GRANPA | Lucas Abela Grey Nomad Tour

Lucas ‘Granpa’ Abela’s (fka Justice Yeldham) performances on their signature instrument; shards of amplified glass are the stuff of legend. Their singular practice spawned from the noise music underground, where over twenty years the glass evolved from a means to create ecstatic free-noise cacophonies into an outsider instrument that produces some kind of organic electronica. Abela vibrates the pane vocally to control a modular patch that uses no traditional syntheses techniques, instead the glass acts as both sound and modulation source. The patch extracting control voltages from the glass’s dynamics and frequency in order to modulate itself in synchronicity with the performance, shaping six parallel stereo effects chains that merge into dense layers of anomalous music.

Performed intimately in the round, The Grey Nomad Tour follows the release of Bag of Max Bag of Cass* (Warp Records), a collaborative album with Zach Hill (Death Grips). The album explores interpolating the two musicians by converting Zach’s performance into CV that alters Abela’s glass signal as they play. At select shows Lucas will conduct a short Q and A session after the show to explain their patching techniques.

The grey nomad tour has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

"Lucas is just captivating. It's incredible how he can flip the feeling of a room upside down and sonically there’s just no other sound like his" — ZACH HILL - Death Grips

"The most exciting performer I have seen in the last three years – in fact, since I first saw Iggy Pop" — Bruce Russell, WIRE magazine

"One moment you hear John Coltrane playing a volcano, the next you hear a string section being squeezed through a toothpaste tube" — David Rees, The New York Times