[something's happening], Ecka Mordecai, JQ & MIDDEX at Spanners

[something’s happening] is the sound and text duo of poet and performer Iris Colomb and musician Daryl Worthington (Beachers). The project explores textual and sonic permutation through improvisation.

On “a map has always been an attempt”, a new album from [something's happening], Colomb and Worthington construct twelve delicate, shape-shifting pieces of found text and electro-acoustic sound which captivate and bewilder. Each track is an excerpt of audio from one of three live performances from 2022. These involved Colomb picking out small fragments of text from books and using these to improvise new poetic constructions which were then morphed and warped through effects, while Worthington uses guitar, electronics, drum machines and a host of acoustic instruments and non-instruments.

Ecka Mordecai is an artist working with sound, scent and performance. She lives and works in London.

JQ is a multi-instrumentalist from south London who has released albums with Post-Geography, Lo Recordings, Métron, Salmon Universe, Shadow World, Green & New Atlantis. He is a member of the trio Forgiveness and has held residencies on NTS and Noods. He has recently played alongside Matmos and Jake Muir.

The Quietus: "JQ is the internet era’s own miniature Mahler. Oddly enough JQ still makes the future sound bright to my ears – even if it’s mostly by indicting the bleakness of the present"

In performance MIDDEX is a disorderly counterpoint of primitive composition and atmospheric interference. An interplay between the scrapheap concretions and skewed, enigmatic vernacular. Metallic clatter and automotive rhythms moving between abrasive materiality and amorphous disarrangement. Delirious atonalities and barrelling drum salvos with locked drum machine beats, oscillating alarm signals, tremulous ringtones and crude synth coalescing in an overcast vision of technological disturbance. Against this backdrop, a disjointed vocal narrative of the strange and the mundane unfolds; a territory of sentient sewage and enclosed non-place(s). The stomping ground of the exiled and estranged, a microcosm of modern malaise. MIDDEX's latest album, “In Second Floor and Third Floor Story” was released by Goods Outward in 2024.

SPANNERS:

Arch 504 Ridgway Rd

London

SW9 7EX