I visited Rich Mix in Bethnal Green Road this evening, which is an East End based venue that presents an impressive combination of live music, spoken word, theatre, dance, talks and visual art in their performance and exhibition spaces. My long-term contact Scanner was appearing in town, and it was a rare opportunity to catch his pioneering work in a live context.
Emerging in the early 1990s, Scanner became renowned for his innovative use of intercepted mobile phone conversations and found sounds, weaving them into haunting electronic compositions that explore surveillance, identity, and memory. His prolific output spans albums, sound installations, dance, film, and public art, and collaborations with Bryan Ferry, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson and Steve McQueen.
First on stage, however, were Joseph Branciforte – an electronic experimentalist, composer, Grammy-winning producer, whose New York label Greyfade has become a home for process-based composition and minimal electronic music – plus Jozef Dumoulin, a Belgian keyboardist and composer, widely recognized for his innovative approach to the Fender Rhodes.
