Featuring:

DAISUKE TANABE [JP]
YOSI HORIKAWA [JP]
live in Manila

supporting acts:

Similar Objects x Moki McFly [PH]
Bent Lynchpin [PH]
Red-I [PH]

Projection Mapping by Gene Kogan [US]
B-SIDE, JULY 13, 10PM
Entrance 200PHP with free drink

This month of July, we’re most pleased to present some of Asia’s understated yet innovative electronic music producers: Japan’s Daisuke Tanabe and Yosi Horikawa, and the Philippines’ Bent Lynchpin, Similar Objects x Moki Mcfly, Red-i. They are among some of the most aurally sublime, refreshing, and pleasing electronic acts within our midst now who are fast redefining the current sound of electronic music locally and abroad. Their music moves far beyond the genre of 21st century production-based music, capturing smooth pre-70s instrumentation and sounds from the most natural sources. Such creations grab us with a forceful gesture, jumping in and out of tribal and futuristic realms of composition with a hypnotic aura, front to back. For every moment that pulls their live performances years into the future, a balanced layering of the past keeps the nostalgia of their performances grounded in the ominous nature of our culture and history as creative people. This electronic music from Japan and the Philippines is a new world of rhythms, melodies, and overtones for this age. These are sounds that have have been defining and, at the same time, defying our current decade’s musical trend.

Casual Encounters at Blue Moon
with Daisuke Tanabe and Yosi Horikawa
July 14 @ Green Papaya Art Project

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
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HEADLINERS:

Daisuke Tanabe [JP]
Patience is a virtue, and few know that better than understated electronic beatmaker Daisuke Tanabe. After carefully honing his craft from the age of 16, it was his first EP release in 2006 that brought him to the attention of tastemakers like Gilles Peterson and Pete Adarkwah. Since then he has remixed the likes of Elan Mehler and Aaron Jerome, collaborated with Monday Michiru, and released music on labels like Ninja Tune, BBE, and Brownswood Recordings. Taking inspiration from ambient, jazz, folk, reggae, and the entire canon of electronic music, Daisuke Tanabe assembles superbly subtle compositions made up of distinctively miniscule layers of sound.
More info can be found at http://daisuketanabe.net/. For samples of Daisuke’s music, visit https://soundcloud.com/daisuketanabe.

Yosi Horikawa [JP]
Yosi Horikawa is a Japanese producer whose music truly deserves the adjective original.
Born in Osaka, Yosi first started making music at age 12, recording in his bedroom using his voice and various found and made sounds. After many years honing his talents, 2009 saw him join the French label Eklektik Records where he released his first EP, Touch.
This in turn lead to a request by Jay Scarlett--of Beat Dimensions fame--to include Yosi on the Maverick Sessions EP series for Jay’s own Ubeat label. In 2011, Yosi contributed a track to the Nihon Kizuna compilation, which raised over $30,000 for earthquake and tsunami relief efforts in Northern Japan, and shortly after this he was invited to the Red Bull Music Academy
in Madrid where he collaborated with the likes of Dorian Concept, Anenon and Jesse Boykins III, as well as receiving further praise for his productions from the likes of BBC Radio 1′s Benji B.
Listen to Yosi’s music at https://soundcloud.com/yosi-horikawa.

SUPPORTING ACTS:

Bent Lynchpin [PH]
http://soundcloud.com/eudaemonics/bent-lynchpin-live-december
http://soundcloud.com/svbkvlt/bent-lynchpin-rude-mental

SimilarObjects [PH]
https://soundcloud.com/similarobjects

Moki McFly [PH]
http://ikalopa.bandcamp.com/album/mutual-tolerance-ep
https://soundcloud.com/ikalopa/sets/reflections
https://soundcloud.com/ikalopa/sets/pixelatedastrodots

Red-I [B-Side, Dubplate Manila]
https://soundcloud.com/red-i

Live Visuals by
Gene Kogan [US]
http://www.genekogan.com/

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT:

Sound is all our dreams of music.
Noise is music’s dreams of us.
—Morton Feldman (1958)

Rock. Jazz. Punk. Dubstep. Underground music. Every decade in music seems to have a flurry of new genres that can seemingly rise and fall overnight, but leave behind a sonic record of the times we live in.
These words and their longer cousins, the -ism family (surrealism, postmodernism, minimalism), are used to commodify and commercialize an artist's complex personal vision. These terminologies are not about understanding. It never has been. It's about money. Like the ravenous vultures they truly have become, music journalists are always eager to swoop in on unfamiliar sounds and declare them new genres.
Some of their discoveries were legitimate and refreshing—and they might even make appearances on all those best-albums-of-the-year lists that are popping up right about now. Others, of course, are totally ridiculous. Here are some of them: Drill. Trap. Hipster House. Homo Hop. Tumblr-wave. Future Garage/Post-Dubstep. Vaporwave.

