An evening of experimental songwriting and tape music. Featuring a new collaborative piece by Popular Music & Paul Cousins, alongside performances by Adam Christensen and Fondant.
Doors 7:30pm
Tickets £6-10 Sliding Scale
In mythology, an echo often represents a pale repetition—a fading copy of a lost original. This collaboration proposes an alternative view: that the mere possibility of an echo actively reshapes and informs the sound from which it emerges. Popular Music's lush, cinematic textures will intertwine with Paul Cousins' reel-to-reel tape manipulations, creating layers of repetition, resonance, and transformation.
The echo becomes a temporal bridge—collapsing the distinction between past and future events. In each loop, the anticipation of future sound intertwines with memory, folding linear time into itself. Here, echoes become not merely reflections but moments of convergence, where the past is continually reimagined and the future anticipated in an ever-shifting present.
In both natural and architectural environments, the possibility of an echo changes how you relate to space—demanding silence in a quiet library, reinforcing reverence in a place of worship, or inspiring a sense of curiosity and awe: a shout into a canyon just to hear the sound bounce back, a call and response with the void.
Popular Music are a Melbourne-based duo of former Parenthetical Girls leader Zac Pennington and composer Prudence Rees-Lee. Born in Los Angeles, the shadow of the Hollywood sign still lingers over their sound: weird, hauntological pop built on lush string arrangements and analog electronics, where threads of grief, myth-making, and memory twist toward the tragic-comic.
Paul Cousins is a sound artist & composer based in London. Using a collection of 1/4” reel-to-reel machines, tape echoes and other analog equipment, he creates music on the themes of repetition and imperfection. His compositions have featured in major installations at the Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery and in FACT magazine. In addition to releases with Decca Records, Castles in Space and BMG, in the studio he has worked on a diverse range of projects for major/indie labels and recorded Grammy winning artists. His recent sound installation Atomised Listening invited visitors to interact with obsolete music technology at Stone Nest in London’s West End.
Adam Christensen (UK, 1979) is a London-based artist who makes performance, video, fabric and text works, and performs with the music project Ectopia, which was Wysing Arts Centre’s band-in-residence in 2016. He has previously performed and presented work at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Baltic Triennial as well as Almanac, David Roberts Art Foundation, Southard Reid, London, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Hollybush Gardens in London.
Fondant are murmurs, tape and string ~ sitting down encouraged.