Latent Joy

Latent Joy featuring Flora Yin-Wong, rkss, Joe Namy, NikNak & Annie Goh.

For this year's AGM Somerset House Studios have commissioned a new ensemble performance for St Mary Le Strand. Developed by residents Vivienne Griffin and Paul Purgas, the pair have created a graphic score that will be responded to by a group of artists and musicians from Somerset House Studios and beyond.

Titled Latent Joy the score acts as an intuitive prompt for a live improvisation realised by Flora Yin-Wong, rkss, Joe Namy, NikNak and Annie Goh. Working across a variety of media encompassing spatial feedback, computer music, live percussion and turntable experiments the group will animate the score, reimagining this fragmentary notational prompt as a unified sonic action, manifesting as a collective free improvisation within St Mary Le Strand.

About the artists

Flora Yin-Wong

With debut releases on Modern Love and PAN, Flora Yin Wong, London-born of Chinese and Malaysian heritage, is an experimental sound artist and writer. This autumn, she will be presenting bespoke new live performances at Unsound Krakow, Atonal Berlin and Semibreve Festival.

rkss

As an artist and musician, rkss (Robin Buckley) takes a critical approach to music with their experimental productions, using sound as a series of gestures to explore complex socio-political issues by working with and pushing against social contexts. rkss' live sets fuse unpredictable, divergent rhythms with radical synthesis techniques to reimagine and explore speculative futures, creating space for different ways of being. Their releases Brostep in the Style of Florian Hecker and DJ Tools (UIQ) - named one of Pitchfork’s experimental albums of the year - resist categorisation while questioning established hierarchies within electronic music.

Annie Goh

Annie Goh is an artist and researcher working primarily with sound, space, electronic media and generative processes within their social and cultural contexts. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 on archaeoacoustics and sonic knowledge production, where she was also a Stuart Hall Foundation PhD Fellow. She co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival Berlin 2013-2016 and is co-founder of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project since 2015 with Dr Marie Thompson. She is a Lecturer in XD Pathway in BA Fine Art at CSM and an Associate Lecturer in Sound Arts at LCC.

NikNak

An award-winning storyteller, NikNak is devoted to developing her unique practice as a DJ & turntablist, sound artist/composer, producer, tutor, sound engineer and radio presenter. She was one of the resident artists on Opera North's "Resonance" Programme in 2020, and is a resident artist at the University of Huddersfield // HCMF’s Sound Pioneers cohort.

Joe Namy

Joe Namy is an artist, educator, and musician, often working collaboratively and across mediums—in performance, sculpture, photography, text, video, and installation. His projects often focus on the social constructs of music and organized sound, such as the pageantry and politics of opera, the noise laws and gender dynamics of bass, the colors and tones of militarization, the migration patterns of instruments and songs, and the complexities of translation in all this - from language to language, from score to sound, from drum to dance.

Latent Joy is developed by Paul Purgas and Vivienne Griffin for Somerset House Studios and St Mary Le Strand, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.