Luke Fowler in Residence

Description:

Western Front hosted Glasgow-based artist and musician Luke Fowler for a residency in which he researched the life and work of Martin Bartlett towards the production of new work. A co-founder of Western Front and its music program, Bartlett was a composer, musician, and pioneer in the field of interactive computer music.

While in residence, Fowler resurrected “the black box”—Bartlett’s original, handmade modular synthesizer—for an offsite performance at Selectors’ Records with musicians Sarah Davachi and Joshua Stevenson. Fowler also hosted a dialogue at Cineworks following the screening of his film To the Editor of Amateur Photographer (2014), co-directed by Mark Fell.  

Fowler’s research culminated in the film Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett (2017) which debuted at SFU Woodward’s. Combining self-shot 16mm footage with previously unseen archival material, the film pays tribute to Bartlett’s life, work, and the cultural milieu that he came out of. Featuring a crafted consideration of Bartlett’s interests in minimalism, world music, early computer music languages, and microtuning, the work is conceived of as a para-documentary that reclaims certain elements of Bartlett’s life—whose contributions as an interdisciplinary composer were largely unknown until his early passing from AIDS in the early 1990s.