Psychic Liberation

Psychic Liberation (PL) is a label founded in 2013, originally ran with Miguel Alvariño titled Primitive Languages as a cassette and record store project in New York City. It is now operated solo by Nick Klein since 2019 under the working title Psychic Liberation out of the EU. The eponymous concert series in the Red Salon takes place with changing guests. On May 31st we are happy to present: African-American Sound Recordings • Martin Howse • Joke Lanz • W E I G 

African-American Sound Recordings is an artist operating in the United States. Currently based in New York, the project explores its detached anonymity through experiments in noise, sound collage, & industrial ambience. He is affiliated with the label outfit D.O.T. Audio Arts.

W E I G consists of two people, Jay Hines and Nick Ruiz, who are interested in noise music; both its history and process. Individually they have exhibited in Museums, art galleries and project spaces in the US and the EU. Their collaborative history is clumsily strewn across a few decades. The overlap is inconsistent, owing in part to residing in different US cities. However, for a portion of each year, Ruiz lives in the spare room in Hines’s NYC apartment. This episodic cohabitation involves reluctant and infrequent moments of learning, playing and troubleshooting electronic gear, which is mostly just lying around the apartment in heaps and mounds. Hines, though an amateur synth builder, will generally offer little to no instruction and it’s unclear if he himself understands how to operate the various electronic music-making gear he’s hoarded. A “creative process” consisting of little more than bile-filled debate between two diametrically opposed positions and blind fumbling movements, above and/or around gear. They seemingly embrace the “WHAT” (medium, tool, vice, etc) with an unhinged delirium so completely self-disavowed that the “WHY”, which would normally contribute a fully formed thesis, instead flounders distracted in the warm moist earth, yawning in the early balmy dawn. A palpable failure lacking any inroads to participation with culture. A dull hunger fueled by contrarian quips and a dismissive prance. In full regalia, static antagonism is levied against the crowd’s yelping concerns for objectivity, as though they were bending the frothy perimeter, towards a big reveal. Theatre of the absurd.

Martin Howse is occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth (geophysical phenomena), software and the human psyche (psychogeophysics) through the construction of experimental situations (performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works, codes and texts. He is equally the creator of the skin-driven audio divination noise module, The Dark Interpreter, and the ERD modular synthesizer series.

Joke Lanz is a pioneer of the electronic Independent scene and crossover artist whose work spans improvised and experimental music, noise and turntablism, performance art and musique concrète. He regularly performs with his band Sudden Infant or in various combinations throughout the improv and noise scene or as solo artist with voice and electronics. He’s a member of the internationally renowned Schimpfluch Gruppe alongside of Rudolf Eb.er and Dave Phillips.