Friday, February 14th, 2025, 8:00pm to 9:30pm

1750 Arch St.
Berkeley, CA
94707

About:

In Lovage Sharrock's live collaboration with Jon Leidecker
(Wobbly/Negativland/Thurston Moore Group), the artists repurpose obsolete
technology to process and respond to live acoustic moments, combining song
composition and indeterminacy with a heightened care for typically discarded
noises.
 

Lovage Sharrock will share her rigorous-yet-playful creative practice in a talk and
performance with Jon Leidecker (Wobbly/Negativland/Thurston Moore Group) at
CNMAT. Drawing from her history on a terminal island in British Columbia —
where limited resources demand ingenuity and interdependence — she’ll offer an
inspiring perspective on the creative potential in reimagining scarcity as a chance
for generosity rather than competition.
Sharrock’s collaboration with Leidecker, in which he repurposes obsolete technology to
process and respond to live acoustic moments, combines song composition with
rethinking often ignored or discarded noises from the live process. In vocal
performances, Sharrock&'s intimate, often fragile vocals embrace irregularity, reclaiming
the “flaw” by transforming it into a space for exploration and discovery. Her acoustic
guitar work plays with subtly shifting patterns, harmonics and progressions as new ways
of reuse. Together, Sharrock and Leidecker reveal how “mismaking” (an archaic word
meaning "made poorly or improperly") can be a joyful act of radical preservation and a
generative tool for sonic bricolage.
Under the unbrella context of degrowth, mismaking offers a way to creatively use what
already exists, reflecting a commitment to resourcefulness and creative renewal. By
turning mismade work into a resource, they highlight the potential of wrongness as an
opportunity, transforming it into a space for exploration and discovery. Their illustration
of how mistakes, often discarded as waste, are valuable sites of generation and
reinvention, reframes error, and the discarded, to reshape how we think about
resources, creativity, and value.
Songs We No Longer Sing, Sharrock’s new album as Phipps Pt., co-produced with
Leidecker, will be released later in 2025.

Short Bio:

Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) is a human in the loop, making music with people and
machines that listen. By improvising with recordings as readily as people, and through
the use of sampling, feedback and automation, the goal is to produce sounds that seem
to be asking questions -- hopefully the right ones. You don't want to waste your time
with music that's lying to you. A long and winding list of collaborators blurs the line
between solo and group work -- current touring projects include Negativland, the
Thurston Moore Group, Jennifer Walshe, Zoh Amba, and Cheryl E. Leonard. Talks
on the secret histories of electronic music have been presented at Oxford, Stanford,
Mills, UC Berkeley and Peabody, and his nine hour overview of sampling and
collage, 'Variations', is hosted online by the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.
Radio remains his home medium, with Negativland's Over The Edge livemix
broadcast continuing to emerge out of KPFA FM, Berkeley.

Our Bio: 

Phipps Pt. is a sound-based project of Canadian artist and conduit, Lovage Sharrock. 
What began as a series of one-off performances pairing her hypnotic guitar patterns and vocals with
rotating collaborators has evolved with the addition of Jon Leidecker (Wobbly). Each conjured
performance is unfiltered, distinct and unrepeatable.
Their debut album, Kiss You So Many Times You Can’t Count My Love, was released on Sanity
Muffin Records. The follow-up album, Songs We No Longer Sing, is set to release later this year.