James Rushford + Francis Plagne
Entry Requirements: Over 18s only
Francis Plagne is a musician from Melbourne whose work combines songwriting with a variety of other approaches, including group improvisation, instrumental abstraction and domestic musique concrète. He has released recordings on Albert's Basement, Black Truffle, Breakdance the Dawn, Kye Records, Penultimate Press and his own Mould Museum label, among others, and recently released collaborative works with crys cole and Andrew Chalk. He will be accompanied by long-time collaborator James Rushford on keyboards and medieval-style portative organ. Together they will dip into some material from Plagne's recent and forthcoming releases: songs that hint at melodic satisfaction between rambling instrumental interludes, ambiguous tape interjections and the wheezing breaths of strangled organ pipes.
James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer. His work is drawn from a familiarity with specific concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist languages. Currently, his work deals with the aesthetic concept of musical shadow.
As a composer, James has been commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), Decibel (Perth), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006/2008), Norway Ultima Festival (2011), Unsound Festival (New York 2014) and Liquid Architecture Festival (2010).
As a performer, he has presented work at STEIM Institute (Amsterdam), Logos Foundation (Ghent), Issue Project Room (New York), Instants Chavirés (Montreuil), Constellation (Chicago), Café Oto (London), Super Deluxe (Tokyo), Blank Forms (New York), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Cave12 (Geneva), Send & Receive Festival (Winnipeg), WORM (Rotterdam), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Only Connect Festival (Oslo), Now Now (2011/2012), Adelaide Festival (2014), Melbourne International Jazz Festival (2011) and the Tectonics Festival (Adelaide 2014, New York 2015, Tel Aviv 2015). He has also performed as a soloist with the Krakow Sinfonietta, Australian Art Orchestra, Michel Pisaro, Eyvind King, David Behrman and Jon Rose.
James has collaborative projects with Joe Talia, Golden Fur (with Samuel Dunscombe & Judith Hamann), Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Klaus Lang, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Annea Lockwood, Graham Lambkin, Francis Plagne, Tashi Wada, the visual artist Michael Salerno and the writer Dennis Cooper.
His music has been published by Pogus (US), Prisma (Norway), Bocian (Poland), Penultimate Press (UK), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS) and KYE (US).
James holds a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and was a 2018 fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.