Nonsemble at Extended Play Festival

Brisbane’s indie-chamber group Nonsemble head south to perform in Extended Play, Sydney’s exciting and eclectic festival of innovative and experimental music. The septet will present two of their best loved audiovisual works: Samurai Loops and Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke.Nonsemble formed in 2012 around a shared passion for bridging gaps between contemporary classical music and electronica, pop, and post-rock. The core ensemble consists of a string quartet plus drums, guitar, and piano, but has morphed through various projects over the years, including realtime VR performances, live film scorings, pop-up performances in art galleries, and site-specific improvisational happenings

Fresh from a recent US premiere in NYC’s prestigious MATA festival, Samurai Loops is an audiovisual work for 2 pianos, tape, and video. It explores and explodes a few minutes of footage cut from the 1967 film, Samurai Rebellion, fragmented and manipulated to make rhythmic patterns in the music visible. In the scene, two old friends are bound by their duties as Samurai to fight to the death. The duel is resolved in a single fluid and deadly motion. In Samurai Loops, this critical moment is frozen, and its hidden rhythmic qualities revealed.

Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke is a 30-minute work using the moves of 1953 championship game of Go as stimulus for harmonic, rhythmic and melodic material. It’s an experiment in extracting musical ideas from abstract patterns and sequences, and allowing these ideas to develop intuitively into a large-scale work. Dubbed a “monumental contemporary classic”, and featured on WNYC’s prestigious New Sounds radio, the piece has enjoyed performances in various Brisbane venues, MONA in Hobart, Bang on a Can Festival in the US, and the Netherlands.In Extended Play, Nonsemble will be joined by live visualist Jaymis Loveday, who will augment the work with his entrancing go-inspired animations.