Now Hear This Festival – Quadruple Bill

Festival Pass

DJ Noodle Soup and Jia Jia Yong | Mustafa Rafiq | Jacob Audrey Taves | Shawn Pinchbeck | 7 PM | Mile Zero Dance Space

The Program

Konghou Electric – DJ Noodle Soup and Jia Jia Yong

Sawab – Mustafa Rafiq

The Remaining Functionality of Abandoned States – Jacob Audrey Taves *Content warning – there will be loud noises and some stroboscopic effects in video

The Artists

DJ Noodle Soup is Marcus Fung, a classically trained pianist who studied Music Composition and Jazz Piano performance at Grant MacEwan and later studied Expressive Art Therapy. Marcus weaves his love for music with inclusion, working with peoples of different backgrounds, ages, and abilities and he likes to refer to himself as a re-generative culture artist.

Jia Jia Yong is a harpist and composer passionate about showcasing cultural art forms and heritage in contemporary performance art. She performs as a freelance musician at various events in Edmonton and area and enjoys developing collaborative projects with other musicians and artists.

Mustafa Rafiq is a person and artist. Through music, paint and performance he researches relationships among blackness, nature, divinity, sound and time. Born in 1995 to Fijian immigrants, he lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Communicating in a language of errors, hum, crackle, feedback and found sounds and images, audio and visual artist Jacob Audrey Taves explores themes of alienation, post-industrial anxiety and the push and pull between macro and micro social, political and sonic frameworks.

Utilizing the fragile nature of malfunctioning equipment and exposing unintentional media artifacts, Taves’ work gives errors room to develop and to have voices of their own in an emotive, free-form structure. Throughout their various bands and projects they have toured Europe, Canada, USA, Mexico and Japan, sharing billing with Merzbow, Keiji Haino, Venetian Snares, Freida Abtan, John Oswald, Mark Hosler (Negativland), People Like Us, DJ Olive, William Hooker, Zea, Andy Moor, Robert Henke and others.

They have performed at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival (Canada), Hamsylet (Ukraine), Body Machine Body (Estonia), ZNFI (Slovenia), Yaga Gathering (Lithuania), 4D Festival (Japan) and have been an artist in residence at Les Pixels Transverseux (Sevres, France), Hammock (Vancouver, Canada) and PAVED Art and New Media (Saskatoon, Canada).

Shawn Pinchbeck is an award winning Edmonton, Alberta based electroacoustic music composer, sound artist, audio engineer, performer, media artist, curator and educator. His artworks explore all things that sound, often with other elements such as: video, computer interaction, multi-speaker environments, sensors and electronics, interdisciplinary performance and gallery installations. Shawn has eight albums of electroacoustic, film and ambient music.

His music and sound design has been used in numerous films and contemporary dance performances. Currently, the film “Far From the Apple Tree” can seen on Tubi TV; its soundtrack, in collaboration with singer songwriter Rose McDowall, was nominated for best Scottish album of the year in 2020. He regularly performs live sound and visual music works at festivals in Canada and Europe. He has MMus and PhD degrees in electroacoustic music composition from the University of Birmingham, UK where he studied with Jonty Harrison and Erik Oña.

Program Notes

Konghou Electric features a set of 3 pieces performed by DJ Noodle Soup on the mixer and Jia Jia Yong on the konghou. Their musical collaboration explores elements of classical Chinese music and melodies as they interweave with digital effects and textures, finding space between modern and ancient.

The first piece “Wild Geese Descending” combines a classical Chinese piece “Ping Sha Luo Yan” with lofi jazz inspired improvisation. This is followed by “Parting” which brings together drum and bass elements and motifs from “Yangguan San Die”, a classical Chinese piece about the parting of two friends. The set will end with a improvisation between the konghou and the piano as a conversation and encounter of the two instruments.

Sawab – An ongoing exploration on themes for a guitar tuning intended to move the instrument closer into the sound emerging from Mustafas minds eye

The Remaining Functionality of Abandoned States – Systems of organization chug along as they pass their functionality, usefulness or are proven ineffective at achieving their aims. They leave behind broken bits of data, of infrastructure and of human beings while operating on automatic by people who have never met their bosses, as an algorithm or as an abandoned construct running on fumes. Unable to ever balance such fluid and complex equations as those that govern life, every system has its left behinds: the man who tunes every radio to the classic rock station; the quaint believer in the free market.

In more serious terms the left behinds rot away and die, unable to access this or that because of paperwork or negotiations here or there, because of cracks in the functionality of systems that can never achieve balance. Some are left behind in the negative space between where systems of organization should meet, but don’t.

Channeling the detritus of malignant policy and organization by pushing the fractured limits of hardware and software as a metaphoric exploratory process, “The Remaining Functionality of Abandoned States” does not necessarily make a political statement nor raise any questions in and of itself. It builds structures from debris and chewed up, half used bits and makes itself at home in negative space.

“The Remaining Functionality of Abandoned States” gives life to the metaphor by creating audible constructions from left behind errors which interpret the emotional response of being a part of many failed systems while creating a unique new and living form.