This Saturday, August 31, the excellent Wysing Festival takes place at the Wysing Arts Centre near Bourn in Cambridgeshire.
The line-up features a mass of ace electronic experimenters – Venetian Snares, Cut Hands, Rusell Haswell and Luke Abbott – who are on the bill alongside spoken word and film screenings across three stages. There’ll also be a set of artists’ stalls, hosting various small publishers, labels and galleries among others, as well as some fancy techy activities for families – head over to Wysing’s site for full details and tickets.
One of the events on the main stage will be Vociferous, an audio-visual collaboration between New York-based Israeli artist Keren Cytter, Keira Fox from unhinged London noise trio Maria & The Mirrors and Vindicatrix, David Aird’s electro-industrial project. We asked Cytter, Fox and Wysing curator Gareth Bell-Jones to give us an introduction.
Gareth Bell-Jones: I’ve known Keira for a number of years and worked with her before, her band played an incredible set at Wysing’s festival last year. Keira mentioned one time that she had recently been asked by Keren to play at an event in Frankfurt. I’d been a fan of Keren’s work for some time and whilst she was talking I just thought it made total sense for these two to work together. The themes, drives, complex and sometimes illogical emotional constructions that make up Keren’s videos and performances seemed to have such a cross over with the pounding extremes and incoherence of their music. It felt like a perfect match. It was exciting to imagine what might come from this collaboration and how this relationship might work between the two. The two had hung out a bit in Frankfurt and Keira was instantly taken by the suggestion of working with Keren. I got in touch with Keren to ask if she’d also be interested. She immediately responded that she would love to.
Can you tell us about anything you’ve begun working on so far during the residency? What roles have you taken on?
Keren Cytter: I made the videos and the script. They made the music. It was important that their position in the space will be combined and make sense all together with the sound video and concept. That’s what we did in the residency mostly – preparing the videos and music and testing them all together.
Keira Fox: We – me and Charlie Feinstein of Maria & The Mirrors and David Aird of Vindicatrix – have worked on the sounds and vocals for the video works, as well as the performative part of the show, all of us having various roles.
Have there been any challenges so far?
KC: Generally it all has to make sense so it looks as one harmonic piece and not two parts that are forced to be together.
KF: Not really, just an intensive time.
Keren – what attracted you to using found mobile phone footage for the piece?
KC: I didn’t want to force my style on Keira, Charlie and David and I was busy with other projects and didn’t have the time to think a shoot another video.
Will the project live up to its title, Vociferous?
KC: Def yes.
