31 May 2016

The Los Angeles Free Music Society and their Legacy at Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent

'The unearthing of the LAFMS recordings is experimental rock history at it's most historical and hysterical - a completely bizarro and further-out counterpart to the L.A. punk scene.' (Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth)

Uncanny Valley is a new festival celebrating the open marriage between underground music/culture and the visual arts. Central guests for this first edition are the Los Angeles Free Music Society and a selection of contemporary avant-garde heroes who happily embrace the chaos, freedom en energy of those legendary neo-dada artpranksters.

It could be said that The Los Angeles Free Music Society was born from the dissillusionment of the seventies US Westcoast art scene. Consisting of a a band of artist friends, they giddily blended high art and trashy DIY-attitude with a completely unique sensibility. The otherwise too serious worlds of visual art and music were taken as a playground where B-movies, bad cartoons, fluxus, avant-garde, proto-noise, freejazz and collage got trashed and mixed into something new and something wild. Forty years later their deconstructions of popculture and sound/ video experiments still remain as vibrant and challenging as ever.

Core members like Tom Recchion, Rick and Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen, Joseph Hammer, Dennis Duck and notorious visual artists as Paul McCarthy en Mike Kelley formed several bands and projects that took aim at high minded avant-garde and the pittfalls of consumer society. Their collective, freewheeling way of creating influenced a great number of artists and musicians who took up the DIY approach to art and life, like noisecombo Wolf Eyes, dada improv group Volcano The Bear or outsider electronics and performance duo Calhau.

The 4 day Uncanny Valley Festival aims to show that this weird and wonderful world of the LAFMS hasn't lost any of its bite nor it's power to inspire. While the catalogue of LAFMS music projects is vast and endless (think of Smegma, The Doo-Dooettes, Dinosaurs With Horns…) , we chose to focus on a couple of specific projects and formations – like Extended Organ (with Paul McCarthy, Tom Recchion, David Toop...), AIRWAY (with Wolf Eyes & Aaron Moore) and Waxy and teamed them up with some of the best postmillenium avant-noise acts around, thus linking up with the here and now.

Next to many music performances we will also host an exhibition of the LAFMS flyer and poster archive at the 019 venue, have a paneltalk with all the artists moderated by David Toop and do a screening of LAFMS video work curated by Floris Van Hoof.

More info & tickets >> www.vooruit.be