Music @ Capital House: Shamica Ruddock & Grace MacDonald

This June we’re bringing in the speakers and filling our gallery with music with an eclectic mix of underground and ambient club sounds, intimate blues and electronic experimentation!

A double-bill of two artists making waves across the European electronic / sound scene. London-based Shamica Ruddock presents her live sound work Drum Language, which is an ongoing sonic enquiry exploring Maroon sound cultures and African-Caribbean folk drumming practices. The name Maroon, given to groups of free Black peoples, or formerly enslaved fugitives, who, from the 16th century onwards, created autonomous self-governing settlements in inaccessible landscapes across several countries, remains a byword for resistance. With Drum Language, Ruddock creates a reverberant listening space where the drumming patterns and the meanings they encode are broken down and undercut by interruptions, breaks and ruptures across an underlying funk.

Zürich-based Jersey composer Grace MacDonald writes music dedicated to low-resolution memories, fantasy and playful folktronica. Working with hybrid electro-acoustic music, her live performances, such as her recent multi-award-winning duo project, Knowing The Oak Tree, combine the natural sounds of voice and saxophone with their processed counterpart on a backdrop of a pixelated synth polyphony. A Ghost Holding Me is a thirty- minute solo song cycle dedicated to the peaceful loneliness found traversing familiar spaces, now empty. Imagine a quiet train carriage or an empty video game lobby. There is comfort in the familiar, well travelled paths of our memories, but they are not real, only ghosts.

Pictured: Shamica Ruddock – Drum Language