Illusion of Safety intrepidly charts the terra incognita where sound, silence, noise and music intersect. Using conventional instruments, sound generating devices and random objects, IOS hews sonic sculptures that deliberately provoke, mesmerize and even affront listeners.
Unable to categorize their work into one style, each release, live performance, and sometimes individual piece often shifts abruptly from one atmosphere to another. Leading some to describe their output as schizophrenic. Their work is Decomposition: using obscure sources, exhibiting a strong sense of balance in structure and sound color, juxtaposing the beautiful and the disturbing.
Current emphasis is working with electronic synthesis, computer composition and manipulation, musical reference, and close microphone searching hands. Referencing external and enhancing internal locations, manipulating semi-recognizable elements in structures of a re-arranged language of error. Destroyed music, broken sound, disturbed ambience, and the quest for the sublime.
Since the Eighties, Al Margolis (If,Bwana) has earned himself an international reputation as a vanguard for experimental music, running the indie cassette label Sound of Pig Music. Among the label’s diverse and thrilling offerings, you will find numerous releases by Margolis/If, Bwana, wherein he explores a plethora of sonic experiments, transforming conventional sounds into uncanny otherness, and even finding ways to distort unconventional distortions. His music has succeeded in fusing ambience with industrial and musique concrete, producing strange soundscapes that are both soothing and unnerving, often at the same time.
In the Nineties, Margolis evolved the Sound of Pig label into Pogus Productions, replacing the cassette medium with compact disk technology. His own sonic pursuits have matured too, growing ever stranger and more daring.
5 April 2008
Le Bonheur, A. Dansaertstraat 196 Rue A. Dansaert, 1000 Brussels
20.00h, free entrance