The list goes on. From the fairly recent buzzwords on music-uploading sites such as Soundcloud and Bandcamp, as well as the revival of grunge or post-punk and others, these meaningless labels evaporate into nostalgic ether
to be later discovered and treasured by music junkies.
Once a group of artists and musicians have been packaged together under such a banner, it is not only easier for work to be marketed—it also becomes easier for the audience to “buy” it and for the critic to respond with prepackaged opinions. Audiences are deprived of their right to the
pleasure of creating their own interpretation, and the critic no longer has to think about what is really happening or go any deeper than the monochromatic surface of the label itself, thus avoiding any encounter with the real aesthetic criteria that make any individual artist's work possible. This is almost entirely unprecedented for an artistic movement of such scope and involving as many important figures as it does. Perhaps it is due to the fact that the music explicitly and violently resists the classifications that these so-called thinkers have so desperately tried to impose on it.

The point is, the musical world is a mess: from the inevitable collapse of the record industry via the decentralization and self-publishing opportunities the Internet and digital media have opened, to the constant repackaging of musical thought. And musical thought is vast in scope, enormous in depth, and the approaches to it, various and dynamic. The original hope of Fete dela WSK is to tap into all these permutations, casting light on music that has none of the sanitization and manipulation it undergoes in the big studios: more organic, more direct, more honest, no agendas. Originality, it can be argued, is an obsolete virtue. But the pursuit of it remains vigorous and thrilling.

This month of July, we’re most pleased to present some of Asia’s understated yet innovative electronic music producers: Japan’s Daisuke Tanabe and Yosi Horikawa, and the Philippines’ Bent Lynchpin, Similarobjects, and Moki Mcfly. They are among some of the most aurally sublime, refreshing, and pleasing electronic acts within our midst now who are fast redefining the current sound of electronic music locally and abroad. Their music moves far beyond the genre of 21st century production-based music, capturing smooth pre-70s instrumentation and sounds from the most natural sources. Such creations grab us with a forceful gesture, jumping in and out of tribal and futuristic realms of composition with a hypnotic aura, front to back. For every moment that pulls their live performances years into the future, a balanced layering
of the past keeps the nostalgia of their performances grounded in the ominous nature of our culture and history as creative people. This electronic music from Japan and the Philippines is a new world of rhythms, melodies, and overtones for this age.
These are sounds that have been defining and, at the same time, defying our current decade’s musical trend.

—Tengal, artistic director of WSK
Manila, July 2013

===============
ABOUT FETE DELA WSK!
===============

Fete dela WSK (or, simply, WSK!) is an international festival for cutting-edge music and related visual art. It is one of the pioneering events initiated by SABAW Media Art Kitchen, a not-for-profit artist-run organization whose primary interests lie in the creation, design, & research-based production of media which explores the various ways that art and technology intersect and diverge.

First launched in 2008 as Fete dela Wasaque, what started out as a festival that focused solely on live performances within the field of sonic arts has since crossed-over and gone on to examine the parallel voices (dance, poetry, internet art, theater, cinema, TV, and radio) that have worked hand in hand with the sonic arts throughout history.

The name itself is an obvious wordplay from the famous French music festival, Fete dela Musique, which for a long time had showcased simultaneous, large-scale local and mainstream music performances in Manila. The lack of a venue for showcasing experimental works in sound prompted SABAW to create what would serve as a similar showcase platform for innovative works in sound, its performativity, and its interrelationships with other media.

Website: www.wsknow.com
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/FetedelaWSK

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ABOUT THE JAPAN FOUNDATION, MANILA
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The Japan Foundation, Manila, is the 18th Overseas Office to be established and was inaugurated in June 1996. Its main objective is to deepen the global understanding of Japan and enhance mutual cooperation through the promotion of various cultural activies like lectures, film festivals, exhibitions and performances.

Website: http://www.jfmo.org.ph/