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October 2016 – upcoming gigs – a transatlantic 15th October – avant-pop with Trevor Wilson, Jackson Emmer and Michael Chinworth in Asheville, North Carolina; classical fusion with Emily Hall, Ryan Teague, Resina and Lucy Claire at Daylight Music (London); folk and psaltery groove with Jausmė and Sian Magill at the Magic Garden (London)

More by chance than design, today’s preview post (for Saturday 15th) covers both sides of the Atlantic.

I’ve been following (and tracing back) the career of singer/songwriter Trevor Wilson for a while now – from his cross-genre experiments at Bennington College to his scatter of solo records and his more recent work steering the eerie/joyous glee-pop unit Anawan. Having opted to leave New York (after one last concert in his Brooklyn base), he’s now upped sticks to North Carolina and settled in the “art mecca” city of Asheville, where he’s wasted little time, not just putting down roots but making them work. Details on his first post-New York concert below:

Trevor Wilson + Jackson Emmer + Michael Chinworth
‘The Back 40’, 60 Craggy Avenue, Asheville, North Carolina, 28806, USA
Saturday 15th October 2016, 6.30pm – free event (donation suggested) – email for more details

Trevor says “after some months of finding my way around, I’m very excited to announce my first performance here. Remarkably, I will be joined by none other than Anawan members Ethan Woods and Michael Chinworth, as well as two new singing partners, Jeremiah Satterfield and Laura Franke. Michael will perform a set, and so will Jackson Emmer, one of my oldest and dearest friends. This will all happen in a backyard farm just through the woods from my house in West Asheville. It will be an outdoor, bonfire-style concert, and we’ll convene at 6:30 to chit chat and snack. I’ll be performing some Anawan material with Ethan and Michael, as well as some new material with Laura and Jeremiah.”

The new material may or may not relate to Trevor’s upcoming new album ‘Sour Songs’ which he describes as featuring “the most direct, pop-oriented, and fun tracks I have ever created. They’re based around the keyboard, and a lot of them feature electronic beats. It’s definitely a departure, but it feels honest, and really connected to where I am at right now. I truly can’t wait to share them with you.”

Meanwhile, here’s an appropriately rural clip from a few years ago, featuring Trevor singing in the fields (albeit up in Vermont), plus an Anawan video from around the same time.

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On the same Saturday, back in London, it’s another day and another Daylight Music show. Following last week’s organ-and-voice extravaganza, the Daylighters continue to happily mull over ten years of presenting everything from electronic bleeps to uke-toting folkies via unusual instruments and classical inroads. This week leans more towards the latter…

Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 236: Emily Hall + Ryan Teague + Resina + Lucy Claire
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 15th October 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

Emily Hall writes contemporary and avant-pop-slanted takes on the classical song cycle, instrumental narrative and opera. This has led her into commissions for (among others) London Sinfonietta, London Symphony Orchestra, BBCNOW, the Brodsky Quartet and Opera North. It’s also led to collaborations with the likes of the English author Toby Litt (who co-wrote her song-cycle on the diverse “everyday wonder and lurking fear” nature of motherhood, ‘Life Cycle’ – see the excerpt above) and Icelandic poet/occasional Bjork lyricist Sjón, who crafted the words for her haunting trio opera ‘Folie à Deux’.

The latter begins with a man singing an awed paean of worship to an hillside electricity pylon and goes on to explore the consequence of a religious frenzy being transmitted from one person to another, and a relationship in isolation succumbing to the weight of a wild delusion. It’s scored for two singers and a pair of harps (one acoustic, the other electromagnetic) and you can listen to it in full below.

There’ll probably be samples of these plus Emily’s other works in the Daylight showcase. She will be accompanied by Khoros Choir and by classically-inclined singer-songwriter Ana Silvera. Emily has also helped to invent a triggering instrument-cum-mobile, which fits in a suitcase, so with any luck she might be bringing that along too.

Bristolian multi-instrumental composer/producer Ryan Teague has followed a gradually developing path from his minimalist electronic roots which has incorporated classical, electronic, acoustic and soundtrack work and approaches learned from all these fields (as well as from gamelan, a form which informed his ‘Storm Or Tempest May Stop Play’ piece premiered last year at Daylight Music).

Ryan’s upcoming album, ‘Site Specific’ features full-band music pulling in influences from impressionistic early-’70s electric jazz. His performance on Saturday sees him accompanied by bass clarinettist Gareth Davis, electric pianist/synthesizer player Dan Moore and drummer Mark Whitlam.

Karolina Rec is an Warsaw-based cellist and composer working with improvisation and texture under the project name of Resina. In addition to her own work, she’s been involved with several Polish bands and projects including Kings of Caramel, Cieslak and Princess, Nathalie And The Loners, and Anthony Chorale. Here’s a little of her textured post-classical performance looping:

There will also be contributions by composer-performer Lucy Claire. She’s a late addition and there’s not much news on exactly what she’ll be doing. Her work stretches from soundscapes and soundtrack to deeper and more involved contemporary classical works, so she might be performing anything from a between-acts soundscape to a tape-and-keyboard piece to stints on the in-house pipe organ and piano. Here’s a taste of some of what Lucy does:

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In the evening, Lithuanian-born singer-songwriter/kanklės player Jausmė and novelistic folkie Sian Magill return to south London’s Magic Garden, following up their show back in July.

