Network Music Festival

Sound without Borders // 15-18th July 2020

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Wrongheaded

Wrongheaded have been playing together for at least twenty minutes. They were formed from a merger of Yee-King and Nilson, for the express purpose of exploring the cross-domain of on-the-fly computing, music, dance, and costumed theatre.

The proponents usually operate their bodies and computers at the mercy of live coded instructions, experimenting in algorithmic choreography. Live coding is a performative act which places programming software at the conceptual heart of a live show. None the less, the virtual world spills out to the physical; and by combining instructions for human action with instructions for sound and visuals, we can unify human action and computation. The performance combines contemporary dance, electronic music, and a theatrical reflection on ubiquitous computing.

Previous performances have included the Royal Festival Hall ballroom as part of the London Jazz Festival, a planetarium in Plymouth, and a London pub event covered by BBC and ABC news crews.

Wrongheaded are Matthew Yee-King and Click Nilson.

Click Nilson emerged from the Swedish algorithmic music scene in the mid 1970s with his groundbreaking piece “An Instructional Game for 1 to many musicians”. This piece, whilst entirely unreliant on digits, formed a key part of techniques – alongside work of other pioneering artists such as Sol Lewitt and the Alan Turing Five – that formed the basis of what has today become the production of software in a live performative context – i.e., livecoding.

Matthew Yee-King was born in 1975. He went to secondary school with other Rephlex etc artists Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) and Jordan Muscott (Railway Raver). In a band with these two as well as Graham Gatheral (later in a duo with yee-king called Bavin) and James Stephenson (Chungking + Jack Sparrow), he learned to play drums. He also began to compose electronic music with his Amiga. By now he is a bonafide live coder.