THOSE LUCKY ENOUGH TO BE AT THE REPUBLIC 5 YEARS AGO
WILL REMEMBER A TRULY WONDERFUL PERFORMANCE
BY A GROUP OF SYDNEY'S FINEST IMPROVISERS...

NOW THAT PERFORMANCE HAS BEEN RELEASED
IN A BEAUTIFULLY PACKAGED VINYL EDITION

and to celebrate and launch this release
we're lucky enough to welcome back for a rare appearance

John Encarnacao's
GIRAFFE
QUARTET

WITH FILMS BY
RYSZARD DABEK

John Encarnacao has long made both improvised and song-based musics. As guitarist/singer-songwriter, he has recorded with The Nature Strip, Warmer and Smelly Tongues, with releases by the labels China Pig Records, Half a Cow, W.Minc and Waterfront. As an improvisor, releases date back to the mid-90s with the solo plunderphonic project St Crustacean. He has over 30 releases in his discography, and currently plays with bassist Lloyd Swanton and pianist Felicity Wilcox in the trio W.E.S.T.

In 2014, John Encarnacao released the album Giraffe Solos – a set of free improvisations on acoustic guitar in a never-to-be-repeated tuning. After playing some shows in this vein, he decided to expand the project through collaborating with some trusted colleagues. A one-off concert at the People’s Republic resulted in Giraffe Quartet and Duets, the album’s format – with a duet between John and each of the other players, and a number of quartet performances - inspired by Anthony Braxton’s Trio and Duet album.

Saxophonist Brendan Smyly made a living in the 1990s with kitsch-bizarro showband The Andy 500 and guested on recordings by The Gadflys, Front End Loader and Jimmy Little, among others. Since the mid-2000s he has featured in improvising groups The Monstrous Now and Espadrille, the latter with John Encarnacao. In those groups he has worked with electronics as well as saxophones.

Holly Harrison is an internationally commissioned composer from Western Sydney. Her trumpet concerto Hellbent was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in April, adding to an extensive list of performances throughout Australia, Europe, Asia and the USA. She is also a unique and formidable drummer, as demonstrated on this recording and her duo album with Joseph Tabua (as Tabua-Harrison) for Psychopyjama, Scout (2018).

Jon Drummond is a composer with a particular interest in “how sonification can tell the story of science”. To this end he builds his own electronic environments and also harnesses computers and experimental technologies, such as the Arduin0-based, light-controlled synthesizers heard on this record, for improvisation. Jon Drummond and John Encarnacao collaborated in the electronic duo Pi, which released the album Irrationalthrough Psychopyjama in 1999.
The quartet’s performance will be preceded by a selection of moving image works by artist Ryszard Dabek made in direct relation to the musical and sound practice of John Encarnacao. These works, spanning a period of over 16 years (2004 - 2021) have arisen through a number of collaborative contexts including live performance and improvisation as well as more traditional forms of studio-based practice. Originating on a range of mediums including video, super 8 and 16mm these short films were produced for film/media festivals, gallery installations and online delivery.

Ryszard Dabek is a Sydney-based artist who works across photography and moving image. Much of his recent work coalesces around the idea of a present haunted by the spectral vestiges of Modernity. Architectural form (utopian or otherwise), modernist design and cinematic reflexivity are all pivotal to this fascination with the recent past. Central to his practice is a critical and sustained engagement with pre-digital photographic and moving image forms and the ways these can interface with the contemporary digital moment.

Program:
who falls, was, 2004, 4mins 50 secs
Skarpa, 2015, 15mins 45 secs
The Economist Plaza (instrumental version), 2011/18, 2min 52 sec
Skyshow, 2018, 7mins 22 secs
Light That Returns, 2020, 2min 53 sec
This Floating World, 2021, 5min 45 secs

It was a one-off concert at the People’s Republic in 2015
which resulted in Giraffe Quartet and Duets.
The album’s format – a duet between John and each of the other players, and a number of quartet performances - was inspired by Anthony Braxton’s Trio and Duet album.

Giraffe Quartet and Duets, like many releases on the Psychopyjama label, is freely improvised music that draws as much from the outer limits of rock and electronica as jazz or other improvised music, perhaps in the territory of Henry Cow or the Art Ensemble of Chicago...

TO SEE FULL DETAILS OF THE ALBUM, CLICK HERE

THE ALBUM IS LIMITED TO 100 COPIES

WHICH WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE NIGHT FOR JUST A$30

ALL PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC EVENTS ARE FREE

WITH GENEROUS DONATIONS INVITED

AND ENCOURAGED
 

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AND TO CONFIRM YOUR ATTENDANCE

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proof of vaccination on the night

OUR EVENTS ARE B.Y.O.

please bring along any beverages you wish

but no food is allowed