Assembled from the guts of waste pianos, customised and tuned to the pitch of an angel’s whisper. Xpiano is an art piece and a musical magic carpet. It also forms the backbone to some remarkable recordings available through Armchair Astronaut. Music to play as you fall asleep, for astral navigators and nocturnal journeys, music for the minds eye, sound-tracks to the subconscious. Born from a passionate dedication to sound exploration, Xpiano maps an otherworldly ethnological adventure. Through the lost tribes and forgotten cultures of the cosmos, to destinations of the imagination.
Xpiano welcomes commissions
for film soundtrack work, gallery installations and unusual performance spaces.
Also music can be made to your specific requirements.
WIRELESS
WIRELESS
are a group of experimental artists. Their adventures in sound and music have
been emanating through the ethers since January 2002, and are winning them
listeners from across the musical spectrum.
Described variously as “amazing head-burst movie
music”, to ”soundtracks for the seriously disturbed ” .
WIRELESS have crafted together a compelling body of work. Their sound takes
the listener on a journey through a series of sublime landscapes, through
crumbling cities and deserted cathedrals, through the air over forgotten civilisations,
from deep beneath the oceans, to deeper into space.
Mining a seam to themselves, WIRELESS have tapped a
rich source of mind altering, bowel-churning music, to explore the depths
of aural possibilities made available to the intrepid.
The music you hear in a coma--Transmissions between
stations of consciousness--Dreamstate Soundscapes.
Mapping the hidden blueprints, the turning points of
the year, of the planets.
Secret codes to the universe itself. Music- the science
between memory, mind and mathematics encoded in the very structures of our
psyches, of our mental functioning.
The higher language beyond thought and rational. WIRELESS
tap the deepest realms hidden within sound. In the pursuit of meaning, the
scenery can be terrifying.
WIRELESS make music which evolves before your ears.
Not as entertainment, but as a journey for the senses.
They take the journey seriously, as they do the destination.
The music maps new territories, investigates ever more arcane regions.
Telepathic synergy remains, as ever, the crux of their
operation. Guided by wires, speaking without tongues.
WIRELESS make unsafe music beautiful. Music which exists
and addresses its own corporeal bubble. Adrift from any safe houses of musical
convention. Orbiting their own star, or lost between planets. Giant rusty
liners buckling on impact and sinking on a time lapsed audio ocean. Crackles
from transmitters placed in the afterlife. The whispers and echoes of the
chattering dead. Snatches of lives in parallel worlds.
Transmissions from the ethers, interference from sources unknown. To witness
Armageddon, and get it down on tape, to play it on reverse, time and time
again.
WIRELESS make dangerous music. Both, for the listener
and the group themselves. Live executions, public or private, require active
listening and response, to engage and then concentrate. Every execution potentiates
a transformation. Nothing is at rest.
All involved experience a personal head journey, a
sense of having come through to the other side of something, a sense of arrival.
Some listener’s report shifts in mood or consciousness,
altered perceptions of time etc. Do not panic, this is quite understandable
and a healthy response to the experience itself. Whilst WIRELESS take every
measure possible against personal discomfort, the nature of live executions
will always permit the unexpected to happen. WIRELESS cannot be held responsible
for any after effects of listening.
Foreboding concrete steps and corridors, a promethian maze, gave way to a glowing room of light colour and smoke. I was joining a room of about 40 people, the sense of anticipation mixed with uncertainty. We were all here to be experimented on, a point made more evident by a sexy clipboard wielding mistress of ceremonies handing out ‘test sheets’ and crayons to everyone present. Great. I thought, something to doodle on if the going gets tough.
The
scene was like an explosion in a music shop. Things were hanging off the
walls and ceiling, piles of drum parts, cymbals, broken pianos, reel to
reels and effect boxes. Rattles, shakers, sticks and bones. It was all there,
laid out like christmas. This wasn't to be your average rock and roll gig,
of that I was sure.
A crackling screeching megaphone menacingly requested mobiles
to be extinguished, and that the experiment had begun. The next hour was
one in which we were taken on an audio-visual journey through the bowels
of Hell to be dumped at the Golden Gates. The sense of tension, created
by Wireless as they appeared to be locking onto separate strands of music
was almost unbearable, yet totally compelling. And as they wove the strands
together patiently evolving the tension to an extended aural prolapse I
thought my brain had burst. A genuinely affecting experience, a bit like
being dipped into psychedelic golden water, and then hung out to dry in
the sun. I can remember flames flickering around the walls and smoke begin
to settle as we reached our destination. The experiment was over. I had
arrived.
Tracking music back to its magical roots demands a de-intellectualised instinctive approach, and a de-learning of programmed responses.
The nature of the music made is intended to induce altered
states of listening. An attempt to create transformative music. By-passing
the custom to entertain, to break through into something other, genuinely
affecting, and greater than the sum of its parts.
The mission is
quite simple:
To attempt to achieve
ecstatic musical states through applying shamanic methods to a 21st century
palette of sounds.
To reject all preconceived systems of composition, other than intuitive,
in the moment, gut reaction.
To get to as pure a source of emotion as is musically possible.
To champion the danger and honesty
of spontaneously creating music. To allow the unexpected to occur, and shape
the course of the music as it is created.
