kode91

Kode9 released 'Nothing', will tour a live A/V set in 2016, but meanwhile is out DJing & stuff (dates)

Kode9
photo of Kode9 by Philip Skoczkowski

Kode9‘s first solo album is out now on Hyperdub, the record label he runs. He describes it like this:

The album throws horror soundtracks, sampled library and j-pop records into a no mans land between grime, early dubstep and Chicago footwork. Mostly instrumental, it zigzags between hypnotic, downcast loops, growling drones, jagged cut-ups of androids gone haywire, threaded through twitchy, transatlantic rhythms and sub-bass inaudible through your laptop speakers.

Building slowly, but more upbeat than previous albums, many of these tracks have more in common with Kode9’s recent singles from the last few years than they do with his two previous albums with collaborator The Spaceape ‘Memories of the Future’ (2006) and ‘Black Sun’ (2012)

Yet ‘Nothing’ is haunted both by The Spaceape’s presence (he died in 2014 after a prolonged battle with cancer), on ‘Third Ear Transmission’, a communiqué from a zone of digital immortality, and his absence, on ‘Void’, whose spaces were originally intended for the vocalist, and ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ which closes the album with a 9 minute silence.

In 2016, in collaboration with simulation artist Lawrence Lek, Kode9 will tour a live A/V set which revolves around a evacuated, fully automated, luxury hotel known as the ‘Nøtel’, whose corporate logo features on the album’s cover. The project explores a post-scarcity world in which the only thing in short supply is humans. The performance guides the audience on a first-person tour through the uncanny architecture of the Nøtel. In sprawling chambers deep within slick glass corridors, they encounter warped spaces, quantum clouds, gravitational pools, dancing voids and holograms of the dead.

MEANWHILE, Kode9 is now out on a DJ tour that starts in Montreal tonight (11/11) and hits Cielo in Manhattan on 11/16 with Kiva & Francois K, zips directly to LA for a gig at Airliner, and then comes right back to NYC for a late night 11/20 party in Brooklyn at Palisades with M.E.S.H. and Geng. All dates are listed below.

M.E.S.H. also performs two days later at MoMA PS1 in with Florian Hecker & Mark Leckey, part of Sunday Sessions at the Long Island City venue

Sunday Sessions: Florian Hecker and Mark Leckey, Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, U.S. Premiere
Sunday, November 22, 4:00-6:00 p.m.
MoMA PS1

With James Hoff; Bill Kouligas; TCF; M.E.S.H, Aleksandra Domanovic and Harm van den Dorpel
Sunday Sessions presents the U.S. premiere of Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, as part of a program organized by Bill Kouligas, founder PAN, Berlin. Collaborators since 2010, acclaimed sound experimentalist Florian Hecker and multidisciplinary artist Mark Leckey are interested in sound and its material effects. Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera brings together two discrete solo works to form a mutant configuration in which Hecker decomposes, modulates, and re-synthesizes the vocal track from Leckey’s 2010 performance piece GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (for which Leckey intoned the inner monologue of a black Samsung fridge) and Hecker’s own 3 Channel Chronics installation from that same year. The resulting work is a multipart hybrid in which heavily distorted fragments of Leckey’s narrative are interspersed with Hecker’s synthetic textures and fidgety tonal patterns.

Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera, the album, was released earlier this year.

This Sunday’s ‘Sunday Session’ at PS1 is called “1+2+3: Solos, Duos, and Trios for Greater New York” and includes Keith Fullerton Whitman (electronics), David Grubbs (guitar), Eli Keszler (drums, percussion, and electronics), Okkyung Lee (cello), Nate Wooley (trumpet) and C. Spencer Yeh (violin and voice).

Listen to a track from Kode9’s new album with all of his tour dates listed below…


Kode9 – Respirator (Taken From ‘Nothing’)

Nothing track list
01. Zero Point Energy
02. Notel
03. Void
04. Holo
05. Third Ear Transmission feat. The Spaceape
06. Zero Work
07. Vacuum Packed
08. Wu Wei
09. Casimir Effect
10. Respirator
11. Mirage
12. 9 Drones
13. Nothing Lasts Forever

Kode9

Kode9 — 2015 DJ TOUR DATES
November 11: Bassdrive / Le Belmont, MONTREAL, Canada
November 12: Blueprint / Fortune Sound, VANCOUVER, Canada
November 12: Parameter / f8, SAN FRANCISCO, USA
November 14: 1833 / East Room, CHICAGO, USA
November 16: Deep Space / Cielo, NEW YORK, USA
November 18: Low End Theory / Airliner, LOS ANGELES, USA
November 20: Ad Hoc Presents / Palisades, BROOKLYN, USA