GRANPA's EPK

BIOGRAPHY

Lucas ‘Granpa’ Abela’s (fka Justice Yeldham) performances on their signature instrument; shards of amplified glass are the stuff of legend. Their singular practice spawned from the noise music underground, where over twenty years the glass evolved from a means to create ecstatic free-noise cacophonies into an outsider instrument that produces some kind of organic electronica. Abela vibrates the pane vocally to control a modular patch that uses no traditional syntheses techniques, instead the glass acts as both sound and modulation source. The patch extracting control voltages from the glass’s dynamics and frequency in order to modulate itself in synchronicity with the performance, shaping six parallel stereo effects chains that merge into dense layers of anomalous music.

GREY NOMAD TOUR

Performed intimately in the round, The Grey Nomad Tour follows the release of Bag of Max Bag of Cass* (Warp Records), a collaborative album with Zach Hill (Death Grips). The album explores interpolating the two musicians by converting Zach’s performance into CV that alters Abela’s glass signal as they play. At select shows Lucas will conduct a short Q and A session after the show to explain their patching techniques.

The grey nomad tour has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Please include the above acknowledgement alongside the Creative Australia logo ( download here )

PULL QUOTES

"Lucas is just captivating. It's incredible how he can flip the feeling of a room upside down and sonically there’s just no other sound like his" — ZACH HILL - Death Grips

"The most exciting performer I have seen in the last three years – in fact, since I first saw Iggy Pop" — Bruce Russell, WIRE magazine

"One moment you hear John Coltrane playing a volcano, the next you hear a string section being squeezed through a toothpaste tube" — David Rees, The New York Times

"Brilliantly immediate performance, galvanising and alien and funny, and free of safe gestures and easy comparisons." — Frances Morgan, The Quietus

"Inclusive and joyful, with its blend of unhinged humour and blistering sonic attack." — Rory Gibbon, The Quietus (Unsound Festival 2015)

"An intense cacophonic human explosion of condensed cathartic vibrations... laced with a kind of transgressive, yet genuine euphoria." — Andy Black Forest, Supersonic Festival (2012)

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Audio:
2 x XLR cables (modular rig has built in stereo DI)

Power:
2 x Power sockets for Modular and Lighting

Glass:
Window Pane Glass, discarded offcuts from local glassier preferred, ideally something 4mm to 6mm thick and no smaller than 200 x 500 mm in size (bigger the better, I have glass cutter to produce final triangular shape). Please avoid tempered or toughened glass.

Lighting:
Built-in LED lighting in the modular case. Please dim or turn off house lights.

Seating:
Prefer to play on the floor in front of the PA with the audience seated in circle, first rows on the floor then two rows of seating with the remaining guests standing to produce a natural human amphitheatre.

BOOKING CONTACT
please mail abela at dualplover dot com for booking enquiries