In Vitro: Phew, Merche Blasco & Rimov Rimov

• Rimov Rimov
(live)

rimov/Rimov is the musical brainchild of artists Simon Joostens and Robbe De Pestel exploring different genres ranging from leftfield hip hop and avant-folk to guitar music, DIY-synth-stuff and sound-design. The group tries to reflect its wide musical interest into an ever-changing live-set. Joostens takes care of the instrumentals, combining an education in classical composition with the idea of reverse learning (read: unlearning every instrument he's been taught how to play). De Pestel is the unschooled vocalist and writer mostly drawing from postmodernist literature and early eighties post-punk and synth-wave music. This makes for an odd performance, the two youngins trying to find the right balance between musical intricacy and bedroom production style sloppiness. Expect nothing. Expect anything. Do as you wish.

• Merche Blasco
(live AV)

Merche Blasco is a multimedia artist and composer based in New York, and currently living in Berlin. She designs and builds imprecise technological assemblages that catalyze embodied forms of live electroacoustic composition and new modes of listening. Through her constructed devices, Merche attempts to establish a more horizontal relationship with other entities, distancing herself from parameters of precision, power, and control. As an alternative form of performance, she engineers collaborative spaces with instruments that are given their own agency, in compositions where her body and the live exploration of organic materials are central elements. Her work also increasingly focuses on designing participatory sound performances in public spaces to connect strangers and their surroundings through collective music-making and listening.

Merche has presented her performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Shed, CTM Festival, MaerzMusik , Sonar Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, among others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Wire magazine.

• Phew
(live)

Hiromi Moritani aka Phew is a legendary figure in the Japanese underground music scene. Starting out in 1978 as front woman of one of Osaka’s earliest punk groups, Aunt Sally, she went on to collaborate with a some of the most prominent names as a solo artist, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Conny Plank, Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, Alex Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, and Chrislo Haas of DAF. In recent years she has released multiple records and played live with Ana da Silva (The Raincoats), Jim O’Rourke, Oren Ambarchi, Ikue Mori, and Yoshimi (OOIOO, Boredoms), among others.

In 2020, Disciples released Vertigo KO, a collection of material previously released on compilations. In 2021 Mute Records released New Decade, a stunning new solo album recorded in her home studio in the suburbs of Tokyo during the pandemic. For her performance at STUK you can expect lots of material from previous albums as well as a new body of work.

artwork © Ran De Vos