Fri, 25 Oct 2024, 21:00
Price:
29.00 €
"Impossible to overlook and hard to forget", said Pitchfork, one of the world's most prominent music portals, of Rival Consoles' work, while Clash, a music magazine, commented that the artist was "deliberately attempting to offset the bleakness of everyday life". Ryan Lee West, under the Rival Consoles moniker, has been described as one of the UK's most influential electronic musicians. His first extended play EP, Vemeer, was released under the Aparatec moniker in 2007 on the London-based independent record label Erased Tapes. Incidentally, it was the first recording ever released by this label. In the same year, Ryan Lee West started working as Rival Consoles, and his recordings are still released by Erased Tapes. It is now one of the world's most respected and well-known labels for experimental music, with artists such as Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Kiasmos and others.
London-based Rival Consoles' electronica is distinguished by the humanity and atmospheric quality of the synths' sound. His work has evolved steadily over the past seventeen years, with early complex productions taking on more conceptual and metamorphic sounds as time has passed. A major turning point in Rival Consoles' output came in 2014-2015 with the two EPs Odyssey and Sonne, which began to cement his reputation as a producer of intelligent electronica that encompasses a wide range of musical ideas. Pitchfork has described his music as "sophisticated, avant-garde and close to the styles of Jon Hopkins and Nils Frahm". Like these artists, Rival Consoles does not shy away from breaking genre boundaries and going off the beaten track - for example, he has performed a number of audio-visual shows with the London Contemporary Orchestra.
Interestingly, Ryan Lee West's adolescence was spent mainly listening to rock music rather than club music, and he also played guitar. These experiences have left their mark on his electronic work: he often tests his ideas with acoustic instruments such as guitar or piano rather than synthesisers, encoding in his tracks both a subtle sense of songwriting and a need for a more organic sound. Rival Consoles has also remixed works by well-known electronic musicians such as Jon Hopkins, Ólafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, Max Cooper, Vessels, Noisia, Sasha, Sasha, Toydrum and others. The artist has participated in major music festivals such as Sónar, Moogfest, FORM, Mutek, Big Ears, Lovebox, Roskilde, Wonderfruit, MIRA, Strawberry Fields, as well as iconic music venues such as Berlin's Berghain, Seattle's The Crocodile, LA's Union Station, etc.
In September, Rival Consoles will perform at London's Troxy Hall, Paris' Salle Pleyel, Hamburg's Reeperbahn Festival and Berlin's Columbiahalle. Before arriving in Vilnius, he will tour the United States in October, performing at Desert Daze and Slingshot festivals, as well as in San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.
Rival Consoles has released 8 full-length solo albums and a collaborative album with the Icelandic minimalist techno duo Kiasmos, as well as six EPs. During his audiovisual performance in Vilnius, the artist will present not only his latest studio album Now Is, but also immersive audio-visual experiences that span the last decade of Rival Consoles' work. From lush ambient to unique-sounding techno, and the whole broad spectrum between these genres, the performance will lay down a unique narrative of his ideas that has never been heard live before.