Jausmė + Sian Magill
Heavenly Sunday Folk @ The Magic Garden, 231 Battersea Park Road, Battersea, London, SW11 4LG, England
Sunday 16th November, 9.00pm – free event – information

The last time Jausmė was here, she was duetting with cellist Nicole Collarbone. This time, she’s on her own. Although she usually labels her songcraft and instrumentalism (voice and kanklės, plus the occasional effects pedal) as “urban etherealism”, and generally lets it fall somewhere between its Baltic roots and her adopted home of Milton Keynes (when she’s not guesting on other people’s techno and sub-bass tracks), she’s billing this Saturday’s music as “soul, jazz and folklore”. This either means that she’s found a new smoothed-out direction for her psaltery songs, or uncovered a new twist. Come and see. Meanwhile, here are two of her songs played out on the grasslands. (The second one might provide some explanation…)

Building on what looks like a fruitful gig friendship with Jausmė, Sian Magill brings more of her detailed folk songs into play – immaculate and quietly smouldering; modern-traditional; emotion-soused but steeped in intelligence.

Tags: Ana Silvera, Anawan, Asheville (North Carolina - USA), cello music, Emily Hall, Jackson Emmer, Jeremiah Satterfield, kanklės music, Khoros Choir, Laura Franke, listening to women, London (England), Lucy Claire, Michael Chinworth, Resina (Karolina Rec), Ryan Teague, Sian Magill, Trevor Wilson, women of heart and mind

October 2016 – upcoming classical gigs – Helen Grime Day at Wigmore Hall in London (15th), Cariolan Trio + Adam Brown at Conway Hall in London (30th); plus Ligeti Quartet in Little Missenden, London and Aberdeenshire (16th, 17th, 30th)

10 Oct

Helen Grime Day
Wigmore Hall, 36 Wigmore Street, Marylebone, London, W1U 2BP, England
Saturday 15th October 2016, 1.00pm/6.00pm/7.30pm – information

Wigmore Hall is devoting a whole day to the work of Scottish composer Helen Grime, who’s about to begin her term as the Hall’s first female composer-in-residence for the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 seasons.

An hour-long early afternoon concert will be entirely devoted to Helen’s chamber music, played by a five-piece ensemble of strings, oboe and piano. There’ll be two sets of instrumental works originally inspired by fine art minatures – ‘Three Whistler Miniatures’ (triggered by Helen’s encounter with James Whistler’s chalk and pastel drawings in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Museum) and ‘Aviary Sketches’, influenced by the mysterious ‘assemblage boxes’ of American artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell. There’ll also be performances of Helen’s ‘Oboe Quartet’, and her string duo ‘To See The Summer Sky’, plus the British premiere of the piano and oboe duo ‘Five North Eastern Scenes’. (Here’s a version of the Whistler piece…)

In the evening, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and conductor Geoffrey Paterson will take over the hall for a double triptych of music by Helen and her influences.

From the press release: “Helen Grime’s ‘Seven Pierrot Miniatures’ (NB – a companion piece to Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’) project the composer’s uncanny feeling for instrumental tone colours and textural contrasts, whilst her ‘Clarinet Concerto’ (to be played by soloist Mark van de Wiel) is a study in virtuosity that grows more meditative as it unfolds. Oliver Knussen and Elliott Carter have been formative influences in Grime’s career; her duo ‘Embrace’ picks up the duos in Knussen’s delightful ‘Songs without Voices’, and the Carter duo, written for Knussen’s 50th birthday, mirrors this.” There’ll also be a performance of Leoš Janáček’s woodland fantasy ‘Concertino’.

There are two takes on two of those Grime pieces below:

In between the concerts, at 6.00pm, Helen will give a forty-five minute talk.

Performers:

Alexandra Wood – violin (afternoon concert)
Rachel Roberts – viola (afternoon concert)
Philip Higham – cello (afternoon concert)
Nicholas Daniel – oboe (afternoon concert)
Huw Watkins – piano (afternoon concert)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – ensemble (evening concert)
Mark van de Wiel – clarinet (evening concert)
Geoffrey Paterson – conductor (evening concert)

Programme:

(morning concert:)

Helen Grime – Three Whistler Miniatures (for piano, violin & cello)
Helen Grime – Aviary Sketches (after Joseph Cornell) (for violin, viola & cello)
Helen Grime – To see the summer sky (for violin & viola)
Helen Grime – Five North Eastern Scenes (for oboe & piano) (UK première)
Helen Grime – Oboe Quartet (for oboe, violin, viola & cello)

(evening concert:)

Helen Grime – Embrace (for Bb clarinet & C trumpet)
Helen Grime – Seven Pierrot Miniatures (for piccolo, bass clarinet, piano, viola & voice)
Oliver Knussen – Songs without Voices Op. 26 (for flute, cor anglais, clarinet, horn, piano and string trio )
Helen Grime – Clarinet Concerto (for clarinet, piccolo, contrabassoon, harp & strings)
Elliott Carter – Au Quai (for bassoon and viola)
Helen Grime – Luna (for piccolo, oboe/clarinet, E-flat clarinet, horn, percussion & piano)
Leoš Janáček – Concertino (for piano, two violins, viola, clarinet, French horn and bassoon )

