Rian Treanor + Cara Tolmie
RIAN TREANOR
British artist Rian Treanor's music is complex yet highly kinetic, reflecting equal interest in club culture and experimental sound design. He has released records on Planet Mu, Nyege Nyege Tapes, The Death of Rave and Warp sub-label Arcola. Using the programming language Max/MSP he develops bespoke software to explore extended rhythmic techniques and algorithmic processes, building devices that enable spontaneous pattern modulation within various collaborations, workshops, live performances and installations.
CARA TOLMIE
Cara Tolmie (born Glasgow, 1984, based in Stockholm) spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely and internationally at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.
Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body - of how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, both pleasurable and disorienting. Within this she often explores performative techniques that dis/reorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of defamiliarised, uncanny and repetitive vocalisation.
Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.
This new collaboration between Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor is a highly kinetic and playful endeavour. Body centric vocal explorations, meet with intricate rhythmic systems in a hypersurreal space occupied by sounding inhalations, hedonistic swells, dissociative beats, mimicked samples and meandering word play.
Focusing on the expanded edges of voice and computer music and how they merge and escalate one another, their collaboration plays with an effusive form of experiential listening. One that lifts, releases and invites the audience into new terrains of ecstatic and at times jarring physical and sensorial encounters.
Their debut LP is out now on Planet Mu.
Worldwide: chloe@annexagency.co.uk
“In the middle is a collaboration by returning Counterflows performers Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor. Tolmie uses a vocal practice called internal singing, controlling her inhalations and exhalations in an utterly astonishing way, mimicking digital samples, luring the audience into a thrilling kind of experimental listening where they question what they are hearing. Experiencing her breathwork and word play over Treanor’s searching, hypnotic rave beats is the weekend’s stone cold standout, hitting a sweet spot where skill and hedonism come together. An intersection where the truly inventive, massively enjoyable Counterflows festival often finds itself”