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Memory9
Memory9 will perform at The Big Chill festival 2008 A-Z line up | Ticket infoMemory9 - Biography
Memory9, aka Gadi Sassoon, Italy’s genre-defying, bass heavy, London-dwelling export. A sound artist strongly focused on live performance, Memory9 has appeared around the world under different guises including Mnemosyne, Arc-Tek and the breakcore duo Aliens At Home. His work has taken such diverse shapes as to have been showcased in art galleries, blasted out of rave rigs or shaking floors in world-class clubs.
It started when he was a teenage punk rocker in the Milan underbelly, involved with bands and anarchist social centres. The inner workings of music fascintated him, and he naturally moved to reverse-engineering jazz and classical music, to the gestalt in harmony, thriving on pythagorean string ratios; tangling with score paper and drum machines, he quickly distinguished himself as a young composer and guitarist and won several scholarships that ended up bringing him to America for two years, but not before he got an early education in science, maths and industrial design. In Boston he contributed greatly to the local electronica and glitchy hip hop scenes whilst obtaining a degree from famed Berklee College of Music in just half the time required. He abandoned pure jazz composition and performance, disappointed by the sterilized nature of modern American jazz, which he found deprived of its revolutionary values. Eventually he found his artistic freedom in technology, in designing small machines and bits of code. His musical sensitivity and understanding of music tradition carried over and merged with his knowledge of mathematics and tech, in a novel perspective on modern sound art that attracts constant interest in Europe, Asia and North America.
In London Gadi became Memory9. There he collaborated with artists such as Dj Vadim (Ninja Tune, BBE), DJ Krust (Full Cycle), Dani Siciliano (!K7), to name a few. He redefined his dancefloor skills, experimenting with unseen laptop performance techniques at some of the best underground nights as well as on grimy squat rigs, exposing him to world-class djing and bass-heavy rig culture respectively. These two elements inform Memory9’s live sets, recently featured in Paris, Milan, Berlin, Shanghai, Boston, Barcelona, Glasgow, and NYC. Audiences and critics agree on a truly unique experience: a fragmented voyage between grimy slicks of bass and sharply structured mosaics of beats and noise, where the familiar and the unfamiliar are mashed to fine grains, blending into a new whole. Countless atoms of sound reworked into a vortex of groove, a dancing murder of pop culture with embedded viruses, Memory9 bridges the gap between the zen of electronic performance and the thrust of live playing thanks to unique control surfaces and homemade software, injecting the floor with his kaleidoscopic vision of music. That, and loads of bass.
"I mash music into shards of sound and then seek new ways to fit the fragments together, with my own buggy wares and toys. I am obsessed with permutation, fragmentation and warped perception: I'm trying to move to the next level and show an alternative, less passive way of relating to digital culture, somewhere between hacking and vandalism I suppose. I like to think of my mash-up sets as though you were coming to see someone who is reaching with his hands into your ipod's memory and banging on the data with drumsticks, or maybe hammers. I don't particularly think of it as 'glitch', more like music for a hi-tech generation with little to no attention span, that's my generation. "
This August in Eastnor this fresh live talent from the London scene will present a special concert with his custom electronic instruments.
Memory9's much anticipated debut record will be available in the second quarter of 2008.
www.memory9.net
www.myspace.com/gadisassoon
Memory9 will perform at The Big Chill festival 2008 A-Z line up | Ticket info
Written: 13th Mar, 08
Read: 786 times