Incidentally, Helen has recently announced her first new work as part of the residency, which will be a piano concerto for Huw Watkins and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. This will be premiered at the hall in March 2017. In the meantime, here’s a dip into yet another Grimes piece (her acclaimed orchestral work ‘Near Midnight’, which already seems to be working its way into the repertoire…)

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If you’re interested in hearing Helen’s ‘Aviary Sketches’ twice in one month, the The Coriolan String Trio are including it in their Conway Hall concert a couple of weeks after Helen Grimes Day, sandwiched in between two pieces of established classical repertoire…

Conway Hall Sunday Concerts presents:
Coriolan String Trio + Adam Brown
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1R 4RL, London
Sunday 30th October 2016, 5:30 pm – information

From the Conway Hall publicity mailshot – “The Coriolan String Trio combines the forces of chamber musicians from two renowned chamber groups, with a thirst for exploring and expanding on the repertoire for String Trio. As founding members of the Finzi String Quartet, viola player Ruth Gibson and violinist Sara Wolstenholme performed internationally, broadcast and recorded together until 2012. Until 2012, Robin Michael was cellist in the critically acclaimed Fidelio Trio for over ten years, with an extensive discography and premiering over a hundred new works for the genre. Since first meeting in 2013, all three have enjoyed collaborating through Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival and projects at Kings Place, London.”

Programme:

Ludwig van Beethoven – String Trio in G Op.9/1
Helen Grime – Aviary Sketches (after Joseph Cornell)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Divertimento in E flat K563

As a bonus, “at a pre-concert recital at 5.30pm, guitarist Adam Brown will perform solo, presenting varied dance forms from across Latin America. Performed works will be recorded on a forthcoming album that will include dynamic new arrangements and exciting first recordings.” No extra details on that, but here’s Adam performing a take on a Jimmy van Heusen classic…

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In between the previous two shows, The Ligeti Quartet are touring their interesting ‘Fellow Travellers’ programme at a couple of English venues.

From the Forge website:

“The Ligeti Quartet – consisting of violinists Mandira de Saram and Patrick Dawkins, viola player Richard Jones and cellist Val Welbanks – is dedicated to performing modern and contemporary music, commissioning new works, and engaging a diverse audience. Formed in 2010, they were united by their fascination with the music of György Ligeti, and have since established a reputation as leading exponents of new music.

“The title of this programme and the opening piece, ‘Fellow Traveler’, suggest socio-political and Cold War connotations. The pieces of music you will hear at this concert refer in various ways to tensions and freedom, unity through eclecticism – relevant themes in the month before the US presidential election. The concert is built around two major works by Samuel Barber and Dmitri Shostakovich, contemporaries who in this programme represent classics of the mid-20th century USA and USSR. Their music was related in language but written under very different circumstances; Barber composed his quartet in the prime of his life, buoyed by the artistic perks of The New Deal; Shostakovich wrote of his fear of mortality, in the grips of terminal illness and under Soviet scrutiny.”

The concert also includes quartet works by the polystylistic pioneer Alfred Schnittke, the polymathic jazz-and-classical composer John Zorn (from a set of intricate, witty compositions inspired by the rules and forms of sadomasochism), and the premiere of a new Duke Ellington-inspired quartet composed by another jazz musician, Laura Jurd (who’s also on tour this month).

Programme:

John Adams – Fellow Traveler
Alfred Schnittke – String Quartet No. 3
Samuel Barber – String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11
John Zorn – Cat O’Nine Tails
Laura Jurd – Jump Cut Shuffle (world premiere)
Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet No. 13, op. 138

Here are takes on moste of those pieces:

Dates:

Little Missenden Festival of Music and the Arts, St John the Baptist Church, Little Missenden, Amersham, HP7 0RA, England, Sunday 16th October 2016, 3.00pm – information
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England, Monday 17th October 2016, 7:00 pm – information

In addition, the Quartet will be playing another show at the end of the month, in Aberdeenshire (as part of the ongoing Scotland-wide Sound Festival). This show will feature a different set, although one which illustrates the Quartet’s interests and preoccupations with modern and twentieth-century music.

Sound Festival presents:
The Ligeti Quartet
Woodend Barn, Banchory, AB31 5QA, Scotland
Sunday 30th October 2016, 7.00pm – information

Programme:

György Kurtág – Six Moments Musicaux, op, 44
Béla Bartok – String Quartet No. 5
Iannis Xenakis – Tetras
György Ligeti – String Quartet No. 1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes)

(Again, here’s some playthroughs of most of those pieces by various folk…)

Tags: acoustic guitar music, Adam Brown, Alexandra Wood, Banchory (Scotland), Béla Bartók, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), chamber ensemble, Conway Hall (promoter/venue), Elliott Carter, Geoffrey Paterson, György Kurtág, György Ligeti, Helen Grime, Huw Watkins, Iannis Xenakis, Leoš Janáček, Ligeti Quartet, London (England), Ludwig van Beethoven, Mandira de Saram, Mark van de Wiel, Nicholas Daniel, Oliver Knussen, Patrick Dawkins, Philip Higham, Rachel Roberts, Richard Jones (viola player), Robin Michael, Ruth Gibson, Sara Wolstenholme, Sound Festival (event), string quartet, string trio, trio music, Val Welbanks, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, classical (Western art music), Classical music

October 2016 – upcoming London gigs – ‘Organ Reframed’ covers all manner and method of pipes and sounds at Union Chapel (7th-9th)

6 Oct

Tomorrow, London’s Union Chapel begins a celebration of a number of things (its performance acoustic, its appeal to a diverse body of musicians and audiences, its innovative cultural spirit, and not least its grand 1877 pipe organ) via the ‘Organ Reframed’ mini-festival. A three-day four-concert occasion, it “release(s the organ) from its traditional roots with a varied programme of film, intimate solo sets, ensemble improvisations and large scale commissions. This festival of experimental music will challenge perceptions and show this extraordinary instrument in a new light.”

