“Playback Room” considers studio music as a distinctive art form and its recorded version as the pinnacle of many musicians’ production. This series of intimate listening seminars invites a range of artists to share and discuss their own selection of music and recordings that have been an important source of inspiration to their work and lives.
Led by music and culture critic Laura Snapes, this event includes an out-of-hours opportunity to explore the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition.
Following 30 minutes of selected music our artists lead an hour-long conversation, all taking place within this major exhibition showcasing Wolfgang Tillmans’ expanded practice.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ Playback Room is a space conceived by the artist specifically for listening to recorded music. While museums are dedicated to the contemplation of works of visual art and concert halls allow us to experience live music, no comparable venues exist where visitors can listen to music in its optimum sound quality.
Programme
Monday 20 February – with Throwing Shade
Monday 27 February – with Magz Hall
Monday 6 March – with Anna Meredith
Monday 13 March – with Adam Buxton
Monday 20 March – with Jeremy Deller
Biographies
Throwing Shade, aka Nabihah Iqbal, is a musician with an MPhil from Cambridge specialising in African history, works in human rights law (predominately in South Africa), a Black Belt in Karate and a rising producer and NTS Radio host whose latest House of Silk EP was released via Ninja Tune in 2016. Having debuted on Kassem Mosse’s Ominira imprint and followed suit with releases for No Pain In Pop (Patten, Grimes, Forest Swords) and Happy Skull, she continues her patchwork of peripheral pop. In November 2014, Throwing Shade was commissioned by Tate to compose a piece of music for the Turner Prize. She is currently working on a film soundtrack for a Belgian director, due out later this year. As well as working on her own productions, Throwing Shade also presents a bi-weekly show on NTS Radio, where she shares weird and wonderful music from around the world, with the aim of playing listeners tunes they won’t have heard before.
Magz Hall is a sound and radio artist and senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University UK. Magz heads the artist led group Radio Arts curating works for exhibition, broadcast, workshops and events. Works such as Tree Radio, Spiritual Radio, Dream Vessels, Dream Space, Babble Station, Radio Recall, Numbers, Radio Mind, Sound Train explore speculative futures of FM reflecting on a 100 years of international radio art practice, which cuts across sound art, radiophonics, music and installation. A founding producer of London’s Art station Resonance FM, her work has been exhibited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, British Museum, Tate Britain, the Sainsbury Centre, Whitechapel Gallery, V&A, Jerwood Visual Arts, MACBA Barcelona as well as in Denmark, Italy, Germany, Norway, Morocco, Canada, the USA and broadcast internationally.
Anna Meredith is a composer and producer and after building an established career in the classical world and two critically acclaimed EPs, released her much-anticipated debut album, Varmints on Moshi Moshi Records in March 2016. The critical response was overwhelming with 4 and 5 star reviews across the board from the likes of The Wire, Sunday Times, Loud & Quiet, Uncut, Q Magazine, The Line of Best Fit, DIY and the coveted Best New Music [8.4] on Pitchfork. Loud & Quiet also named it their Album of the Year for 2016.
Aside from sharing bills with Anna Calvi, James Blake and These New Puritans, Meredith’s dizzying CV includes being Composer in Residence for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a piece written for MRI scanner, soundtracking PRADA’s Spring/Summer 2015 campaign, symphonies created for nursery children, music for park benches in Hong Kong and sleep-pods in Singapore. Recent performances at the BBC Proms have included collaborations with Laura Marling and The Stranglers for the first 6 Music Prom, a performance of her body-percussion piece Connect It from the BBC Ten Pieces project and her Last Night of the Proms composition Froms was simultaneously performed by five symphony orchestras across the UK, was broadcast to an audience of 40 million people. Peformed by the National Youth Orchestra, her piece HandsFree, devised around the explosive clatter and thwack of body percussion received rave reviews from it’s performances at Southbank Centre, Royal Albert Hall, Barbican Centre, Utah Youth Symphony and even the M6 services.
Adam Buxton is a comedian, actor, writer and presenter. Together with comedy partner Joe Cornish he created and hosted the pioneering cult Channel 4 series The Adam & Joe Show. The pair also presented their own show on BBC 6Music and Adam hosted and co-created BUG, a live tour through the strange, innovative and exciting world of music videos and short films on the internet which was also broadcast on Sky.
Adam has appeared in a wealth of TV comedy including The IT Crowd, Have I Got News for You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Doctor Who, and The Last Chancers - as well as Adam & Joe Go Tokyo and Adam & Joe’s American Animation Adventure. On film, Adam appeared alongside alongside Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in their cop comedy Hot Fuzz, Stardust, and in the acclaimed British indie film Son of Rambow. Adam made his theatrical debut in I, Pavel - which chronicled the most passionate, most intense and least talented European avante-garde artist of the last 50 years. Adam’s short film creations have gathered their own following on YouTube and featured in his Sky show BUG.
Jeremy Deller lives and works in London. He studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He works with a variety of media, including video, sculpture, and graphic art, which has emphasized collaborative projects, re-enactments, and public art, through which he has reflected on popular culture in post-industrial England. His most important projects include Acid Brass 1997, Folk Archive 1999, in collaboration with Alan Kane, The Battle of Orgreave 2001 and Sacrilege (a scale model inflatable Stonehenge) 2012. Exhibitions include English Magic for the British Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, 2013, the retrospective Joy in People, Hayward Gallery, 2012 and Iggy Pop Life Class, Brooklyn Museum, 2016 . He has also developed curatorial projects, including All That Is Solid Melts Into Air 2013 and Love is Enough : William Morris and Andy Warhol.
Laura Snapes is an award-winning cultural critic and former NME features editor. She currently contributes to The Guardian, The Observer, The Financial Times, Pitchfork, Uncut, NPR, MTV, Fader, Buzzfeed and more. She originally hails from Cornwall.