Psychic Liberation

Psychic Liberation (PL) is a label founded in 2013 that originally ran with Miguel Alvariño under the title Primitive Languages as a cassette and record store project in New York City. Since 2019, Nick Klein has been running it solo out of the EU under the title Psychic Liberation. On June 29th Leif Elggren, Joachim Nordwall, Mario de Vega and Makoto Oshiro will perform at the monthly concert series of the same name in the Roter Salon – curated by Hugo Esquinca and Nick Klein. *Due to travel issues, Kevin Drumm will not be performing live, but has prepared an audio work specifically for this edition of the PL Night that will be diffused in the Roter Salon space for the context of this night only.

Leif Elggren is a writer, visual artist, artists‘ book publisher, stage performer, and composer based in Stockholm, Sweden. His varied and prolific output routinely involves dreams, subtle absurdities, and social hierarchies turned upside-down. His works often includes iconographical material like royal crowns, emblematic symbols, viruses, contagious diseases, furniture and the combination of yellow & black. His audio works are often created as the sound track to an installation or a performance.

Joachim Nordwall (b. 1975) is based on Brännö island on the west coast of Sweden. He has a long background in the Swedish experimental music scene, starting out with recordings with the psych-drone duo Alvars Orkester as a teenager in 1988. His early interest in psychic tension created by sound is now as ever present in his music. His ”Soul Music” album for Entr’acte shows his deep interest in circular rhythms, analogue synth loops and mind expanding experiments. Nordwall has also released his music on labels like Ash International and Hospital Productions. From 1999-2005 he was sweating with the avant punk rock trio Kid Commando and when that stopped he created the ritual drone rock group The Skull Defekts until 2018. Nowadays he is active in the tape loop trio Organ of Corti with releases for iDEAL, Dead Mind and New Forces. Nordwall also runs iDEAL Recordings since 1998 and has ongoing or ended collaborations with artists like Mika Vainio, Mats Gustafsson, Leif Elggren, CM von Hausswolff, Kevin Drumm, Mark Wastell, Michael Morley, John Duncan and Christine Abdelnour, and he is a busy organizer of festivals and concert nights in Sweden and abroad.

Mario de Vega – Through relations between energies and systems produced by signal amplification, induced situations, electronic interfaces, detritus of actions and architectonic interventions, Mario de Vega’s work evokes listening settings whether the body still listening, or only believes to listen.

Makoto Oshiro is a Tokyo-Berlin-based performer and artist. His primary medium is sound, but also combines other elements, including light, electricity, and the movement of objects. In live performances, he uses self- made tools and instruments that are based on electronic devices, everyday materials, and junk. His installation work handles sound as a physical and auditory phenomenon and focuses on characteristics such as vibration and interference. He is also a member of the live installation/performance group The Great △(夏 の大△) with Takahiro Kawaguchi and Satoshi Yashiro and runs the label Basic Function.

KEVIN DRUMM Avant-garde tabletop guitarist Kevin Drumm was born and raised in 1970 in South Holland, IL, playing in a handful of rock bands before relocating to Chicago in 1991 to work at the city’s Board of Trade. He soon began his experiments with prepared guitar, applying objects including magnets, binder clips, chains, a violin bow and even toenail clippers to distort the instrument’s sound. In time, Drumm befriended a number of members of Chicago’s growing improv community, including Jim O‘ Rourke (with whom he served in Brise-Glace, additionally contributing to Gastr del Sol’s Upgrade and Afterlife album and Ken Vandermark. In late 1997 Drumm made his solo debut with a self-titled (Perdition Plastics) and has released superb duo records with Taku Sugimoto (Sonoris), Axel Dörner, Martin Tètreault (both Erstwhile) and Ralf Wehowsky (Selektion). His chameleon-like presence has been documented on a number of projects, each revealing new facets of his wide-ranging and unique talents on both guitar and electronics. Drumm seamlessly melds the worlds of acoustic and electronic sound, occasionally teetering on the edge of silence, yet always remaining impeccably musical. Kevin Drumm has recorded and performed with Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Jim O’Rourke, MIMEO, Mats Gustafsson, John Butcher, Thomas Ankersmit, Taku Sugimoto and many others.