Performance and Sound Explorations, Hosted by LICK

About

Hosted by LICK, with Bill Dietz, Ashley Holmes, Lola de la Mata and Mary Prestidge

Performance and Sound Explorations is a one-off event with, for, and about sonic practice and its relationship with spaces, bodies, history and more. Join LICK and invited artists Bill Dietz, Ashley Holmes, Lola de la Mata and Mary Prestidge for a day of peer-led conversations and workshops, and an evening of new and in progress sharings where installation, sculpture, movement and archive are in dialogue with sound making.

Bill Dietz is an American composer, writer, and co-chair of the Bard MFA Music/Sound department. His work focuses on the history of the listening experience, which is presented in concerts and festivals, but also museums, apartment buildings, and on the streets. Bill is the co-founder of journal Ear / Wave / Event, and is a board member of the Maryanne Amacher Foundation, responsible for promoting and preserving her compositions and research.

Ashley Holmes is an artist based between Sheffield & Liverpool, UK. His work brings together elements of visual art and music, shaped by research interests around hybrid and collaborative methods of production, publishing and broadcasting. Ashley is a resident of NTS radio presenting Tough Matter, and facilitates Open Deck, giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around embodied knowledges and relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories.

Lola de la Mata is a London born French/Spanish conceptual sound artist, composer, curator and musician currently based in Liverpool. Tinnitus and aural diversity are at the core of her research practice, inspiring glass, metal, and ceramic musical instruments. Her debut album Oceans on Azimuth was released in 2024 to much acclaim for which her gaze is focused on the architecture of the ear and its auditory illusions.

Mary Prestidge has been evolving a dance practice for over 50 years. She performed with Ballet Rambert in the early 1970s but later gravitated toward an independent context with artists giving space and support to experimentation and research. Mary was a co founder of the radical X6 Dance Space and collective and its successor Chisenhale Dance Space in London in the late 70s and 80s. Specific influences were the improvisational forms via the lineages of Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson and others. Based in Liverpool since 1995 Mary teaches and continues movement and performance research both with her dance collaborators (Liverpool Improvisation Collective) and with others in a diverse range of contexts and communities.

LICK are the improvisational sound trio of Aous Hamoud, Paula Kolar and Jon Davies. Their live work interprets field recordings, small instruments and incidental noises, focusing on oneiric narrative making, non-verbal conversation, and collective performing and listening. Through live performance, radio broadcast or sound making workshops, LICK emphasises accessibility of field recording and sound making instruments for hearing the world critically and creatively.