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Organ Reframed: James McVinnie/Irene Buckley/Robert Ames/Laura Moody perform new live score for ‘Nosferatu’
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Friday 7th October 2016, 7.00pm – information

Known for multiple theatre, dance and film projects – as well as for orchestral works such as ‘Stórr’) and her live work in the electronic/improv fields via Crevice (with Elaine Howley and Roslyn Steer) and Wry Myrhh (with Ellen King) – composer Irene Buckley has written a number of live film rescorings. These have included one for Carl Dreyer’s ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ and one for Jean Epstein’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.

Her latest such commission is for ‘Organ Reframed’ – a new score for F. W. Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu (A Symphony of Horror)‘ – “an iconic film of the German expressionist cinema, and one of the most famous of all silent movies (which) continues to haunt — and, indeed, terrify — modern audiences with the unshakable power of its images. By teasing a host of occult atmospherics out of dilapidated set-pieces and innocuous real-world locations alike, Murnau captured on celluloid the deeply-rooted elements of a waking nightmare, and launched the signature ‘Murnau-style’ that would change cinema history forever.”

The film will be screened with a live performance of the score carried out by a quartet ensemble: leading New Music pipe organist James McVinnie, viola player Robert Ames (co-artistic director and conductor of the LCO), polystylistic cellist Laura Moody (see multiple past ‘Misfit City’ posts for more on her), and Irene herself contributing live electronics. To give you a hint of what it might be like, here’s an excerpt from Irene’s ‘…Joan Of Arc’ score, back in 2012:

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Daylight Music 235: Organ Reframed – Lætitia Sadier + Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch + Kieran Brunt + Angèle David-Guillou + Adrian Crowley + Gill Sandell + Ed Dowie + William D. Drake
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 8th October 2016, 12.00pm free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

The second concert in the series is a free (or donation-based) lunchtime show run in conjunction with Union Chapel regulars Daylight Music, offering “a stripped-down approach… eight sets of artists and accompanists across different genres and styles. These musicians, singers and composers — who are at various stages of their careers — will explore the very physical relationship between voice and pipes: in many cases, for the first time.”

Performers will include three Franco-London women who specialise in avant-pop/dream-pop/classical crossovers of one kind or another – Stereolab/Monade’s Lætitia Sadier (who, four days earlier, will have been part of Miles Cooper Seaton’s ‘Transient Music’ ensemble at Café Oto), Angèle David-Guillou (of Klima and Piano Magic), and electro-acoustic film soundtracker Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. Also involved is frequent Daylight guester Ed Dowie (usually a purveyor of genteel avant-parlour-pop, having passed through Brothers in Sound, Redarthur and The Paper Cinema).

The Daylighters specialise in late and interstitial additions to already interesting bills. This concert is no exception, with a bumper set of extra guests signing up and recently being unveiled. Joining in alongside the people I’ve already mentioned are Irish singer-songwriter Adrian Crowley (who specializes in what might be described as a baroque-minimal pop style), singer Kieran Brunt (who divides time between classical choral and solo projects and his pop band Strange Boy), multi-instrumental folk singer Gill Sandell (previously of Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo) and singer-songwriter/general keyboard magician William D. Drake (once a Cardiac, now a baroque-pop solo artist with his own cross-era style – as with Laura Moody, see plenty of previous posts…).

Given the varied pop, folk, rock and classical stylings involved (and some of the signature tones of the musicians involved) it’s not clear whether there are going to be specific collaborations or mashups involved, or whether everyone’s playing solo/bringing their own backup. It’s also unclear as to whether the pop culture/pop music side of things will be honoured by Farfisa, Hammond or even Lowrey organs onstage to share musical space with the grand pipe organ; although given the emphasis on “the very physical relationship between voice and pipes”, I’m guessing perhaps not. (NOTE – since I posted that, I’ve found out that Angèle David-Guillou will be playing a new organ-and-voiceloops composition called ‘Too Much Violence’; that there will be at least one duet from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch and Kieran Brunt; that Ed Dowie has a couple of covers and one new piece; and that the Daylighters are scouring the Twittersphere looking for a last-minute pump organist. Knowing them, they’ll find one…)

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Organ Reframed: ‘Spire’ featuring Charles Matthews + Fennesz + Philip Jeck + Simon Scott + Claire M. Singer + John Beaumont + The Eternal Chord
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 8th October 2016, 6.00pm – information

Spire is an ongoing concert series for organ and electronics, curated by Mike Harding (creative producer of the Touch organisation (which covers musician promotions, licensing, mentoring and everything but the business of being a record company association) and by dedicated organist and keyboardist Charles Matthews (one of those exemplary musicians whose work spans everything from church services and teaching to a globetrotting concert schedule and advanced curatorship). Now into its twelfth year, and with sixteen concerts plus four CD recordings behind it, Spire returns to Union Chapel to link up with ‘Organ Reframed’.

