In addition to his artistic practice as a filmmaker and visual artist, Luke Fowler is also an intriguing and adventurous musician. He regularly works with such sound artists as Toshiya Tsunoda and Lee Patterson. For this performance, he will be performing with two of his musician friends: Richard Youngs and Marcus Schmickler.

Like Fowler, Richard Youngs is also from Glasgow, and since the early 1990s, he has been building a very extensive and varied discography with solo projects, as well as recordings and performances with Jandek, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Skullflower, Kawabata Makoto, Alex Neilson and many more. Youngs’ very first record, Advent, from 1990, took on legendary status over the years and is praised by Alan Licht, among others, as one of the absolute and essential masterpieces of minimalist music. With his most recent, and once again impressive recording, Richard Youngs mesmerizes his listeners with beautiful songs.

The curriculum of Marcus Schmickler might be read as a survey of the influential Cologne music scene, of which he is one of the key figures. His projects are as countless as they are varied: from the ‘post-rock’ of Pluramon, to the digital sound processing of Wabi Sabi and the orchestra (de)compositions of Param. The extensive list of collaborations includes such names as Peter Rehberg, Thomas Lehn, Thomas Brinkmann and John Tilbury. Schmickler always deals with the exploration of the outer limits of sound research and the integration of inert sound matter in new surroundings.

The objects and places we cannot leave behind create the tapestry that is Points of Departure. Exploring themes of personal and collective memory through my relationship to the city of Glasgow, a voice-over describes a tablecloth I retrieved whilst clearing my elderly father’s house. The film attempts to unravel the threads of memory held within this mundane item and to find an image within the BBC archive that relates to my memories of growing up in Glasgow. My father’s unrehearsed attempts to translate an Urdu Ghazal discovered in the archive, a poetic expression of the beauty of love and the pain of loss exposes a process of translation that becomes the key allowing a path through the labyrinth of both my own memory and the BBC archive. (Alia Syed)

English & Urdu spoken