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FUAIM Lecture - John Godfrey and Maximilin Le Cain - 13/02/25, Ó Riada Hall, 11:00am
Title: “Dordán”
In 2012, Quiet Music Ensemble commissioned a work from one of Ireland’s most radical contemporary composers, Jennifer Walshe. The resulting piece, Dordán, was premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2013. In 2022, QME recorded the piece and commissioned renowned Irish experimental film maker Maximilian Le Cain to create a film version. This was not to be a documentation of a performance, but an artwork in its own right: the film was released by Diatribe Recordings in November 2024. In this Seminar, John Godfrey, artistic director of QME, and Maximilian Le Cain discuss the ensemble for which the piece was composed, the composition and the film.
John Godfrey is a Senior Lecturer at University College Cork (Ireland); he specialises in Experimental Music, composition, performance, improvisation and music technology. He has been a composer, a performer, and a promoter of contemporary art music for more than 30 years. He co-founded Icebreaker (UK, 1989); became a founding member of Ireland’s Crash Ensemble (1997, Ireland); and in 2008, established Quiet Music Ensemble (Ireland), a group dedicated to experimental and improvised music. Godfrey has appeared in Europe, USA, Australia and Japan, has been broadcast worldwide and appears on many CDs. He has directed several festivals in Ireland.
Maximilian Le Cain has created a prolific and acclaimed body of moving image work including features, shorts, installations and film-related performances. He was The Arts Council / UCC (University College Cork) Film Artist in Residence for 2023. He is co-creator and co-curator of CineSalon, a Cork-based experimental film event and co-director of The CineSalon Experimental Film Festival.
His filmmaking proposes a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. Accepted visual and storytelling codes are encouraged to collapse into a more personalised system that approaches moving imagery as an experiential construct open to possession by multiple claims of memory and interpretation. According to Aidan Dunne in The Irish Times, his works "don't so much challenge narrative and visual conventions as disregard them completely in an effort to find an intensely personal, honest means of addressing experience in all its strangeness and mystery… it is curiously, hypnotically watchable, it takes you to a place of such interiority that it is unsettling, even disturbing, but also very rewarding.”
Le Cain is affiliated with the influential Experimental Film Society (EFS), an autonomous entity explicitly designed for producing cinema through experimentation. He is also known for his collaborations with Vicky Langan which created an intimate but unsettling personal universe in film and performance across more than a decade.