IMA_lounge: Brofist, Rashad Becker, Bill Kouligas, rdlk & Friday Dunard

The first IMA_Lounge highlight of 2014 is the audiovisual live set by the newly founded duo »Brofist«, the members of which are also part of the Live-Coding band Benoît and the Mandelbrots.

Furthermore, with Rashad Becker and Bill Kouligas, two artists of the unconventional label PAN are presented whose releases alternate between Noise, Drone, Sound Art and Club Music. And, last but not least, with surfaces, fiddling and driving beats, Karlsruhe producers and DJs rdlk & Friday Dunard provide for a danceable evening on the ZKM music balcony.
 

The Evening's Musicians

Bill Kouligas
works as producer, DJ and graphic designer in Berlin and New York City. Born in Athens, and brought up on post Punk, New Wave and Hardcore in London in the late 1990s, he developed an interest in Drone and Noise bands such as Sunn O))), Wolf Eyes and Black Dice. He turned to producing himself, and published tapes, limited vinyl and CD-Rs under the name Family Battle Snake. Inspired by the idea of documenting his friend’s music, he founded the PAN label in 2008, and, as graphic designer, took over responsibility for the visual design of the LPs. Among the first of the label’s releases were, above all, artists working in the genres of Drone, Noise and Electroacoustic. Meanwhile, the label also releases aspects of experimental dance music. The back catalog also covers artists such as Helm, Valerio Tricoli, Lee Gamble, Bass Clef, SND, Heatsick aKeith Fullerton Whitman. [www.p-a-n.org & vimeo]
 

Rashad Becker
published his debut album »Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I« on PAN, in 2013. He describes the LP as the anthropology of a fictive population influenced by numerous sources and sounds free from one predominant aesthetic idea. After emigrating from Syria to Europe in his youth, in Berlin Becker began experimenting with sounds in empty buildings and their spatialization. He presented his ideas, among other things, in the form of sound installations. As sound engineer, he also participated in several theater productions. Furthermore, Rashad Becker runs the mastering studio Clunk, where he has mastered a great many PAN LPs. He describes the sounds in his live performances as »entities«, as narratives describing states of affairs. The sources of the sounds he produces are difficult to identify since, although Rashad Becker works exclusively with synthetic sound generation, the result often has an organic appearance. For him, his live sets represent an attempt to break through conventional forms of reception by rendering them more abstract. [vimeo]
 

Brofist
Juan A. Romero and Patrick Borgeat first appeared on stage together in 2006. After experimenting with innovative music interfaces with the laptop band Grainface, and receiving honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica with the live coding band »Benoît and the Mandelbrots«, the duo have been collaborating artistically as Brofist since the beginning of 2014. Their objective is to explore the limits of audiovisual live performances. Thanks to their versatile musical background they draw on diverse currents in electronic music, such as Drone, Noise, Glitch and Ambient. With the strong visual aesthetics connected with the music somewhere between Victor Vasarely and raster-noton, an immersive live performance begins to emerge, which represents a challenge both for the retina as well as the eardrum. [Youtube]
 

rdlk & Friday Dunard
Karlsruhe producers and DJs Redlock and Friday Dunard have been organizing parties together since 2010, such as »Kabelkraut« and «nil«. Flashed by James Holden, Four Tet, Caribou, Krautrock and Synth-Experiments, they generate a richly varied sound between surfaces, fiddling around and rave. Both artists are also active in live projects and belong to the Karlsruhe artist collective »nil«. They founded their own record label Syff in 2013.
 

Program