SPILL 15 – DOUBLE BILL – Justin Hopper and Dead Rat Orchestra & James Holcombe

8.30pm. £15/£10 concessions or part of the SPILL All-Seeing Pass or SPILL Week 2 Pass.

To purchase as part of a pass please call Toynbee Studios box office on 020 7650 2350.

Justin Hopper: I Made Some Low Inquiries

A ritual haunting through poetry, music and images.

I Made Some Low Inquiries is an invocation to nature, calling upon sources from the folk ballads of Appalachia to the toad-bone rituals of edge lands Suffolk. It steals from archival documents, the history of enclosure movements and family stories of weird country life, and infiltrates the secret societies of horse hypnotizers and factory workers alike. Combining texts, music and field recordings that repatriate American mountain ballads to their East Anglian origin, I Made Some Low Inquiries celebrates our absurd struggle to control the natural world through language and landscape; memory and myth.

Dead Rat Orchestra & James Holcombe: Tyburnia 

Dead Rat Orchestra perform a live soundtrack to James Holcombe’s 16mm experimental documentary. Tyburnia explores the parallels between contemporary and historical notions of crime in relation to economy and property, the spectacular nature of punishment, and the state’s use of the body as a site for political control.

Shot on 8mm and 16mm film and using hand processing and historical chemical techniques, Tyburnia is presented here as a unique three screen expanded performative film piece. Bringing their gritty, rough hewn interpretations and dexterous multi-instrumentalism; Dead Rat Orchestra will perform a live sound track to Tyburnia featuring songs that were composed for those condemned to ‘dance the Tyburn jig’. The work offers a new understanding to broadside ballads that have become a staple of folk music, here presented in closer association to their original socio-political context.

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