Music played at previous Spire events has included the ancient, salvaged fourteenth-century organ manuscript The Robertsbridge Codex (the oldest surving keyboard score in the world) and twentieth-century pieces such as ‘In Nomine Lucis’ (by the pioneering and mystic single-pitch/multiple-approach composer Giacinto Scelsi), Henryk Gorécki’s ‘Kantata’, Liana Alexandra’s ‘Consonances III’ and André Jolivet’s ‘Hymne à l’Universe’. The series has also premiered new works by resident Spire composer Marcus Davidson (such as ‘Opposites Attract’ and ‘Standing Wave’), as well as improvisations and collaborations by its associated musicians.

Spire also takes into account the architectural qualities of the church organ: how our perception and experience of it is coloured by its monolithic size, volume and presence compared to other instruments. As Mike and Charles put it, “the organ has the greatest frequency range of any acoustic instrument, but this is rarely exploited; the unique sound of the mechanical organ has often been limited and controlled and Spire aims to liberate it from its history without denying that history… combining organ works ancient and modern (while) other performers use the organ and organ works as a basis for their own compositions, using piano, voice, record players, samplers and other electronic devices.”

Past Spire performers have included laptop-and-guitar noisescaper Fennesz and turntablist/electronicist Philip Jeck, both of whom are joining Charles Matthews for performances this time round. Also joining in are newer Spire associates – Simon Scott (Slowdive drummer, multi-instrumentalist, sound ecologist and deep listener) and John Beaumont (whose life within Anglican church and choral music has seen him rise from treble chorister at Wakefield to tenor songman at York Minster and continuing work in London’s great cathedrals and abbeys, alongside his current work as a “story tenor” mingling classical repertoire with a bardic sensibility). Also joining in is Union Chapel’s organ director and artistic director of ‘Organ Reframed’, Claire M. Singer – a musician, composer and cross-media artist whose work extends from composition to installation via live performance, mostly based around organ, cello and electronics.

Among other pieces, the programme will feature a performance of Spire mainstay ‘The Eternal Chord‘, a Mike Harding-originated conceptual and improvised organ piece which “can take anything from eight minutes to eternity” and which is open to any number of players from a duo upwards. There have been eleven iterations of the piece so far, of which two can be heard below, including one from last year at the Union Chapel.

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Organ Reframed: Five new commissions for James McVinnie & the London Contemporary Orchestra
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Sunday 9th October 2016, 6.30pm – information

Having already helped to open the festival (via their contribution to the ‘Nosferatu’ live score), James McVinnie and Robert Ames return for the final concert in which James joins forces with the London Contemporary Orchestra (conducted/facilitated by Robert) to premiere five new contemporary classical or classical fusion works.

There’s not much information on the new piece by Mark Fell although it’s likely that it’ll be droning, mathematical and algorithmic (in keeping with his existing work, which is infused with electronica and club music ideas and further informed by his extension into the worlds of moving image, dance, text and son-et-lumiere). Similarly, all I can tell you about acoustic/electronic/theatrical composer Alex Groves‘ piece is that it’s called ‘On Colour’ and is six minutes long. Some pointers towards what to expect might come from Alex’s previous piece ‘Patience’ (for viola da gamba and organ), premièred as part of the Daylight Music series at the Union Chapel back in December 2014. (There’s some footage of that show below. I’m hoping that it’s Alex’s piece…)

There’s no doubt that one composer who’ll have no problems filling the Chapel with grand sound is Craig Armstrong, whose music has been well known to a popular audience since the 1990s thanks to his use of luscious, near-decadent massed strings and club beats (as well as his work on hefty-selling records by Massive Attack. Madonna and U2 plus film soundtracks including ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’, ‘Plunkett & Macleane’ and Baz Luhrman’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’).

Almost at the other end of the spectrum is collagist-composer, cultural commentator and musical wit Caroline Haines, who records (as Chaines) for the small Berlin arts label Slip Imprint and has put out a series of restless, splice-styled, information-packed music packages in which everything from sound sources to manufacturing materials has an integral significance. When she chooses to be, Catherine is also a spirited piss-taker, using her existing methods of collagery and radio broadcast (up to and including the comedy sketch show). For evidence, see ‘WUB’, her quick and merciless takedown of pretentious, dishonest conservatoire slummers who parasitize other more media-friendly musical forms without comprehension, respect or indeed much genuine interest.

Dropped hints suggests that Caroline will be performing alongside the orchestra herself: other hints suggest that her contribution is a version of ‘OST‘ (last years’ hallucinogenic audio portrait of the north-east English industrial imprint). I’m guessing that for her second large-scale premiere with LCO (following August’s Curtain Call concert) her restless mind will have come up with something else.

American-born/Berlin-based composer and violist Catherine Lamb has a taste for adding liminal electronics and an interest in “exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room.” Her approach is inspired by Hindustani classical music and the just intonation system (with added influences from her studies with James Tenney and Michael Pisaro). Catherine’s ‘Organ Reframed’ piece is ‘Cumulus Totalitas’ – possibly a sister piece to ‘Curvo Totalis’, her “meditation on sound” premiered last month in New York by percussion-and-piano quartet Yarn/Wire.

