A night of back to back clown-themed entertainment: Tears | O V will be performing their release entitled Send in the Clowns followed by a screening of Charles Eames’ Clown Face and ending on a high note with The Clown House, a performance by The Howling
Doors: 7pm
Tears | O V’s 2021 album Pluto’s Return satirise with nihilistic despair the experience of living through a worldwide pandemic and the political circus that was Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. They will play excerpts from side 2 of this release Send in the Clowns
Tears | O V will also explore the clown in themselves with new material referencing the love and hate relationship between clowns and society; which will be accompanied by a collection of found imagery that has served as a wordless exchange over years between Boobies the Clown ( Deborah from Tears | O V alter ego ) to Emily Neptune astrologer ( Tears | O V collaborator )
Tears | O V work across experimental composition and media archaeology. Their work explores the intersection between mass media and interpersonal belief systems to playfully expose the tyranny of cultural norms. They work electro-acoustically producing soundscape and sequenced sample based works in long form. They are published on Tapeworm, Bloxham tapes and Industrial Coast. They have performed in various manifestations at Tate south tanks, Iklectic, the Whitechapel, Chisenhale and other music and art venues throughout Europe.
Welcome to The Clown House. In their latest performance, The Howling shows you all there is to know about the Clown Inside.
The Clown Inside is always crying. The Clown Inside is not there for your amusement. The Clown Inside keeps in your place. The Clown Inside keeps you inside.
We all have one, even if we won’t admit it. The Clown Inside is there when you stub your toe, trip or spill coffee on yourself. The Clown Inside knows when nobody’s paying any attention to you and why nobody is talking to you. The Clown Inside is always hurt. The Clown Inside talks trash about everyone.
Combining media samples, field recordings, spoken word and analogue tape effects, The Howling takes you inside The Clown House, allowing you to hear everything that’s going on there – everything The Clown Inside hears and sees.
The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and trash aesthetics. Their debut album All Hail Mega Force, released by Tapeworm in the summer of 2022, was described by The Wire as a ‘mesmeric disorientation.’
Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has written and presented critically acclaimed features for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Resonance 104.4 FM. His books include Welcome to Mars, The Bright Labyrinth, The Space Oracle and Inferno all available from Strange Attractor/MIT Press. His latest book from them is The Trash Project Volume Two: Purgatory.
Howlround was founded by sound designer and radio producer Robin The Fog in 2012 to create recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines, with all additional effects and artificial reverb strictly forbidden - a process that has been described by Electronic Sound magazine as 'conjur[ing] magic'. Ten years and nine albums later, his initial attempts to become a 'one man Radiophonic Workshop' have morphed into using closed input tape-loops to create blistering noise and primitive techno, which is quite a long way from where he started.