PETER CUSACK’S AUDIO PERFORMANCE
Peter Cusack is a guitarist, an improviser, and a veteran of the European avant garde. He often calls himself a sonic journalist, and understands his own collages as audio-portraits of various places and situations. They could, for example, be these: “An old poet from Chernobyl reads out her verses, local retired people discuss politics, birds sing in village gardens in the night, toy instruments from the abandoned kindergarten sound as merry, as they used to once.”
Cusack argues that his works are of reportage nature, and do no represent noise music – documentary element outweighs the creative one. Yet, for the listener this journey is very condensed – many hours of records often turn into a minute of a mix-tape, while the soundscape changes as quickly as Peter wants it to.
Ukho music has invited Cusack to the Festival “86” to put together a set of audio installations around the town (May 7, from 11 am to 7 pm, town stadium, train station, and radio-speakers in the town center) and run a solo performance – an hourly walk around Slavutych with guitar (May 7, 5:30 pm).
Peter Cusack is an artist and musician, a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), and is one of the founders of the London College of Communication in the University of the Arts London. Cusack also co-founded and managed the London Musicians’ Collective.
He is best known as a member of the avant garde musical quartet, “Alterations” (with Steve Beresford, David Toop, and Terry Day) and the creator of field and wildlife recording-based albums including “Where Is the Green Parrot?” (1999), “Day for Night” (2000) with Max Eastley, featuring “duets” between Eastley’s kinetic sculpture and Cusack’s field recordings, and “Baikal Ice” (2003), featuring tracks like “Banging Holes In Ice” and “Floating Icicles Rocked By Waves”.
Cusack is particularly interested in environmental sound and acoustic ecology, he focuses on how sounds change as people migrate and as technology changes. Cusack’s Sounds From Dangerous Places is a project to collect sounds from sites which have sustained major environmental damage. Some of those include Chernobyl, the Azerbaijan oil fields, and areas around controversial dams on the Tigris and Euphrates river systems in south east Turkey.