An Evening With Secluded Bronte:: musik theatre from Hell
+ MARIANNA MARUYAMA & HESSEL VELDMAN - impro sound-poetry set.

SECLUDED BRONTE mix composition with improvisation: their scores are open enough to permit surprise.

The Anglo-Welsh trio have been together for 20 years. Since that time in 2002, they have continued to plough an idiosyncratic furrow into the heart of what one might call art-music.

Rock 'n' Roll, abstract noise, musique concrète, references to cinema and television, comedy, poetry, songs, sketches and theatre co-exist equally.

There is also an element of their work which can be best described as a forensic exploration of everyday objects. The sounds produced are placed on an equal footing with more conventional instrumentation: guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion.

Secluded Bronte are:
Adam Bohman – voice, home made string instruments, objects.
Jonathan Bohman – voice, piano, electronics, objects, percussion.
Richard Thomas – voice, guitars, bass, piano, synthesizers, harmonica, computer, drum machine, percussion, telephone

https://vimeo.com/428450349

Secluded Bronte formed in London and launched in New York City in 2002. Their music combines free improvisation, speech, musique concrète, pop, rock ‘n’ roll, music-theatre, expanded cinema… you name it. It’s heterogenous stuff.

A little namedropping might work better, because it is precisely this elusive quality that ensures that a very diverse list of top artists – a.o. Squarepusher, Stereolab, Felix Kubin, Jim O’Rourke, Add N To X, Royal Trux, Peter Strickland, Lol Coxhill, David Byrne, Björk, Iggy Pop, The Necks, Charles Hayward, Ken Campbell, Christian Marclay en Ilan Volkov – is very fond of them and enjoys working with them.

Secluded Bronte have toured in the United States and throughout Europe. They have recorded live sessions for BBC Radio 3, WFMU, Concertzender, Resonance FM. Secluded Bronte have released six albums and two singles: "Secluded in Jersey City" (Pogus), "Dark August Variations" (Worm Records/K7-3), "Ten Point Plan To Destroy Astrology" (Singing Knives), "For Entertainment Everyone Dies" (Apolkalypso), "Daughter Tunnel Sunlight" (Ffordd Allan). In 2020 the group released two albums on the Ffordd Allan label, "Magnetic Crochet" and the live album "Queen’s". In November a third album, "The Horns of Andromeda", was released on Takuroku.

 
“It’s hard to describe the raw, explosive audio art they perpetrate. Everyday objects and sounds are worked on until they become saturated with lurid suggestion, resulting in a bizarre, hysterical immediacy … in the traditions of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Bohman Brothers kitchen-sink realism laughs at the grand claims of lofty art. They will show you fear in a sponge from a drainer.” - Ben Watson in The Wire
Secluded Bronte are a multi-faceted experimental trio whose work has embraced scrapheap musique concrete, clattering post-punk, spoken word, poetry, improvisation and more. Collected from a mixture of studio and live recording, this suite of perfectly planned mischief slips and slides between the physical and metaphysical, pathos and alien-abstraction, wry humour and obscenity – relishing in awkward dualities and eccentric imbalances. Tuneful ditties emerge before switching frame to an aural car crash. Shared refrains and in-jokes from live shows are unveiled, then jump gear to a Morricone-soundtracked car-chase. Listen close, arrange the junk and unpack the mystery.

 

MARIANNA MARUYAMA & HESSEL VELDMAN

impro sound-poetry set

Marianna Maruyama is an artist and writer geo-located in The Hague. She is interested in love and translation. Her work has been performed and exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), documenta14 Parliament of Bodies, Kassel (DE), The Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam (NL), Manifesta 11, Zurich (CH), The Centraal Museum, Utrecht (NL), IMPAKT festival, Utrecht (NL) and CAC Vilnius (LT).  Selected publications include: Performing Security (The Fifth Season, 2019); Translation as Method (Kunstlicht, 2017), Three Movements (Casco/DAI, 2013), Farocki’s Living Room (Harun Farocki Institut, 2018). Since 2016, she has been active as an artist-researcher at the invitation of the Sedje Hémon Foundation in The Hague.

Hessel Veldman (1956, Y Create, FNTC, Gorgonzola Legs), musician, composer and producer, started his search for uncomfortable music during his teens. An early fascination for electronic noise and dissonance, from the beginning of the 1970s, in combination with a preference for writing and performing extremely idiosyncratic music, has created a wide range of experimental compositions and radio productions.