Country: United Kingdom
Ex-Easter Island Head is a Liverpool based musical collective composing and performing music for solid-body electric guitar, percussion and other instruments.
Incorporating multiple prepared electric guitars struck with percussion mallets and treated as an infinitely variable sound-source as well as drawing on an arsenal of cymbals, bells, prayer bowls and acoustic percussion, they devise works that explore group interplay, repetition and melodic invention through purposefully limited means.
They have performed their original compositions solo, as a duo, three-piece, quartet and as a large ensemble across a wide variety of events. These include concerts with modern jazz ensemble Portico Quartet, award winning sound artist Philip Jeck, acclaimed improvisational group Aethenor and collaborations with pioneering New York Minimalist Rhys Chatham and Japanese/American guitarist Dustin Wong.
Their debut record – Mallet Guitars One - was released by Nottingham-based Low Point records. It will be followed in 2012 by the release of Mallet Guitars Two / Music for Moai Hava.
They will present newly commissioned works at World Event Young Artists (Nottingham) in September 2012.
For twenty seven performers and incorporating Mallet Guitars, drums, large bell, hand percussion and culminating in “a beautiful, almost spiritual tide of massed choral vocals”
(Liverpool Daily Post) Music for Moai Hava is a site specific work developed around the residence in the World Museum Liverpool of Moai Hava – a rare, religiously important Moai (Statue) brought from Easter Island by the British Government in 1868.
Unfolding in three movements over 16 minutes, the piece incorporates a large variety of extended instrumental techniques, graphic notation. indeterminacy and a hugely varied number of sound sources.