Ectoplasm Girls is an audiovisual ongoing project initiated in 2007 by sisters Nadine Byrne and Tanya Byrne, with the intention of expressing their joint fascination and experiences with death and dreams, manifesting these subjects trough sound and video.
The Byrne sisters could very well be ghosts from the mid-80s cassette culture of DIY electronics, industrial antipathy, and corrosive psychedelia. As half-formed / half-forgotten songs of deconstructed piano, looped abstractions, and bad vibes, the Ectoplasm Girls arrangements aren’t too dissimilar from those that Zola Jesus primitively sketched on her earliest recordings.
http://https://youtu.be/kJMBMv9Gk_s
Like Zola Jesus, voice is also key to the hauntological pop that the Ectoplasm Girls create, although they take it in an entirely different direction. At times, they adopt a baby-faced atonal lunacy with shrill lullabies above their murky tunes, abstracted rhythms, and macabre electronics; and at others, they utter mantras in dull monotone as if these strangely seductive passages were culled from their own exorcisms.
On their last album TxN, “Sexodrome” takes all the right cues from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, with vocal fragments orbiting a skeletal rhythmic plod that’s all gotta reference Cronenberg in some way shape or form. A blast of hurricane noise launches “If Your Mother Asks” which surges forward through driving techno stomp akin to TG’s ceaseless march “Discipline” and complementary slashes of noise and vocal gaspings.
Tonight’s programme is presented in cooperation with Zabriskie bookshop, where Nadine Byrne will tomorrow, Friday 22nd January, present selected video works and discuss with the audience – an evening under the title “A different Gesture”.
Presented by Digital in Berlin. Check out our Facebook page to win tickets.
Ectoplasm Girls
Thursday, 21 January 2016 | 20:00 CET
Ausland | Lychener Str. 60 | 10437 Berlin
soundcloud.com/ectoplasmgirls | ausland.berlin | Event on Facebook
