Category Archives: Projects

Looking for an edgy / provocative / avante-garde independent film-maker…

Posted on February 15, 2012 by phil| Leave a comment

I’m looking for an exciting, provocative, anarchist or shocking film-maker who is interested in making short films to equally direct, bold and disturbing contemporary music.

There are two pieces that I’d really love a film-maker to make a short film to one of them or both.

The first is 3 minutes long and is called ‘Fuck Forever’ and you can see it here.

(NB: this is a poor audio recording.  we will re-record the soundtrack for the video in a studio in London)

The words for the video performance will be changed from James Young to ‘George Miles’ – referencing the Dennis Cooper pentology of books about George Miles.

The second is ‘numbers 91-95′ based on poetry by Simon Howard, and performed in this video by Ensemble Adapter in Berlin.  The poem is all about memory, nostalgia, dreaming and forgetting.  The text is here and the music is on this video.

More information about my work and audio samples and press reviews are all on this site.  I hope you are inspired!

This is an unpaid, voluntary, collaborative work, and the idea would be to make the film and music freely available as a promotional tool for both artists, ideally distributing round all of our networks.  Ongoing collaborations may transpire too, and may lead to paid collaborations with various multimedia projects I’m working on relating to poetry, violence and sexuality.

The bolder, more edgy and more direct the work, the better!

Please send samples of work, ideas, CVs and any other relevant info to me by email above.  I’d be hoping to have the films finished by the Summer.

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New interview with Nick Blackburn about Music, Text and Violence

Posted on February 10, 2012 by phil| Leave a comment

I met Theatre Director Nick Blackburn over a coffee in a very cute little knitting shop / café in Nantwich on Christmas Eve.  We had long conversations about music, text, violence and theatre, and he filmed a little bit of the conversation, a bit of which is shown here.

This video seems quite relevant to most of my projects this year, as so many of them are connected with violence:

 

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Selected for Blue Touch Paper with poet Steven Fowler

Posted on January 10, 2012 by phil| Leave a comment

I’m delighted to have been selected with poet Steven J Fowler for the London Sinfonietta’s new Blue Touch Paper scheme.

We were selected in October for our project that is an immersive, 45-minute-long  semi-staged piece for ensemble, electronics and vocalists, about Boxing.  Steve is a really wonderful, critically-acclaimed and very prolific young British poet who also used to be a professional boxer.   Steve’s work has so much in common with my own, with its predilection for violence, and its clear, no-nonsense communication with the reader/listener.  We’re hoping to bring all these qualities into our work, and we’re both really excited about producing something that is really fresh, adrenalin-fuelled and original.

The Sinfonietta are backing the project with lots of resources, advice and support, under their Blue Touch Paper scheme for emerging composers and collaborators.  We’re currently working on the project, having lots of workshop sessions with Sinfonietta players, poets, other composers and vocalists/performers.

We will preview 20 minutes of our project in May 2012 with the London Sinfonietta, and we are also on the look out for production partners who may be interested in taking the complete project, once finished.    Watch this space!

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CONTACT dance-floor up and running!

Posted on September 8, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

What an exhausting but wonderful week of hard work.  We started on Monday morning, when I got off the plane from Berlin and went straight to Kings Place to start constructing the touch-sensitive dancefloor that I designed specially for the Kings Place Festival 2011.

A lot of hammering, measuring, taping, wiring and tweaking.  Here’s a video of the construction process… (in this video you watch it 120 times faster than it happened…)

 
Then we programmed it using the bespoke CONTACT software written by Marc Sutton at www.codev.co.uk, and Ableton Live – making the samples in Logic Studio too.    After 3 hours of mapping the location of each of the 120 sensors under the floor, we eventually got the floor to behave just like a 9-octave virtual MIDI keyboard, that spoke to Ableton and triggered all our samples.

The floor has been programmed with lots of samples about the seasons, from Vivaldi to Oliver Knussen to Girls Aloud to Tori Amos to some death metal.  We’ve also got the sounds of swarms of bees, thunderstorms, children’s songs, crickets, music boxes, clocks and the weather.

The floor opened today at Kings Place.  You can see people here tentatively trying it out when the festival first opened…

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Building the Junk Band

Posted on August 4, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

Here’s a video from a while ago that I hadn’t posted on this site.  Its Serge Vuille and I building the Junk Band in Kings Place for the Kings Place Festival 2010.  It took us good 5 hours to install in the atrium of the building, but here you can see the process in just a few minutes!

I was reminded to post this video up because I’m currently in the process of creating this year’s Kings Place Festival installation with dancer-choreographer Lucia Tong.   We’re building a large touch-sensitive dance floor in collaboration with Codev bespoke software design.  Come along to Kings Place, 10th and 11th September to see our performance on this unique new musical instrument!

 

Building the Junk Band from Philip Venables on Vimeo.

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‘About me’ video for the London Sinfonietta

Posted on July 5, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

We just finished the ‘about me’ video for the London Sinfonietta’s Blue Touch Paper project, which starts on Friday with the Collaborators’ Day.  It’s just a short video introducing my work, my ideas and thoughts about collaboration.  Here it is:

 

About Philip Venables (London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper) from Philip Venables on Vimeo.

 

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Blue Touch Paper with London Sinfonietta

Posted on June 30, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

I’m delighted: I’ve been picked to take part in the first stage of the London Sinfonietta’s new Blue Touch Paper scheme.  The chosen composers, artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, scientists, etc, will all attend a collaborators’ day on Friday 8th July in London, to find out about each other’s work, hear from some established artists about their collaborations, and to begin to pair up with people with whom we might want to make some work.

