Zoltan Fecso ~ ‘Shimmer Raga’ Album Launch

Inspired by post-impressionist painting technique Pointillism, Zoltan Fecso uses layered single-note cycles to create his compositions on a unique augmented guitar.
The night will also feature performances by Alexandra Spence and Marble Rain (Julien Mier & Miki Takahashi).

Zoltan Fecso is a musician and composer, known for his live performances on an augmented guitar built by luthier Ian Noyce. Zoltan’s compositions are created by combining small fragments of single notes repeating at varying speeds, inspired by ‘pointillism’, a painting technique using individual coloured dots to create images.

He has performed and given talks on music technology in Amsterdam, Berlin and London, as well as nationally at Arts Centre Melbourne. In 2017, Zoltan was accepted into the Bundanon Trust Artists in Residence Program, where he began to examine the idea of limitations in his creative practice.

The Pointillist understanding of colour theory to create shimmering and pulsating imagery inspired Zoltan’s approach to composing. By interpreting the pointillist properties of colour to the properties of sound, Zoltan is able to explore note relationships as they are placed against one and other. Slow, sparse note cycles combine into melodic phrases and shift with each pass, as the notes intersect at different times. Fast repetitions make individual notes harder to detect, forming shimmering soundscapes.

In August 2018 he made his label debut under his own name, Zoltan Fecso. The album ‘Shimmer Raga’ is his most “honest and self-reflecting work” - critiques Alex Ruder (DJ and Assistant Music Director at the influential radio station KEXP and Founder of Seattle’s Hush Hush Records).

The title and artwork for the album Shimmer Raga were acquired from a painting by the artist Claire Lefebvre, whose work deeply influenced the creative process.

"Striking attention to detail that slowly reveals the beauty in its ambiguity..." - The Slow Music Movement

"...highly tactile and mesmerising" - Brian Housman (Stationary Travels)

Alexandra Spence is an artist and musician from Sydney, Australia. She makes installations, compositions and performances based on (everyday) sound and listening. Through her practice she attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her performances favour noise, quietude, subtlety & unusual sound sources: including feedback, cassette tapes, field recordings, amplified objects, sine tones, no-input mixer, voice & clarinet. Alex has performed and presented work in concerts, festivals, symposiums and galleries in Australia, Canada, and Europe, including the Vancouver Art Gallery; Destroy Vancouver; Engineroom International Sound Art Competition, London; Soundcamp, London; Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Ausland, Berlin; Musée Guimet, Paris; SoundOut Festival, Canberra; the NOW Now Festival; UNSW Galleries; Firstdraft Gallery; and Siteworks Festival, Bundanon, (w. the Splinter Orchestra).

Marble Rain is Dutch multi instrumentalist, producer and composer Julien Mier and Australian foley artist and pianist Miki Takahashi. With their live improvisation based performance they aim to create a surrealistic dream type sound scape and sonic film for the listeners. Inspired by the palette of the timbre of many different objects they travel and re-contextualize a variety of found and lost objects they have collected over the years.