Target audience: | General public |
Duration: | 2 hours |
Location: | Patio |
The concerts of Carmen Villain and Coby Sey are an amalgam of strange melodies and diverse beats, a night overflowing with feelings.
Carmen Villain
The sound universes that Carmen Villain has crafted during her career are an invitation to explore the depths of a discography shaped by a natural curiosity about sound and the potential of music in general.
Carmen grew up surrounded by music: her Mexican mother and Norwegian father were guitarists. As a child, she played classical piano and the clarinet in a band distinctly attuned to the community music that inspires her music today. She spent her teenage years amidst dub sounds and “grandiloquent” rap, as well as punk and shoegaze. As for her creative process, Carmen likes to say that she never looks for an end result, preferring instead to operate by intuition and see the process as a “conversation” with sound. A texture or a melody buried in a field recording can become a sketch. These recordings with fragments of instruments like the flute, voice and clarinet merge into granular soundscapes, places where words can’t express what an instrument does when stripped of its most recognisable elements. The music Carmen composes recalls Jon Hassell’s world-building exercises, Brian Leeds’ “Huerco S” and “Pendant” personas, and the “freak energy” of psychonauts Sun City Girls. In Only Love From Now On, her latest and greatly acclaimed album, bring those influences back to the surface and turn them into sounds in their own right.
Coby Sey
The “open-door” collaborative dimension of Coby Sey’s music is the narrative thread for this concert. After the release of his unmissable Conduit, he comes to the stage at La Casa Encendida with guitarist Leisha Thomas (Alpha Maid), drummer and vibraphonist Momoko Gill (MettaShiba) and saxophonist Ben Vince.
A producer, vocalist and dj, after years as an active participant in South-East London’s DIY music scene, Coby Sey has forged a career as performer and producer with a uniquely changing and edgy music club sound. He frequently works with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein and Kwes. His productions oscillate between live instrumentation, poetry, sampling, and a mixture of recognisable motifs from hip hop, drone, jazz, grime and dub. He is a member of the London-based CURL collective and he also heads up a monthly programme on NTS Radio, offering a gateway to his fascinating sound universe.