Nearly Not There...

Nearly Not There... investigates the fluid occurrences and interactions happening between contemporary music, sound art and performance art.

Focussed on compositional though transient arrangement, this permutational exhibition will show a month long progression of the building, rebuilding, measuring, and calibration of its parts, enfolding performances, concerts, installation works, a seminar, light design, social interaction and a record shop.

Posing notions of sound, instrumentalism, performance and the concert setting merely as working hypotheses, Nearly Not There... creates and denounces divisions as they come, only to establish a transitionary environment acting on and because of itself, providing each gradation a space to function within.

Equally inspired by the musical, the visual and the spatial, it aims to expose emergent relationships within and between; visual art that sounds, performance art of tone and instrument, sound installations disguised as concerts, audience as performers, empty spaces full of sound.

Nearly Not There... is curated by Seamus Cater, Koen Nutters and Martijn Tellinga, and supported by STEIM, Red Light Radio, Sonic Acts and DNK-Amsterdam.

Nearly Not There... will include the first instance of a record shop specialising in many different streams of experimental music and sound art.

Design: Noëm Held

Typeface: Dinamo.us

Light: Marius Mathisrud

Listen back to the Nearly Not There- Red Light Radio sessions here: Red Light Radio NNTR session 1 and Red Light Radio NNTR session 2

Live stream

-nearly not there live stream-

Programme

Friday 30th of January until Wednesday 4th of February

Opening Friday 30th of January at 19.00
Saturday until Wednesday from 12.00 - 18.00

The Input / Output Routine - Part 1 and 2

Part 1: The Rock Band
Part 2: The Artist Talk

Two installations by Morten J Olsen and Koen Nutters

Friday 30th of January until Sunday 1st of March, open daily 12.00 - 18.00

Nearly Not There Records, the first instance of a (temporary) record shop specialising in many different streams of music and sound art.

The music is a cross section of new and experimental music, improvised, structured and composed music, conceptual and art music, all direct from artists or small labels, from many countries, including Holland, Germany, Norway, Lebanon, Turkey and America. The shop carries a small stock, around 100 titles, of LPs, CDs, tapes and books. Most titles are editions of 500 or less, sometimes hand numbered, or silk-screened, etc.

Labels include Human Ear Music, Drid Machine Records, Ftarri, Care of Editions, Cavity, Anomia, Mikroton Recordings and Gaffer Records.

To name but a few, artists include Ariel Pink, The Pitch, Lucretia Dalt, Gert-jan Prins, The International Nothing, Brutal Blues, Michael Pisaro.
These artists are all in some way connected to the DNK-Amsterdam network of performers. DNK-Amsterdam is a concert series for new music in all its forms, active in Amsterdam for the last ten years.

Thursday 5th of February, 12.00 - 18.00

Nearly Not There Records 'in store' event

Live six hour DJ set with

DJ MFK / Koen Nutters
DJ Morendo / Morten J Olsen

& special guests

Friday 6th of February, 21.00

The Material Audience

Performances by André Avelãs, Sara Campos, Seamus Cater, Roderick Hietbrinck, David Helbich, Bea McMahon, Chris Meighan, Martijn Tellinga and Samuel Vriezen.

A social evening where individual artists and composers invite the audience to embody their ideas. In a kind of market situation, the artists will seek out their performers within the event. Performances are planned in advance but only realised in the space. All teaching, communicating, rehearsing and bargaining only happen once the doors open, proposing a socially dynamic evening where the audience become the material.

Monday 9th of February, Red Light Radio, 15.00 - 16.00

Nearly Not There on Red Light Radio

Monday 9th of February until Saturday 14th of February, daily from 12.00 - 18.00*

Sound Installation:

A Study In Focus by Gabriel Paiuk

This installation involves the scale of loudspeakers, the spatial imprint of standardised reproduction systems, among many other threads which define affective qualities and renderings of sonic spaces which we have learned to engage with. Within this work the listener is invited to explore these multiple instances through sitting, standing and walking through the space.

*Wednesday 11th of February extra evening opening time 12.00 - 21.00 !

Thursday 12th of February, 21.00

A STEIM curated concert featuring Peter Edwards and Tijs Ham.

On the 12th of February, STEIM will present a concert at the W139 as part of Nearly Not There... two live electronics performances that dive into the aesthetics of customized,reinvented or otherwise self constructed objects. In search of the control of sound... or perhaps looking to lose that control.

Through all of his work, Peter Edwards strives to destabilize preconceptions of role and function as well as dissolve the barriers between producer and consumer. Particularly to this end, he employs the practice of electronics hacking and circuit bending of common technologies to illustrate that function need not be dictated to the end user.

Tijs Ham will perform the latest developments in his ongoing fascination for the expressive possibilities of chaotic processes. Combining both analog and digital techniques, there is a constant tention between control and surprise. Navigating the tipping points that separate the predicatable from the unforeseen.

Friday 13th of February, in Muziekgebouw aan t IJ, from 19.00

The Nearly Not There… Record Shop will be moved for one night from W139 to Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ.
The Nearly Not There side program is free to enter at any time. The main program is not free and starts at 20:30 sharp.