Although the evening’s billed as five pieces, it seems that there’ll be a bonus from the LCO’s recent repertoire in the shape of the thirteen-minute string orchestra piece ‘Between Rain’. Composed by Edmund Finnis (whose work flows from the luminously minimal to frenetically eerie orchestral jousts) this will be being performed for the first time since the LCO premiered it at Imogen Heap’s 2014 Reverb festival at the Roundhouse, although it’s not clear whether Edmund’s tweaked it since then to include an organ part.

Event co-sponsors ‘Drowned In Sound‘ have an interview with Robert Ames expounding on this part of the project.

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At each event, you’ll also be able to hear sound artist Bill Thompson’s installation ‘A Knowing Space’, which “explores the idea of resonance using durations and timings derived from prime numbers as well as the pitches of organ pipes. The installation is played through seven organ pipes, using transducers that vibrate and fill the space.” Here’s an early taste:

You can also catch ongoing discussion about the whole ‘Organ Reframed’ event at the Facebook page…

Tags: Adrian Crowley, Alex Groves, Angèle David-Guillou, Arctic Circle (promoter), Bill Thompson, Carl Dreyer, Caroline Haines (Chaines), Catherine Lamb, Charles Matthews, Claire M. Singer, Craig Armstrong, Crevice, Daylight Music (event), Ed Dowie, Edmund Finnis, Elaine Howly, electric organ, Ellen King, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Fennesz, Gill Sandell, Imogen Heap, Irene Buckley, James McVinnie, Jean Epstein, John Beaumont, Kieran Brunt, Laura Moody, Lætitia Sadier, London (England), London Contemporary Orchestra, Mark Fell, Nosferatu, Philip Jeck, pipe organ music, Robert Ames, Roslyn Steer, Simon Scott, The Eternal Chord, William D. Drake, Wry Myrhh, Yarn/Wire

October 2016 – upcoming London gigs – two-part experimental concert from Laura Steenberge, Michael Winter and friends at IKLECTIK and Hundred Years Gallery (7th & 9th)

5 Oct

Two Los Angeles composer-experimentalists – Laura Steenberge and Michael Winter – flit between two London art-music venues at the end of this week, joining forces for a two-part concert.

Mira Benjamin presents:
‘Open… and perhaps not yet fully formed’ (with Laura Steenberge and Michael Winter)

Part I – IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England, Friday 7th October 2016, 7.30pm – information here and here
Part II – Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, Hoxton, London, E2 8JD, England, Sunday 9th October 2016, 3:30pm – information here and here

The two visiting musicians make an interesting and complementary pair. Laura’s linguistic training backs up her musicality and instills a curiosity about the roots of communication, with her ‘Chant Etudes’ series attempting to recreate or recapture a “deep past, when the idea of a musical instrument was not yet fully formed.” Making and playing rudimentary part-salvaged instruments (which combine standard recorder or trumpet mouthpieces with flexible metal or plastic piping), Laura blows and sings into them while also whirling them, combining simple and complex harmonies from instrument and voice while participating in a sound which she partially controls and partially doesn’t. It conflates ideas of natural wind sound, air-hung instruments which play without human intercession (such as Aeolian harps) and human attempts at music making which suggest both the pre- and post-industrial. There’s a mystical element too, as Laura deliberately searches out “the secret vibrations hidden among the controlled tones.”

As for Michael, he’s more computationally-minded: setting out his algorhythmic pieces via scores involving minimal standard notation, or minimal graphical cues, or succinct but meticulous lines of text, and drawing structural elements from other disciplines (science, architecture, mathematics, different art fields). Both concerts will feature a performance of Michael’s ‘for Sol LeWitt’ – a text score piece for solo glissando and four sustained tones, which on these occasion will be performed with at least one amplified/processed violin. (Perform it yourself, right now, using any available sound source, from the instructions here – otherwise, cop a listen to the slow-evolving version below).

Four London-based players are joining in on both occasions, fanning the event out out into a loose potential sextet. Two of these are avant-garde violinists – prepared-instrument/improv doyenne Angharad Davies; microtonal specialist Mira Benjamin. The remaining two are objects-and-electronics player John Lely and fellow object botherer/roving conceptualist/sometime pianist Tim Parkinson.

I’m being more than a little glib and flippant in my descriptions here. Just think of them as being like the tabs in a pop-up book, something which you pull out to unfold the details what these assorted players really do – a cascade of directions and deconstructions springing off from the music and situations they engage with. Many of the ensemble are also active encouragers or curators of New Music – Mira through the vigorous commissioning and nurturing of new compositions, as well as serving as the impresario for these two ‘Open…’ shows; others through running various performance nights in LA or London (Michael’s experimental institution the wulf.; the ‘Music We’d Like to Hear‘ series which John and Tim run with Marcus Trunk).

In addition, two ‘Music We’d Like to Hear’ semi-regulars – double bass player/onetime Oxford Improviser Dominic Lash and cellist/Apartment House founder Anton Lukoszevieze – will join in for the second concert. (Anton will be playing John Leles’ self-descriptively-titled ‘The Harmonics of Real Strings’).

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Beyond the pieces I’ve mentioned before, the programmes vary between the concerts, although the general brief is “simple processes and open forms.” One inclusion will be another Michael Winter piece (the rhythmic three-line drone-counterpoint process ‘tergiversate’). Another will be a second John Leles composition, ‘All About the Piano’, in which the initial piano lines are recorded onto a series of dictaphones as they’re played, and are then replayed later on in lo-fi over the top of later lines. (This enables the piece’s history to repeat – the first time as grace, the second time as what sounds like a distant, distracting coterie of ice cream vans.)

