TICKETS
DOORS 7 / MUSIC 8
Bex Burch: Whether combining the rhythmic timbres of wood, metal and audience claps or duetting with the atmospheric and elegiac echoed sounds of water dripping into a metal basin, Bex Burch is a composer, percussionist, instrument maker and improviser who emphasises space, repetition and aspects of chaos. These themes characterise an ongoing approach she describes as “messy minimalism”. Burch’s critically acclaimed 2023 solo album, 'There is only love and fear' was released via Chicago’s International Anthem and named The Guardian's Contemporary Album of the Month. She runs the label, Vula Viel Records, the domestic music event, Kantine Musik, and has collaborated with influential artists including Thomas Sekgura, Leafcutter John as part of ‘Boing!’, Tamar Osborn and Danalogue in ‘Flock’, Peter Zummo, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Ben LaMar Gay, Dan Bitney and Macie Stewart.
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/there-is-only-love-and-fear
Che Chen is a musician, multi-instrumentalist (guitar, bass, percussion, winds and homemade instruments), bandleader and concert organizer based in Queens, NY. An energetic presence in New York City’s experimental underground since the early 2000s, he has tread an idiosyncratic path from noise-song duo True Primes to playing in groups led by drone minimalists and Japanese outsider artists, to studying guitar in Mauritania and improvising with veterans from NYC’s storied free jazz community. He has been organizing concerts for as long as he has been playing them, stemming from the belief that music is social and must take place in community. In 2012, he and “plywood crate” player Rick Brown founded 75 Dollar Bill, a group with flexible personnel whose hybrid music synthesizes modal and rhythmic concepts from the “non-Western” world, Sun Ra’s space chords and the minimalist and No Wave histories of their hometown. Chen’s solo performances explore improvisation as an extension of listening, setting the spontaneous invention of his playing within electronic drones, noise and an immersive sense of space that attempts to invoke the meditative, ecstatic and the sounds of everyday life.