In the meantime, I have to make a 5-minute video about me and my work… I’m a little stumped about exactly what I want to say.. but it has to be done this weekend, so watch out for it on here!

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Blood on the floor…

Posted on April 23, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

So this week I had a lot of fun shooting photos for two flyers for concerts on 9th May (DREAMS, Out Hear, Kings Place) and 10th & 11th September (CONTACT, Kings Place Festival).  I was in Chester the last weekend visiting my parents, and bless them for being good sports and dousing me in blood, painting me, and photographing me.

The first was a zombie pic – basically to tie into the ‘zombie’-ish theme of the Schmürz (the opera I’m writing), of which were presenting two preview scenes on 9th May at Kings Place.  I was reading the text for the amazing piece of Sciarrino – Infinito Nero – that we’re also performing, and was struck by the opening stanza, that really fits in with this pic too!

‎”The spirit was transforming into blood, understanding nothing but blood, seeing nothing but blood, tasting nothing but blood, feeling nothing but blood, thinking nothing but blood, unable to think anything but blood. And everything it did, submerged and sunk it into that very blood.”

So, courtesy of a wonderfully effective and sugary recipe for fake blood from the CBBC (really!) I spent some time perfecting the consistency and gloss on the gore…

Fake blood: here's one I made earlier...

 

So a quick wrap-up in bandages, a good dose of blood all over it and standing in front of the fridge, which gave a nice clear white background… and hey presto….

Zombie out-takes.. Thanks Mum.

Bit of photoshopping to make the eyes a bit more supernatural and add the text…

Finished flyer for DREAMS.

 

Sadly it seems that this flyer is a bit too disturbing for some punters, and I have made a less bloody one for the more faint-hearted.

The second photo was more of an experiment… mainly using the idea of ‘Music Roadkill’ for the CONTACT project I’m doing with Lucia Tong in Kings Place in September… the fourth festival installation I’ve done for them… and this one the most ambitious (and perhaps technologically risky!) to date…

So the idea was to be a kind of CSI body outline…

214697pw150.jpg

painted over with a basic stave… all the more cheesy for the treble clef (dammit, why didn’t I think to add a key signature?  out of practise..).  Nan’s old bedsheet on the patio, painted over… and my dad painting me in black paint in a kinda of loincloth… a bit of an odd experience.  Mum took the photos from above from the the first floor bedroom window…

The photo we used for the final flyer, before photoshopping.

Music Roadkill Out-take.

Then with a bit more photoshopping to turn me into Avatar and remove the domestic context:

CONTACT: Get in touch with the floor...

Such a fun day.  I should give up on the music and just take photos…. Mum said it was just like doing messy hand painting and stuff with us when we were toddlers…

 

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DREAMS. 9th May, Kings Place

Posted on April 18, 2011 by phil| 1 Comment

My latest curatorial project at Kings Place is DREAMS.  Dreams of faith, dreams of pleasure, dreams of fear.

May 9th, 8pm at Kings Place, as part of their Out Hear series.

The performance is in three parts:

  • Juliet Fraser sings Hildegard of Bingen and Alejandro Viñao’s Hildegard’s Dream, a psychological song of spiritual visions…
  • Two preview scenes of my new opera, The Schmürz, to be performed by baritone Marcin Kopec, with Ian Watson on accordion and a group of actors, led by Andrew Fielding and Eamonn O’Dwyer.  The preview scenes are towards the end of the opera, where Len, the main character, finds himself alone with the mysterious Schmürz that has followed him all the way up his apartment building, after Len has abandoned his wife and daughter to the Noise.
  • Sciarrino’s astounding Infinito Nero. This is an incredible 30-minute “ecstasy in one act”, combining dreams of the flesh, faith and madness into a tense, surreal meditation.

Tickets are only £9.50 from www.kingsplace.co.uk.

Please come and support – we want a full house!  And stick around for a drink afterwards.

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Junk Band

Posted on April 2, 2011 by phil| 1 Comment

JUNK BAND! is a new band / installation that was devised for the Kings Place Festival 2010.    It is curated and composed for by Philip Venables, and directed by Serge Vuille.

Check out the video to see us building the junk installation in Kings Place.  It took three and a half hours to install, but you can watch it here in two and a half minutes!  More videos of performances will follow.

The full performance programme at Kings Place is:

Clapping music – Steve Reich (performed on polystyrene pieces)
Brouhaha – Peter Wiegold (adapted for junk)
Lotus – Philip Venables (written specially for the installation)

Performers: Serge Vuille, Adam Clifford, Pete Handley, Sarah Cresswell

The sculpture is designed to encourage people to have a go on it, experiment, find interesting sounds and make their own music.  We project some handy tips about playing it, and some video material, onto the walls of the gallery around the sculpture.  There’s everything in it, bar the kitchen sink: plastic buckets, helium bottle, bits of wood, newspaper, cooking items or cardboard box drum kit.  We’re looking for a kitchen sink to add…

The band is available to conceive “Made to Measure” sculptures and matching musical programmes for Festivals, Art Galleries or any event needing a touch of energetic and original sound, and something to bring adults and children together in public spaces.

Go to Serge Vuille’s page about the Junk Band

Pics: setting up in the atrium space; rehearsing on the kit.  More pics and videos coming soon!

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