The Berlin group PERLONEX’s flurrying micro textures and corrupted electro-acoustic zones have taken them on a twisting incursion across some of the most persistently radical and inventive musical fields of thought and experimentation. While the trio have collaborated and played alongside an esteemed line-up of disparate spirits that have included pianist Charlemagne Palestine and Keith Rowe (AMM), its individual members have done time with an even more proliferate array of iconoclastic luminaries, such as Don Cherry, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jason Forrest, Anla Courtis (Reynols), Philip Jeck, The Haters’s GX Jupitter-Larsen, Xavier Charles, Valerio Tricoli, Toshimaru Nakamura, Phil Minton, and our own Greg Malcolm. Percussionist Burkhard Beins’ Polwechsel has appeared on fabled UK label Erstwhile in tandem with Fennesz and prolific Swiss imprint Hat Hut, alongside AMM’s John Tilbury.
Their first appearance here will take place in the Stone Chamber of the provincial Council Buildings, whose ethereal ambiance promises to let Perlonex’s susurrating hymnal chimes, flickered euphonies and buzzing glassine arcs levitate on another level. As The Wire Magazine’s Nick Cain writes, Perlonex’s 'music is in a state of constant movement and advance, and though the rate and speed at which it shape-shifts varies greatly, it is never static. Comparison has been made to AMM, and there are surface similarities in the use of layers of sound in the construction of the improvisations, but Perlonex’s electronic source material is significantly more dynamic, and the range of sounds it generates broader'.
Christchurch’s PRESCHOOL will provide a fitting entrance mantra for Perlonex’s euphoric liturgy. Improv gone totally crèche, its members consist of the black eminences of the New Age prospect: Adam Willetts, LA Lakers, Rory Dalley, Reuben Derrick, Stuart McKay and Silencio Ensemble’s Chris Reddington. Rhapsodic and immersive, as Geraldine Wojno Kiefer would put it, 'Deity in the pastoral tradition is believed to inhere partly in the landscape and partly in the perceiver, who imagines herself as an active participant and domesticator of this eminently livable space. Pastoral landscape includes a variety of topographical forms, rendered and clothed in verdant green grass, pasturage, woods and farms'.
Presented in association with ALTMUSIC and Vitamin S.