Muziekgebouw Main Program:

The Rest Is Noise
Ensemble Insomnio plays: Georg Friedrich Haas - In Vain

Nearly Not There Side Program:

at 19:30: In Store Concert
Dante Boon (piano) plays: Michael Manion - Music for solo piano

and

at 21:30 In Store Multi-stylistic Nearly Not There DJ Sets by
DJ Shay (NNT, DNK)
DJ Wartone (NNT, DNK)
DJ MFK (NNT, DNK, Analogue Mutations)

Adress: Piet Heinkade 1, 1019 BR Amsterdam (020 788 2000)

Monday 16th of February until Friday 20th of February, daily from 12.00 - 18.00

Installation / Performance:

_during, lasting.. by Martijn Tellinga

5 consecutive days
6 hours daily
9 players enter the space for one hour (unannounced & uncoordinated)
audience comes and goes

Over the course of 5 days and within a timeslot of 6 hours, 9 musicians visit the gallery space on a daily basis. They do so without conferring with each other. Playing positions have been fixed and following their arrival each musician plays a one hour part from the same position every day. With the permutation of the ensemble on a particular day left to chance, the piece displays a serial process of dismantling and re-integration of its parts. More than being a work of long duration, 'during, lasting..' is comprised of reconfigured time. Accordingly, it can take the shape of a silenced space -an environment of no or few sounds or activity-, of a compositional space enveloped by progressing tones and including a multitude of instruments, or of one of the many transitionary stages in between.

Score parts describe simple patterns of sound and silence; sustained distinguishable tones only, one by one, repeated to form units and generally quiet. Between two tones, a long or even longer rest. No intended rhythm between parts has to exist, they are to overlap freely, or not. The number of musicians present in the space at a certain moment sets the complexity of interaction between parts, the daily assemblage of the ensemble over time the unfolding of a form.

Played by Konzert Minimal, Berlin and the DNK Ensemble.

Monday 16th of February, Red Light Radio, 16.00 - 17.00

Another Nearly Not There... radio session. Seamus Cater and Koen Nutters will be playing selections of the Nearly Not There Records shop from the little studio of Red Light Radio.
Tune in here

Saturday 21st of February, 21.00

Concert Night:

Eyes don’t see simultaneously by Lucio Capece

For analog synthesizers, Double plugged Equalisers, Ring Modulator, 3 Wireless speakers hanging from 3 Helium balloons moved by Propellers.

The right eye is seeing the foreground before the left eye and the background after the left eye, while the left eye is in a sense doing the reverse. There is this interesting intrinsic capability, in which the mind or the perceptual mechanism, probably the perceptual mechanism, has this intrinsic capability to put these back together. A lot of our whole ability for depth perception is the fact of the lag, that the eyes do not see the things simultaneously - Robert Irwin, Notes toward a Conditional Art.

This is a piece that I perform with three wireless speakers hanging from three Helium Balloons and PA. The balloons have attached three Propellers that are linked the floor, what makes them move in circles. The piece works on the ambiguous differentiation between foreground and background. In order to wonder how we perceive each o them, when they are differentiated, and when not. How we perceive the whole and the part. The perception hierarchies that are established behind the idea of background and foreground.

If a room is the frame where a sound performance happens, the intention is to put the room and sound in relative levels, as a way to cancel the presence of a frame. The piece is constructed as a come-and-go between ears and body listening, using the gap in the velocity of ear and body sound perception as a way to generate a room inhabiting experience. I have kept the material characteristics quite similar in other aspects, in order to focus in the experience previously mentioned.

Sunday 22nd of February until Tuesday 24th of February , 19.00 - 21.00

Vocal Stresses
Lecture series on the productions and politics of Voice

Breath expelled, forced out, vibrations in the throat, the pressures and pleasures that excite the glottis, to finally exit in the form of voice, to enter into that field of intensity known as public life. As Steven Connor suggests, the voice is essentially the result of physical strains and stresses.

Taking this as a fundamental perspective, the lecture series seeks to consider the intensities of voice, as a vocal stress that moves from the body and into the social frictions of being amongst others. Voice is precisely a strained and flexed movement between an inside and an outside, passing from one to another, and carrying forward urgencies of identity, meaning, and the affective labors central to locating oneself. These vocal frictions and performativities will be elaborated by three artists working with voice whose practices show us the complexity surrounding what it means to speak.

Sunday 22nd Brandon LaBelle
Monday 23rd Piersandra di Matteo
Tuesday 24th Imogen Stidworthy

All lectures start at 19.00.

Wednesday 25th of February, 22.00 to 23.00

Official Sonic Acts Warm up event:

Out Of Darkness

The DNK ensemble will perform an interior tribute to Anthony McCall's seminal land art performance / film Landscape For Fire.

The giant empty gallery space of W139 will be illuminated from total darkness with a grid of fires, returning to it's dark state over the course of an hour.

A one hour opening and closing of W139.

DNK Ensemble
André Avelãs
Seamus Cater
Koen Nutters
Martijn Tellinga

Articles:

Sonic acts blog

Thanks to:

The installation The Input / Output Routine has been made possible by the support of