of reality and time via reflections, projections, and sound. The glasses will serve as the generator of music and also as a filter for the sound and movement the performers will produce.
At Café OTO Yoshiki and Noa will show the sonic aspect of the project and will examine, destabilize and potentialize the relations between objects and subjects, silence and speech, history and future, and in that manner tell, in the most impersonal way, a personal story.
