Another evening in Skolska 28 gallery, presenting a double premiere of two electroacoustic duos. Both duos; Angélica Castelló and Dafne Vicente-Sandoval; and Ivan Palacký and Petr Vrba; share an interest in non-idiomatic improvisation and both are musically located between fierce abstraction and an unbridled dreamworld.
Angélica Castelló studied music in her native town (Conservatorio Nacional de México), in Montreal (Université de Montréal), Amsterdam (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) and Vienna (Konservatorium der Stadt Wien, Institutfür Elektroakustische und Computer Musik).
Since 1999 she lives in Vienna where she teaches and also organises concerts.
Even if she has remained faithful to ancient music (Ensemble fiori musicali), the center and heart of her work is electroacustic and New Music: a co-creation of the Ensembles low frequency orchestra, los autodisparadores (with Thomas Grill and Katharina Klement), frufru (with Maja Osojnik), cilantro (with Billy Roisz), subshrubs (with Katharina Klement, Billy Roisz und Maja Osojnik) and Chesterfield (with Burkhard Stangl). With these ensembles and other musicians such as Olga Neuwirth, Wolfgang Mitterer, Isabelle Duthoit, Franz Hautzinger, Martin Siewert, Mario de Vega, Marina Rosenfeld, John Butcher, Okkyung Lee, dieb13, et al., she has performed across America and Europe. As a composer she has written for her own instruments (mainly Paetzold recorders with or without electronics), for ensembles (a.o. Danubia Saxophon Quartett, subshrubs, Bella Discordia) as well as for theatre and dance. Her music has been recorded for labels such as mosz, Ein_klang Records, Mandorla, Mikroton Records and chmafu nocords, and has been presented on several radio programs. For her work, she has received several prizes and grants in Canada, México and Austria.
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval explores sound through improvisation, contemporary music performance and sound installations. Her main medium is the bassoon. Her personal approach is centred on the fragility of sound and its emergence within a given space. She considers music more as a punctuation of the preexisting silence, rather than an out of context, autonomous discourse. The deconstructed usage of her instrument is a central aspect of her practice. She amplifies fragments through miniature microphones distributed within the instrument. This exploded version of her sound sometimes meets traditional bassoon playing to generate aural discontinuities between the exterior and the interior, the whole and the parts -- a reverse-engineered emergence.
She currently plays in duo with Klaus Filip, Bonnie Jones, Angélica Castelló and Xavier Lopez. Recent/current collaborations with composers include Jakob Ullmann, Éliane Radigue, Peter Ablinger, Klaus Lang, Richard Barrett, Hanna Hartman and Michael Maierhof. She has played in festivals such as Konfrontationen (Austria), Salzburger Festspiele (Austria), Sounding-D (Germany), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (England), No Idea Festival (US) and Visiones Sonoras (Mexico). She has recorded "Solo II" and "Praha", two compositions of Jakob Ullmann released by Edition RZ in April 2012 as part of the cd box "Fremde zeit addendum".
Ivan Palacky is an architect and musician (prepared dictaphones, MD, amplified knitting machine Dopleta 160). Ivan Palacky has played with various groups and taken part in several music projects. He was a member of the guitar/doublebass/bassoon group "Slede, zive slede" (Herring, live herring), and currently performs in a duo called "Tilko/Singlet“ (w. Jennifer Helia de Felice), and the audiovisual project „Koberce, zaclony/Carpets, Curtains“ (w. VJ Vera Lukasova).
He "writes" a sound diary of all his journeys, in which he collects excerpts of stories, weird sounds and various "acoustic mistakes". He likes to take part in one-shot improvisational groups or duos (with Cremaster /E/, Ruth Barberán /E/ and Margarida Garcia /P/, Will Guthrie /Aus/, Andrea Neumann /D/, Klaus Filip /A/...) as well as playing solo performances.
Since 2005 his main interest has been to „dig out“ sounds from an amplified Dopleta 160 knitting machine from the 70s.
As an architect he is interested in architecture without “building“, in sociological methods in designing and in morphogenetic maps in digital architecture.
"...a kind of intuitive "chopping the time" is characteristic for my playing, I think, and also a tendency to reach a piont when my understanding of how the the whole thing works blurs and I accept it instead of trying to get back before this point. I don´t care about the means of achieving this condition, which is also significant. The need to follow the tectonics of playing originates in my profession, architecture: desire for proportions and relationships among individual parts including the most difficult feature: 'return points', subconsciously but precisely placed, in which the whole mostly impalpably flowing sound situation changes and evolves... " (from his interview with Pavel Klusak).
Since 2005, Petr Vrba has undertaken an unrelenting exploration of non-idiomatic improvisation using trumpets, clarinet, vibrating speakers, egg cutters etc., made him one of the most active experimental musicians currently working in Prague. In 2010 he became one of the founding members of improvisation ensemble IQ+1, which released in 2011 the highly acclaimed CD “tváří v tvář”, and in 2013 IQ+1 (released by Polí5).
In 2011 he established the Yanagi duo with Korean experimenter Ryu Hankil (alarm clock, typewriters). In the same year started a close collaboration with American musician/composer George Cremaschi (doublebass, electronics) through which they established the Prague Improvisation Orchestra in 2012, the Los Amargados duo, an international dance-visual-music project Arthuur etc. In recent years he has begun and still continues many projects: Criticón duo (with Tomas Gris), Doppeltrio (with Maja Osojnik and Matija Schellander), Junk & the Beast (with Veronika Mayer), 2 horses too many (with Patrik Pelikán), Škvíry & Spoje (with Dalibor Kocián, Josef Krupa and Michal Matějka), and the audiovisual trio Total Verquert (with SeEun Lee and Ken Ganfield) etc.
Among others Vrba has recorded or played with musicians like Xavier Charles, Isabelle Duthoit, Kai Fagaschinski, Franz Hautzinger, Chris Heenan, Susanna Gartmayer, Matthew Goodheart, Irene Kepl, dd Kern, Christof Kurzmann, Ava Mendoza, Seijiro Murayama, Ivan Palacký, Matija Schellander, Ingrid Schmoliner, Jaroslav Šťastný (aka Peter Graham), Miro Tóth etc.
