19.10.24 – 20.10.24, 20:00, Echoes of Dissent (vol. 5), X-ray hex tet

What could it mean to practice politics by performing music? How could musical improvisation – as a process of collectively searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them – reconfigure our sense of the world? How can we experience and understand music not simply as what presents itself in the context of sound-phenomena-organised-in-time-and-exchanged-for-cash within the factory of post/industrial capitalism, but also, as an aesthetic-poetic-political mode of enquiry, a mode of perception, a way of learning and sharing – in and outside of the vibrations of sound or the marks of language?

These and other questions will be explored over two days through the practice of X- Ray Hex Tet – an ongoing collaboration between:

Billy Steiger – celeste and violin
Crystabel Riley – drums
Edward George – words and music
Pat Thomas – piano and electronics
Paul Abbott – drums and synthetic sounds
Seymour Wright – alto saxophone (actual and potential)

Six musicians of different backgrounds working at the margins of what is (to many) acceptable in terms of music, genre, technique, interpretation, history and ‘tradition’; a set of subjectivities, energies and philosophies who, in dialogue together, venture and probe the awkward wealth and friction of  investigation, finding pleasure (and treasure) in searching for the hidden, secret, and mysterious at the edges of music and meaning.

They will release a recording through Reading Group (New York) in October.

Stoffel Debuysere is affiliated as an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Echoes of Dissent was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.