When you ask your computer what it knows of Simon Wickham-Smith, the answers you get are not myriad but all the more flattering: "Simon Wickham-Smith is an underground hero". At first listen, his music can be mistaken for glitch, but Wickham-Smith takes spiritual content and ships it under the most corporeal title possible. He sets themes about religious life in the real world— the dedication of a spiritualist who kills himself for politics; the distortion of the abject beauty of religious music." (www.pitchforkmedia.com on Wickham-Smith's CD Extreme Bukake).
Of all musicians, Simon Wickham-Smith might have the closest affinity to Pekka Airaksinen - even though he didn't know Airaksinen even existed before he first arrived in Finland last winter for an artist residency in the far north of Lapland. A Tibetan Buddhist himself like Airaksinen, Wickham-Smith seems to have come to, at times, rather similar musical syntheses while balancing two worlds, and combining tonal fields shimmering with mystique and Indian instrumentation with noise and industrial music.
The Lithuanian G-Lab (Arturas Bumstein and Laura Garbstiene) will provide visuals for Wickham-Smith's performance.
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