Minor Renaissance — a concert series for experimental contemporary practices
# 2 with Annie Aries, Isabelle Pead, Pentu
Doors 7:00pm
Tickets £7-12
Minor Renaissance, a concert series for experimental music, traces quiet renewal through shifting relations between instruments and electronics, composed and improvised material, and inherited techniques and wayward contemporary practices.
The name reaches back to a Renaissance that was, in its own time, largely improvised counterpoint conjured over a given line, ornament invented under the hand, the written part no more than a frame for what a body would make of it. That older art turned on exposure: a sound committed to without the safety of being fixed in advance, a gesture that could go otherwise and cannot be taken back. The series holds to that same condition. Across composition and improvisation, acoustic sound and live electronics, it treats sound less as something delivered than as something enacted — worked out in the moment, with something at stake, in the room.
Minor Renaissance invites the audience to notice the small shifts already underway: instruments losing their familiar edges, materials changing form, technologies acting less like tools and more like collaborators. Rather than a rebirth announced by a movement, it points to smaller transformations — fragile, unfinished, temporary communities of sound.
Annie Ruefenacht aka Annie Aries is a composer, sound artist and performer working with modular synthesis, spatial sound and embodied performance. Her practice explores the relationship between listening, technology and performative interaction, with a focus on live electronics and experimental sound environments. Her work has been presented at festivals such as BEAST FEaST, ISCM World New Music Days, NYCEMF, MATA Festival, Sonic Matter among others.
Isabelle Pead is an artist working across sculpture, sound, video and performance. Her work centres on the relationship between the voice and the sounding body, considering softness, utterance and the inbetween. Through a combination of sculptural objects, synthesised sound and her use of extended vocal technique, she explores the material and relational properties of sound and the interaction between performer, space, audience and object. Pead has exhibited work with Sommers Gallery, The Florence Trust, Seager Gallery, Studio Chapple, The Horse Hospital, The Who Gallery, MoM Art Space Hamburg and Galerie Kaufhof.
Pentu is a London-based producer, sound designer and guitarist, exploring experimental and ambient soundscapes, focusing on sounds that mirror the splintered reality of living in an online world. His latest release Liquid Error was released in July via Salmon Universe.
