For our third edition of the year, we’re proud to invite a legendary outsider, The Space Lady to the Musikbrauerei. The Berlin-premiere of Japanese “sound painter” Sugai Ken will complete the special evening.
Transcendentally beautiful, The Space Lady’s music is returning to Earth. Transmitting messages of peace and harmony, The Space Lady began her odyssey on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, then San Francisco ten years later, playing versions of contemporary pop music with an accordion and dressed flamboyantly. Following the theft and destruction of her accordion , The Space Lady invested in a then-new Casio keyboard, complete with a phase shifter and headset mic, birthing an otherworldly new dimension to popular song that has captured the imaginations of the underground and its leading exponents ever since.
After years of releasing albums in Japan, the electronic composer Sugai Ken crosses over to America with his new album UkabazUmorezU. It is made from field recordings he took from “a local performing arts center” and “his daily surroundings”. A lived experience of traditional Japanese music’s conversation with environment, and vice versa, forms the melodic make-up and metaphysical philosophy conditioning UkabazUmorezU. Upon imagining a landscape, Sugai decomposes the image (and the images within the image) and replaces it with a sound representation – an artifactual terrain, tethered to but abstracted from the natural world.
With a melodic cluster dripping into a pool of dark water, UkabazUmorezU’s arrival ripples as an apex in Sugai Ken’s continued construction of a deeply resonant, enveloping sound world. Upon contact, UkabazUmorezU gently and generously unfurls across aural alleys and streets mundanely but mystically detailed with recontextualized Japanese rituals and tradition.
Thomas Lucker is interested in the relationship between the memory and the image. His sculptures are the product of a photographic transfer onto a carved limestone. Once the stones are exposed to the light in the darkroom, they become works, which are both unstable and are charged with tension. On the one hand, Lucker’s pieces balance between photography and stonework, on the other, it is a relation between two-dimensional images and three-dimensional sculptures.
The Space Lady (US) and Sugai Ken (JP), Decks: Bill Kouligas, Art in the Bunker: Thomas Lucker
Wednesday, 18th April 2018 | Doors 20:00 | Start 20:30 CET
Musikbrauerei | Greifswalder Strasse 23a in 10407 Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg
Photo by Roland Owsnitzki.
The Space Lady | Sugai Ken | Facebook event page
There is limited capacity to the salon. Tickets only available at the door. Please be on time.
