Terminal Island: Degrowth & Mismaking
Presented by the Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT). Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM)
with Lovage Sharrock and Jon Leidecker
In Lovage Sharrock's live collaboration with Jon Leidecker (Wobbly/Negativland/Thurston Moore Group), the artists repurpose obsolete technology to process and respond to live acoustic moments, combining song composition and indeterminacy with a heightened care for typically discarded noises.
Lovage Sharrock will share her rigorous-yet-playful creative practice in a talk and performance with Jon Leidecker at CNMAT. Drawing from her history on a terminal island in British Columbia — where limited resources demand ingenuity and interdependence — she’ll offer an inspiring perspective on the creative potential in reimagining scarcity as a chance for generosity rather than competition.
Sharrock’s collaboration with Leidecker, in which he repurposes obsolete technology to process and respond to live acoustic moments, combines song composition with rethinking often ignored or discarded noises from the live process. In vocal performances, Sharrock's intimate, often fragile vocals embrace irregularity, reclaiming the “flaw” by transforming it into a space for exploration and discovery. Her acoustic guitar work plays with subtly shifting patterns, harmonics and progressions as new ways of reuse. Together, Sharrock and Leidecker reveal how “mismaking” (an archaic word meaning "made poorly or improperly") can be a joyful act of radical preservation and a generative tool for sonic bricolage.
Under the unbrella context of degrowth, mismaking offers a way to creatively use what already exists, reflecting a commitment to resourcefulness and creative renewal. By turning mismade work into a resource, they highlight the potential of wrongness as an opportunity, transforming it into a space for exploration and discovery. Their illustration of how mistakes, often discarded as waste, are valuable sites of generation and reinvention, reframes error, and the discarded, to reshape how we think about resources, creativity, and value.
Songs We No Longer Sing, Sharrock’s new album as Phipps Pt., co-produced with Leidecker, will be released later in 2025.
About Phipps Pt.
Phipps Pt. is a sound-based project of Canadian artist and conduit, Lovage Sharrock.
What began as a series of one-off performances pairing her hypnotic guitar patterns and vocals with rotating collaborators has evolved with the addition of Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly). Each conjured performance is unfiltered, distinct and unrepeatable.
Their debut album, Kiss You So Many Times You Can’t Count My Love, was released on Sanity Muffin Records. The follow-up album, Songs We No Longer Sing, is set to release later this year.
About Jon Leidecker
Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) is a human in the loop, making music with people and machines that listen. By improvising with recordings as readily as people, and through the use of sampling, feedback and automation, the goal is to produce sounds that seem to be asking questions—hopefully the right ones. You don't want to waste your time with music that's lying to you. A long and winding list of collaborators blurs the line between solo and group work—current touring projects include Negativland, the Thurston Moore Group, Jennifer Walshe, Zoh Amba, and Cheryl E. Leonard. Talks on the secret histories of electronic music have been presented at Oxford, Stanford, Mills, UC Berkeley and Peabody, and his nine-hour overview of sampling and collage, "Variations," is hosted online by the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.
Radio remains his home medium, with Negativland's Over The Edge live mix broadcast continuing to emerge out of KPFA FM, Berkeley.
Accessibility
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