The Topographies mini-festival brings together some of the most exciting Irish performers and composers for a weekend mini-festival of new music at PAS, one of Berlin’s best-known venues for contemporary, improvised and experimental music. Berlin-based Irish composer/performers Francis Heery, Ellen King and Elliot Murphy will be joined by Irish-based improvisers Izumi Kimura (piano), Shane Latimer (e-guitar) and Daniel Bodwell (double bass). The festival will run over two days with three concerts, a live podcast panel discussion and mixer event for Irish artists to meet with their Berlin contemporaries.
Topographies mini-festival from artistic director Francis Heery is presented by the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland and PAS, Berlin.
More informationDr. Francis Heery is a composer and sound artist. He has a Masters in Music and Media Technologies (Trinity College Dublin) where he studied composition with Donnacha Dennehy, and a PhD in Music Composition (UCC) where he studied with John Godfrey. His music draws from bio-aesthetics and science-fiction , and integrates digital and analog electronics with acoustic instruments. His instrumental works have been performed by the RTE Symphony Orchestra, the Crash Ensemble, the Quiet Music Ensemble, the Talujon Percussion Ensemble, the JACK quartet, Carin Levine, Pascal Galois, James Aylward, Izumi Kimura and Shane Latimer.
Elliot Murphy is an Irish composer and instrumentalist (cello, guitar) based in Berlin whose interests include aleatoricism, folk music and improvisation. His music covers a broad spectrum of genres but recent compositions include Inferno, a large work for solo cello and interactive pre- recorded strings, and a score to the short film The Foundling by Barney Cokeliss which was shortlisted at the 10th International Film Music Competition as part of the 18th Zürich Film Festival. Other works include I dTírdreach, written for the cellists of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and works for percussionist Alex Petcu, cellist Adrian Mantu, and the Avalon Ensemble. Elliot studied Music at Trinity College Dublin, where he specialised in Composition under Professors Donnacha Dennehy and Evangelia Rigaki.
Ellen King is an Irish multidisciplinary composer, producer and DJ based in Berlin, Germany. Writing and performing music under her own name and ‘ELLLL’ moniker, Ellen has carved out a distinctive voice in both contemporary and club-music contexts, with compositions etched by abstract experimentalism, fragmented rhythms and bass-heavy club. In addition to her work in club music, Ellen has worked extensively as a multidisciplinary artist with commissions and collaborations for a slew of contemporary music projects in the realms of visual arts, film, installation, dance and performance art. Recent works include sound design and score for theatre production Das Ereignis, Deutsches SchauSpielHaus Hamburg and music composition Images & Sensations, commissioned for Ireland’s leading new music ensemble, Crash Ensemble.
John Godfrey is a performer, composer and senior lecturer in Music at University College Cork (Ireland). He is a co-founder of Icebreaker; a founding member of Crash Ensemble and the founder of Quiet Music Ensemble. He has performed and been broadcast worldwide and has released many CDs. He specialises in the performance and composition of Experimental music, improvisation and the creation of digital performance systems with MaxMSP.
Daniel Bodwell studied classical double bass with Anthony Bianco at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied jazz double bass with Detlev Beier at the Hochschule fuer Kuenste, Bremen, Germany. He has played with Louis Stewart, John Wadham, Phil Ware, Michael, Hugh, and Richie Buckley, as well as many other excellent Irish jazz musicians. He performs regularly with Frankie Gavin and De Danann, the RTE Concert Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Quiet Music Ensemble, Declan O’Rourke, Jerry Fish, Duke Special, the New Irish Jazz Orchestra, the Nigel Mooney Quartet, Mary Coughlan, the Francesco Turrisi Trio, the Sue Rynhart/Daniel Bodwell Duo, and the New York based Micah Gaugh Trio.
Pianist Izumi Kimura has performed extensively throughout the country and abroad since moving to Ireland from Japan in 1995. She has worked with some of the leading performers and ensembles from both disciplines of classical, jazz and improvised musics. Her main works in the past decade are contemporary music across genres and improvisation.
Shane Latimer is a musician from Dublin, Ireland. As guitarist and composer with OKO (“a revelation” – The Sunday Times) and or as curator with the Bottlenote Festival (“a no-holds-barred celebration of beautiful noise” – The Irish Times), his music has a focus on the improvisational and experimental. His latest solo work exists in the entangled space between the embodied and the embedded.