Tim Parkinson will be contributing two brand-new pieces – ‘No. 4’ and ‘No. 5’ – about which he’s not provided any information. Having recently composed an almost actionless opera with a combined orchestra-pit-cum-stage-set of trash and rubble, without any music (bar stolen snippets of Handel and Rossini as performance bookends), and which mostly consists of the performers wading through the wreckage, he’s arguably the most playful of the composers contributing to ‘Open’. Expect anything; and then expect to see that anything dismantled.

Outside of music sourced by the ensemble members themselves, ‘Open…’ will see a performance of one of the Circular Music piano pieces by Swiss composer Jürg Frey (a member of the Wandelweiser Group, who pursue a John Cage-inspired integration of silence and humble reticence into composition). ‘Circular Music part 6’ is part of a series in which Frey seems to have been skirting around the avant-garde composer’s fear of (or suspicion of) virtuoso cliché or cultural determinism – aiming instead to naturally compose something which is both starkly simple and, at the same time, significant.

In an interview with Sheffield record label Another Timbre, Frey expanded on this by talking about how he was “looking to find a confidence in chords, dyads and single notes… I hope that accordingly they will resonate with confidence. This applies to every material, whether stones or a piano, but with the piano it seems to be more challenging because of the clarity of the material and how the instrument itself suggests it should be used.” (Full interview text here, while one of the other Circular Music pieces is linked below.)

The last piece confirmed for the concert (although there should be others) is ‘Another’, by Christian Wolff: conceptual composer, final survivor of the Cage-led New York School of experimental classical, a muso-political provocateur in step with Cornelius Cardew, and an avowed influence on both Tim Parkinson and John Leles. ‘Another’ isn’t a piece I can actually find in Woolf’s catalogue. It may well be a version of his floating, fragmentary but surprisingly lovely nine-minute electric guitar piece ‘Another Possibility’, which is and was a response to a 1966 piece which Woolf’s friend Morton Feldman had composed for him to perform on electric guitar (despite Woolf’s own unfamiliarity with the instrument).

Woolf would later recall the process of making ‘The Possibility Of A New Work For Electric Guitar’ as “we immediately set to work, (Feldman) at the piano, playing a chord: “can you do that?” I could. “How about this?” With some contortions (the guitar was laid flat so I could better see what I was doing – I’m not a guitar player, and this way I could finger and pluck with either hand), yes.”This?” Not quite. “Now” (with changed voicing, or a new chord)? Yes. And so on, until he had made the piece. Tempo was slow and dynamics soft, the structure dictated by the amount of time we were able to concentrate on the work. The sound, the chords or single notes, were reverberations set off by his (characteristic) piano playing, feeling for a resonance, then confidently transferred to the guitar within that instrument’s capacities (sometimes adding one of its particular features, the ability to make small slides with a vibrato bar).” Woolf only performed Feldman’s composition three times before both guitar and the manuscript were stolen from his car the following year – but he’d subsequently use the memory of the lost piece for inspiration.

Incidentally, three years after Woolf composed ‘Another Possibility’ (and some forty years after the theft), a recording of the stolen Feldman score was recovered, and it was subsequently transcribed and put back into the repertoire. The full story is here, and you can compare the two related pieces below – ‘Another Possibility’ via an interesting effect-sprinkled performance (Andy Summers-gone-avant-garde) by Swiss omin-guitarist Gilbert Impérial, and the original Feldman ‘…Possibility…’ in a straight, reverent reading by Japanese classical/electric crossover player Gaku Yamada.

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Here’s a quick rundown of ‘Open…’ again.

Performers:

Laura Steenberge (objects and voice)
Michael Winter (guitalele, objects, electronics)
Mira Benjamin (violin)
Angharad Davies (violin)
John Lely (objects, electronics)
Tim Parkinson (piano, objects)
Dominic Lash (double bass – Part 2 only)
Anton Lukoszevieze (cello – Part 2 only)

Programme:

Part 1 includes:
Laura Steenberge – The Chant Etudes
Michael Winter – for Sol LeWitt
John Lely – All About the Piano
Jürg Frey – Circular Music No. 6
Tim Parkinson – No.4 (2016) & No.5 (2016)

Part 2 includes:
Laura Steenberge – The Chant Etudes
Michael Winter – tergiversate
John Lely – The Harmonics of Real Strings
Michael Winter – for Sol LeWitt
Christian Wolff – Another

Tags: Angharad Davies, Another Timbre (record label), Anton Lukoszevieze, cello music, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Dominic Lash, double bass music, electric guitar music, Gaku Yamada, Gilbert Impérial, IKLECTIK Art Lab (promoters), Jürg Frey, John Lely, Laura Steenberge, London (England), Michael Winter, Mira Benjamin, Morton Feldman, piano music, played objects, Tim Parkinson, violin music

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, acoustic music, ceremonial music, chamber music, classical (Western art music), cross-cultural music, deep listening, DIY music, electro-acoustic music, experimental music, improvisation, instrumental music, minimalism, performance art, previews, process music

October 2016 – upcoming gigs in London – more avant-classical/experimental ensemble work as new Kammer Klang season opens at Café Oto with Miles Cooper Seaton, Distractfold Ensemble and Martyna Poznańska (4th October)

30 Sep

Heading off the end of his Kammer Klang-sponsored Oto residency, Miles Cooper Seaton moves seamlessly into headlining the first concert of the Kammer Klang 2016/2017 season.

