Blog
Cold Winters Edge
Published 1 November 2011 by JT


I think autumn has gone now and a cold winter but creative winter is well on it's way. So, I'm posting review of my work Untitled Lines which was performed at the ICA as part of the Pablo Bronstein exhibition in July 2011.

Entr'acte released Untitled Lines as an event only cassette and it is now out of print.Below is an is an excerpt from both tracks Drift and Swan from the cassette.
Untitled Lines - Jo Thomas / Entr'acte by Jo Thomas
Thank you to Luca Nasciuti for writing this review and thank you to everyone who came that night.

'Jo Thomas, Untitled Lines, ICA, 21 July 2011
The acousmatic , quadraphonic diffusion of Jo Thomas’ work drew the audience into a space that could be navigated and investigated throughout. Perhaps an installation, where the audience could move in and out, making their way through the composition, yet a visually strong performance, with the composer, centre stage, performing on the laptop in a purposed designed costume by Marta Pozanski.
As in Pablo Bronstein’s metamorphic furniture, Thomas’s work relies on the ability to reshape recorded material (utterances, and environmental sounds), transforming, veiling, and unfolding its nature, its identity; an approach embraced by Thomas in both the composition and live performance. As Bronstein draws upon history and social living in his work, so does Untitled Lines, where the compositional material was recorded with an iPhone, and the core concept of reduced listening in electroacoustic music is challenged by a performance infused with bodily presence and elegant gestures that dominate the space.
Untitled Lines was quite a unique performance. Site-specific and cross-disciplinary, the event captured the essence of Bronstein’s work which is in itself multifaceted and polysemic. And composer Jo Thomas encompassed both the visual and aural fields in this work, as a synchronous ‘sonic-choreography’, where sounds become lines, drawn on paper that in fact is space.
Luca Nasciuti July 2011