Evening of talks by Ben Watson, Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta followed up with music by Lauri Hyvärinen, Taneli Viitahuhta and Ben Watson.
On Friday 6th of May, Titanik gallery will host an event of talks and free improvised music. On program will be talk by Ben Watson from London, accompanied by Sezgin Boynik, Taneli Viitahuhta and Lauri Hyvärinen. Watson is music journalist, author of books on Frank Zapoa and Derek Bailey and founder of AMM (Association of Musical Marxists). Watson’s talk will circle around burning issues for militant aesthetics and truth in music. Among other issues, he will discuss the relation of language in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to procedures in Derek Bailey’s Free Improvisation: the necessity of analytic systems open to intuition and chance. Sezgin Boynik is editor of Rab-Rab journal for political and formal inquiries in art. He will talk about Amiri Baraka and the politics of blues form. Taneli Viitahuhta is a musician and researcher. His topic is free improvisation and flight from reified work.
After talks Watson and Viitahuhta will perform with Lauri Hyvärinen, guitar experimentalist and improviser from Helsinki. Together Viitahuhta (sax) and Hyvärinen will perform Watson’s “graphic poems”, wrote for the occasion. In the words of Watson: “graphic poems can be interpreted by vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers or indeed anyone.”
The evening is organised by Helsinki based publishing house Tutkijaliitto in collaboration with Rab-Rab. It is the first event of Tutkijaliitto seminar series Kriittisen työn tila / Critical work space, funded by KSL Civic Association for Adult Learning.
Event is free of charge, but there will be Unkant, Tutkijaliitto and Rab-Rab publications on sale, so if you are interested in purchasing literary explosives, remember to bring cash.
Ben Watson is author of many books such as Frank Zappa: Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (St Martins’ Press, 1996), Art, Class & Cleavage (Quartet, 1999) and Derek Bailey and Story of Free Improvisation (Verso, 2004). He has published in journals such as The WIRE, Radical Philosophy and Historical materialism. Late Lunch with Out To Lunch is his ongoing weekly program on Resonance FM.
