Altmusic presents:
BETTY APPLE

Known for her powerful, often provocative live performance work and experimental projects, BETTY APPLE is one of the leading lights from a younger generation of avant-garde artists in Taiwan.

Using body politics as her framework, Betty Apple’s focus is on performative, live sound art which flirts with abjection, noise and club culture. Drawing on her experience as a millennial living in post-colonial Taiwan, Betty Apple’s performances wrest sound from kitsch objects symbolic of consumer society – particularly mass-produced objects intended for eroticism or entertainment, such as vibrators, underwear and fluorescent paint, which are carried inside the body and expressed through violent and grotesque means.

Through these performances, Apple (de)constructs a chaotic and hysterical “noise text” that is created from input to output, distorted by dynamics introduced by humans as well as objects. Producing sound with her body, she creates an exciting, edgy atmosphere – an imploding wave of connection and mystery.

Deeply influenced by bedroom electronica and sub-culture, Betty Apple arrived at sound and composition by way of her background in theatre. She works with noise and range of aberrant texture, and is an accomplished producer of electronic music and DJ while also engaging in video art, performance art, and art curation. Born in 1986 in Chiayi, Taiwan, she received her B.A. in Theatre and M.A. in New Media Art at the Taipei National University of the Arts.

TOUR DATES:
Wednesday 31 July – Wine Cellar, Auckland w/ URSULA LE SIN & BLOOD MOTHERS
Thursday 1 August – Caroline, Wellington w/ URSULA LE SIN & CRONE
Friday 2 August – The Cook, Dunedin w/ AOTEAROA SNUFF JAZZ QUARTET & NEGATIVE NANCIES
Saturday 3 August – Christchurch Town Hall, Christchurch w/ AOTEAROA SNUFF JAZZ SEXTET & TEEN HATERS

TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE FOR AK, WLGTN, DUN
and
HERE FOR CHCH
 

SUPPORTS:
URSULA LE SIN
Ursula Le Sin spends their time by the sea. Interested in the communicative abilities of performance, they share their search for sound-facilitated release. Through raw playfulness, they aim to encourage connection particularly for those often uncomfortable in conventional electronic music spaces. Supporting the facilitation of events that are both immersive and accessible, they are a member of Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based music collective MESH.

Rhythms tumble, trickle, crash and drip. Sharp drums swell through puddles of reverberated delay. Le Sin’s music is first and foremost informed by high BPM body-moving. However, their sets progress sluggishly to invite self-directed engagement. Influencing their sound is their involvement in improv projects oil & rag and BEARZONEXXX.

BLOOD MOTHERS
Blood Mothers is the Avant-Nesian expression and intricate weaving of INSTINCTUAL ELEMENTAL HYBRID knowledge.

Samara Alofa and Native B merge to reprogram the masses, a multi-dimensional entity that recovers data lost amongst our industrial walls of exsistence.There is rage between the lines… Papatūānuku’s womb will scream and stomp and you will hear HER.

Blood Mothers was birthed in the cracks of DISPLACED BLOODLINES, UNIVERSAL DNA MEMORY RETURN and ultimately the RETURN TO SOURCE.

CRONE
crone is the sci-fi goth duo of Emily Berryman and Lucy Reid. Birthed in the cold depths of Ōtepoti, they are now based in Wellington where they spent their first year concocting tracks from the spectral confines of an old fish chiller.

crone’s sound is underpinned by a sustained sense of drama, stirring effected live loops and samples into an intoxicating mix that evokes the space in between dance and drone, dark and melancholic.

AOTEAROA SNUFF JAZZ
Imagine a horn-led sextet that gives you the same visceral thrill as a ringside seat at the great Ali/Frazier fights – the Rumble in the Jungle, or the Thriller in Manila. ‘Energy music’ that gives everyone at least a bloody nose, if not an actual trip to the emergency room.

Three saxes (Jeff Henderson, Reuben Derrick and Matt Middleton), blown ‘without qualms’, as the Axemen put it – plus a polyrhythmic drummer (Nick Harte), turntables (Rory Dalley – aka IRD) and a guitar-player (Bruce Russell) who can start fires psycho-acoustically. Three decades of antipodean sonic experimentalism distilled into one line-up brought together for strictly limited shows, before dispersing to the four winds.

NEGATIVE NACNIES
On the surface, it was simple – a floor tom, a snare, a cheap synth, and a guitar – but the sound was like nothing I’d ever heard. The keyboardist played and sang with the percussionist at the back, who commandeered the rhythm section with deep pounding grooves. All the while, the guitarist swayed and gyrated like Jimmy Page, but looked like a philosophy professor as he unleashed a fuzzed out fury of noise at just the right moments. – Otago Daily Times

TEEN HATERS
Both Helen and Peter have long been active in the Christchurch scene. They are both, perhaps, better known for their solo work – Helen’s Mela project and Peter under his own name (in which capacity, much material has been released on independent, international labels in the last decade or so).

On the ‘musical description’ front, Drones are important – whether Helen’s slowly evolving, repetitive cello patterns or Peter’s rinky-dink SK-1 samples + almost-open-chord guitar feedback. And the drones are often interrupted with perplexing accidents – sonic flotsam and jetsam bobbing up and down on an otherwise gently undulating aural surface. Their performances usually start off slow and quiet, gradually building in intensity. It’s really a music of contrasts – mostly improv upon an elementary structural underpinning, largely dronal with occasional staccatos, an enveloping ambience flecked with noise.