Pause: Billy Bultheel & James Richards Workers in Song

About

Workers in Song is the result of a collaboration between composer Billy Bultheel (b. 1987, BE) and visual artist James Richards (b. 1983, UK), who found one another based on an expansive approach towards their disciplines. Bringing together archival film and music with newly created footage and scores, their performance is haunted by the histories of occult photography and spectral music and is replete with references to their previous works as well as more quotidian pleasures such as online hook-ups, subcultures of bygone eras, and the darker dimensions of romantic subjectivity.

Conceived as an open-ended, modular structure, Bultheel and Richards present newly produced music and film material, and place these into dialogue with poems, films, and scores by other artists—without subsuming any part into a uniform whole. As such, the artists offer a glimpse into the references and sources of inspiration and appreciation that have imprinted themselves on them. Situated in KW’s main hall, Workers in Song turns it into a musical Frankenstein, taking apart the seamless and unified apparatus of the cinema or chamber concert. Both lusciously sentimental and abrasive with distortion, many elements insistently return to the porous line between inside and outside, the self and others, the body and the world.