Electromagnetic composer & Cathodic projectionist: #maximalist.

Across decades, Porest (aka Mark Gergis) has issued a trail of confounding agitprop sound art, post-globalized hate-pop, diabolical radio dramas and carefully rearranged realities. Porest’s blatant embezzlement of human syntax and cultural misunderstanding broadcasts vital mixed messages across all fields. Live performances integrate Porest’s music, performance and sound into a grand total sum that can’t be unseen. Ongoing collaborations have included: Negativland (USA) Alan Bishop / Sun City Girls (USA), and Aavikko (Finland), among others.

 Porest’s Modern Journal of Popular Savagery LP was released by Nashazphone (Cairo) in 2016, followed by an appearance at TUSK festival (UK) and a European tour. In 2017, Porest’s Optimized! – The Parallel Broadcasts was issued as a split LP alongside London’s People Like Us on the Discrepant label (UK), followed by performances in Cairo, and at the Beirut and Beyond festival in Lebanon (curated by Egypt’s Maurice Louca). 2017’s album Flimsy Tomb was released by Sucata Tapes (UK) on cassette, celebrated with a performance at Café OTO, London. Past releases can be found on the Seeland, Resipiscent and Abduction labels. 

 London-based Mark Gergis was born in California, where he begat the Porest project. Mark was co-founder of the long-running experimental Bay Area music and performance collective Mono Pause, as well as its offshoot Neung Phak; performing inspired renditions of southeast Asian folk and pop music. Since 2003, with the Sublime Frequencies label, and more recently, with his own record label Sham Palace, Mark has shared decades of research and scores of archived international music, film footage and sound recordings acquired during extensive travels in the Middle East and South East Asia. 

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I have no fuckin' idea how to describe this monster...how about brazen, sample-driven, manic, pissed-off, over-the-top, brilliant?  – BLASTITUDE

Porest creates subversively comedic and extremely leftist audio collages on as current and confrontational a tip as creatively possible. …Venomous…uninhibitedly outspoken sound-bite masterpieces. Porest lodges a well-aimed spit-wad into the eye of capitalist America. You can’t argue with the truth.  – Kevin Hainey, EXCLAIM!

All I know is the way Mark Gergis cuts and pastes signifiers of our global predicament into songs that are funny, baffling, catchy, reverent, subversive, absurd, and logical is a knack that has a few parallels (Negativland, Eugene Chadbourne, Gergis’ brethren Sun City GIrls) but no real peers. …The Porest POV is so intact it’s blinding – and I’ll be staring at this sun for a while.  – Marc Masters, 200 WORDS

sonnobjet@gmail.com

1/2 Instruções Rituais with @theatreofforgottenconcern

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