Convergence and Rockfeedback announce a special Ben Frost Audio - Visual performance featuring Marcel Weber at Heaven, London on March 16. Australia-born, Iceland-based composer Ben Frost returns to Convergence with a colossal and compelling new live show featuring material from his highly anticipated new album, The Centre Cannot Hold which will be released today via Mute.

The Centre Cannot Hold was recorded over ten days by Steve Albini in Chicago. The music exists not in space, but in a space; it is a document of an event, of a room, and of the composer within it. It is music that is not fully controlled and appears to be anxiously, often violently competing against its creator. In collaborating with Albini, Frost chooses a new immediacy and raw directness. As an artist whose command of sound design lies at the heart of his practice, by placing himself primarily in the role of live performer and handing the studio recording process over to Albini, Frost continues pursuit of Theseus’ paradox; the question of whether a ship restored by replacing every single part remains the same ship.

Glenn Max, Artistic Director of Convergence says: “It was a turning point for us in 2014 when Ben Frost decided to place his  A U R O R A album-release performance within Convergence. His performance at Village Underground that Friday night - accompanied by two drummer/electronicists -- was riveting and a palpable sense of Convergence's identity was formed on that night. It’s a pleasure to welcome him back with his new special audio / visual presentation with Marcel Weber”

For this special outing, Ben Frost will be collaborating with the visual artist Marcel Weber who works with imagery, light and space. His performances and installations have been commissioned and featured by festivals such as CTM and Transmediale, Unsound and Mutek and he’s collaborated with artists including Clark, Kuedo and Kode9. 

Weber’s work is marked by a well-defined and distinctive aesthetic, using images that both resonate with and form a relationship to sound. Applying the musical language and its ability to cut to the heart of our emotional worlds to moving image, an uncommon and ethereal quality emerges, brought to life by his passion for experimental narratives. The outcome is a multi-layered experience communicated by dynamic imagery: a cosmos made out of textures and distortions, a magical experience of surreal moments, stimuli for the subconscious.

Convergence returns in 2018 for its fifth edition. Held annually in March, the event series has entertained & educated over 100,000 attendees across London since its inception. Through concerts, exhibitions and talks, Convergence celebrates the latest technological developments of digital culture, elucidating issues, developments and innovation across art and society.

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Convergence 2018 Shows

Friday 16 March

Ben Frost and Marcel Weber

Heaven

19:00 doors

Tickets

Produced by RFB in association with Convergence

Friday 9 & Saturday 10 March

John Cale (2018-1964): A Futurespective With the London Contemporary Orchestra

The Barbican

Produced by the Barbican in association with Convergence

The Convergence Festival returned this year with yet another mind-boggling roster of electronic talent, live gigs and talks around music and technology, and for the closing night Convergence hosts a night of electronic genius in a converted cinema in London’s East End. As well as seminal Skull Disco founder Shackleton and electronic Warp-trio, Darkstar, the night features a performance from everybody’s favourite German tech-cum-house-cum-ambient-cum-classical producer, Hendrik Weber - Pantha Du Prince.

Weber has made a career out of bridging the gap between electronic and classical music, producer turned composer back to producer, and just like Reich, Glass and all, Weber sits in the middle of that dance/classical Venn diagram, deftly displaying the simple fact that as dance music is not just thrown together by anyone with a mac, so classical composition shouldn’t be seen as a genre, but rather a mode of making music.

Weber’s set mostly comprises songs from 2010’s Black Noise, his first album on Rough Trade and to all intents, the ‘crossover’ album for Pantha Du Prince (featuring collaborations with longtime remix buddy, Noah Lennox). Black Noise was born out of of field recordings from Weber’s sojourns in the Swiss Alps, and one could be forgiven for thinking the material might sound out of place in a dark venue at 2am. However it quickly becomes clear that any fears are unfounded - quite apart from the fact that Black Noise is Weber’s most dance-orientated release (strange and beautiful as 2014’s Bell Laboratory experiment was, carillons and marimbas aren’t really built to get you fistpumping and standing on chairs), tracks from Black Noise open up sonic soundscapes that reach far beyond the sticky floors of the venue. Wreathed in shadow, Weber adjusts the music live, pirouetting around his audience - beat-focused minimalism seguing gently into the sonic abstraction of his more ambient work.

And it is this sonic abstraction that really forms the backbone of PDP - the slow-build of the bounce on the clubbier material is increased tenfold, as Weber moves seamlessly into the kind of late night frost of the more shall we say ‘chime-orientated’ work. From the tapping of a woodblock to footsteps in the snow, from the glockenspiel to glistening bells, as Hendrik Weber stands up on a stage, bathed in the glow and mixing up noises right there in front of you, it’s easy to close your eyes and forget quite where you are.