We are delighted to welcome back one of our favourite ensembles, Ex-Easter Island Head, to curate a show for our fourth season of Luminate. The genre-defying ‘mallet guitar’ ensemble helped launch Luminate back in 2018, and are returning in expanded quartet form to premiere new material from their forthcoming album. They have chosen two remarkable artists, Kelly Jayne Jones and Thomas Stone to join them.

Ex-Easter Island Head (2009-) are a UK-based musical collective composing and performing music for solid body electric guitar, percussion and other instruments.

Primarily performing as a quartet, the group incorporate multiple electric guitars augmented through mechanical preparations and extended techniques to create works that explore group interplay, repetition and melodic invention through purposefully limited means. They have performed their original compositions solo, as a duo, trio, quartet and as a large ensemble across a wide variety of events from site specific installation works to live film scores. Their records Mallet Guitars One –Three, Large Electric Ensemble and Twenty-Two Strings have been released to significant critical acclaim from the likes of The Wire, Pitchfork, the Quietus and the New York Times. The group have received airplay on the BBC, ABC and more with their music favourably compared to the likes of Steve Reich, Glenn Branca and John Cage.

‘A three chord punk mission statement turned into a neo-classical manifesto’ The Wire

‘Free flowing genius’ The Guardian

Kelly Jayne Jones is a Manchester based artist making work that combines performance, installation and sound. She began working in experimental concrete music and her practice has expanded to include dance, gesture, sonic drawings, stone sculpture and film.

She is interested in creating a multi-sensory experience that creates possible conditions for communication and exchange. Creating contemporary zones bordering quantum fictions, where communion may have the potential to explore our inner dimensions. She is currently exploring animist ideas around the breath and spirit of mountains and rivers and how we can reconnect with our planet by means of ancient and future rituals. Her work traverses the emotions of desire and anxiety, the comfortable and uncomfortable edges of our inner spaces and social co-existence.

Thomas Stone is an electroacoustic composer and musician from London. His practice focuses on live performance, reconciling disparate influences such as his tinnitus, physical endurance, false memories, the physical effect of sound, séance, bass music and 20th century composition. Refined through presentation in various resonant spaces (from churches to a disused water tank, Cornish coastal caves to the hull of a ship) his compositions use contrabassoon and sampling devices as oscillators for his snare drum.  Blurring the boundaries between acoustic and electronic sound sources, his post-classical / post-techno soundscapes use the relatively ugly means of long tones, dissonances and cyclic rhythms to reach moments of austere, fragile beauty.  Thomas has performed throughout the UK including shows at Tate Britain, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Serpentine Gallery and BBC Radio 3.

This event is supported by PRS Foundation