Press room

L’Rain

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer and curator L’Rain (Taja Cheek) makes her Barbican debut following the release of her critically acclaimed third album I Killed Your Dog.

With I Killed Your Dog (Mexican Summer, 2023) Taja Creek brings her L’Rain project to Milton Court. Alongside long-time collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, Cheek has developed L’Rain into a shape-shifting entity that blurs the line between band and individual. Beginning as an abstract meditation on grief, Cheek traces the origins of L’Rain to the period which followed the dissolution of her vibrant DIY musical community in early 2010s NYC and the passing of her mother, Lorraine. The name L’Rain was conceived as both a tribute to her mother and her own gregarious alter ego L’ (lah-postrophe).

Awarded the coveted ‘Best New Music’ badge by Pitchfork, I Killed Your Dog has been described by Cheek as an ‘anti-break-up’ record that takes the universal pop theme of love as its starting point – bold, bratty and diabolical – and inspects it through the form of a conversation with her younger self, untangling her relationship with femininity and the expectations of formal musical conventions. Overwriting the themes of grief and identity that informed her previous work, I Killed Your Dog considers what it means to hurt the people you love the most. Multi-layered in subject and form, L’Rain’s sonic explorations interrogate instead how emotion and experience intersect with identity: the experimental and the hyper-commercial; expectation and reality; hope and despair. ‘I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,’ Cheek explains. ‘Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.’

Produced by the Barbican in association with Form

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EXTRA DATES ADDED

Nils Frahm – Music For London

 + matinee performance Sun 14 Jul 2024, 3pm

Berlin-based pianist, composer and producer Nils Frahm returns to the Barbican in July 2024 for a four-night residency. He will bring his new Music For London project – part of a worldwide tour in which each show is dedicated to each city – presenting brand-new material that moves between the worlds of experimental, neo-classical, ambient and electronica.

To read the full press release, please visit this link.

SUPPORT ACT ANNOUNCED

David August

+ Hatis Noit

The Italian-German producer, label-owner, multi-instrumentalist and DJ David August delivers an evening of a kinetic audiovisual live experience as he brings his latest project, VĪS, to the Barbican in December 2023.

A prolific emerging voice in electronic music, David August gained global acclaim in the early 2010s, performing a solo session for Boiler Room and releasing an array of musical offerings. August went on to establish his own label, 99CHANTS, in 2018 – an open-minded platform that brought him the opportunity to work with esteemed artists like Lena Platonos, KMRU and Bunita Marcus. What followed was a sophisticated honing of style and artistic language. When the world went on pause in early 2020, August had the chance to question the role of music and art during a global crisis and develop his craft more holistically. VĪS (Latin for “energy” or “force”) is the result of a lengthy process of self-discovery, collaboration and research.

Plato's words "everything is becoming and never is" gave August the foundation for VĪS, his ambitious latest undertaking. VĪS is a sprawling multi-disciplinary chronicle that imagines an alternative evolution of mankind through sound. With its own ‘Imaginary Alphabet’ (created by Moroccan artist Hiba Baddou), an interactive website, an art book and an audio-visual live show, the album (99CHANTS in association with !K7, 2023) is far more than just music with its suggestion that it is movement and imagination that drives us forward. VĪS arrives as part of August's commitment to collaboration and follows work with jazz-noise vocalist and composer Cansu Tanrikulu as Aşa, and Carnatic vocalist Sushma Soma as Madrā.

For this special Barbican performance, August will be collaborating with choreographer Franka Marlene Foth, scenographer MFO / Marcel Weber and percussionist Andrea Belfi.

David August has performed with the likes of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and remixed artists from Max Cooper to Bunita Marcus. August has appeared at Primavera Sound, Sonar, Montreux Jazz and Dour Festival and headlined shows at London’s Roundhouse, Berlin’s Columbiahalle and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.

Support for the evening comes from Japanese vocal performer Hatis Noit. Hatis Noit is self-taught and inspired by everything she could find from Gagaku — Japanese classical music — and operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, to avant-garde and pop vocalists. Her 2022 album Aura was critically acclaimed receiving 9/10 from Clash Magazine and 8/10 from Loud and Quiet.

Produced by the Barbican in association with Dollop

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