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Kammer Klang presents:
Miles Cooper Seaton & ensemble + Distractfold Ensemble + Martyna Poznańska + Monocreo DJs
Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Tuesday 4th October 2016, 8.00pm – information

The word on Miles (again): “For over a decade, (his) work has defied genre and discipline, spanning immersive ambient installations, intimate sets in sacred spaces and festival stages from Los Angeles to Tokyo – as a solo artist, with his own band Akron/Family and as a member of Michael Gira’s Angels of Light. Their common thread is the raw emotional charge that infuses every performance with incendiary energy, leaving listeners hyper-sensitised to their own feelings and bodies, to each other and to the world around them.”

For this particular concert, Miles will be presenting the British premiere of ‘Transient Music #2’, performed by a seven-piece ensemble featuring an enviably broad set of musicians from varied traditions. In addition to the two Italian musicians who’ve been his right-hand men for the whole of his residency over the previous week (singer/guitarist Tobia Poltroneri, percussionist Alessandro Cau), he’ll be joined by post-rock/art-pop heroine Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab, Monade), by Oliver Coates (curator, cross-discipline collaborator and principal cellist in several prominent orchestras), by multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas (Orlando, Vanishing Twin, School Of Hypnosis, Earth Moon Earth) and by Japanese-French throat-singer/flautist Maïa Barouh.

Describing his ‘Transient Music’ series as “an evolving composition for modular ensemble”, Miles adds “music as an art form is truly realised when it is perceived. It is reciprocity that gives it life. Given this fact, it is the field of perception or awareness that is the context in which a composition is experienced. Though we have a visceral and instinctual relationship with music as primordial utterance, our modern experiences of music are often bound more to the intellectual barriers we place around sound in order to compartmentalise and understand its intention.

“Transient Music aims to engage the intuitive or pre-descriptive space that exists in the gap between experience and understanding. Members of the ensemble are given principal guideposts and cues that relate to their own cosmologies in order to encourage the cultivation of a spontaneous and empathetic awareness. This awareness is then activated sonically and energetically, and finally made manifest as a collective gesture of inclusivity as the tonal field gradually extends to the perceiver.”

Further information on the others playing at the event:

Manchester-based Distractfold are a contemporary music ensemble who “specialise in performing instrumental, electro-acoustic and mixed chamber music from the twenty-first century. Founded by composers/artistic directors Mauricio Pauly and Sam Salem with clarinettist Rocío Bolaños, violinist Linda Jankowska, cellist Alice Purton and viola player Emma Richards, Distractfold have presented over forty concerts around the world since 2011 and became the first British ensemble to be awarded to the prestigious Kranichstein Prize for Interpretation at the 47th International Summer Course for New Music, Darmstadt.” The ensemble will be joined by an associate – the young electric guitarist Daniel Brew (Beats & Pieces), with technical director Constantin Popp offering technological support.

The Distractfold programme includes an “ecstatic” piece by the Australian composer Liza Lim, who establishes her compositional ideas around a nexus of “Australian Indigenous aesthetics; Asian ritual forms and performance practices… Sufi poetics of bewilderment, loss, communion and ecstasy; and the textilic arts of weaving and knot-making as a cross-modal technology for thinking.”

Distractfold will also be presenting British premieres of new works by Mauricio Pauly and Sam Salem. Both pieces were originally premiered this year, back on 7th August in Darmstadt (as part of the 48th International Summer Course for New Music) and display the differing approaches of the two Distractfold directors – Mauricio concentrating on ensemble music with unorthodox lineups plus “amplification, performative electronics and prefabricated sounds”, while Sam concentrates on more mixed-media work founded on “the sounds of urban environments (and) specific geographical location(s)… aspir(ing) to illuminate and explore the hidden musicality and beauty of his geographical subjects, as well as his own relationship to his environment as both a source of inspiration and musical material.”

Bookending the evening will be individual sets by Berlin-based cross-disciplinary artist Martyna Poznańska and by DJs from the Milton Keynes record label Monocreo. Using field recordings, writing, composition and visual material including video and photography (plus her background in linguistics, Spanish literature and sound art), Martyna explores “the processes of remembering and forgetting, growth, decay and transformation” via installation and performance work. Monotreo’s releases, based around the remit of “sound art and outer limits”, have included recordings of post-punk and rhythmic electronic music as well as graphic scores.

Performers:

Miles Cooper Seaton + ensemble
Distractfold Ensemble
Martyna Poznańska
Monocreo DJs

Programme:

Martyna Poznańska – unspecified work for ‘Fresh Klang” programme
Mauricio Pauly – Charred Edifice Shining, for amplified string trio (2016) (UK premiere)
Liza Lim – Inguz (Fertility), for clarinet in A and violoncello (1996)
Sam Salem – Untitled Valley of Fear, for three object operators, tape and video (2016) (UK premiere)
Miles Cooper Seaton: Transient Music #2 (UK premiere)
Monocreo DJ set

Here’s a set of examples of other work by the composers and performers involved, including one from a previous Oto appearance:

Tags: Alessandro Cau, Alice Purton, Café Oto (promoter/venue), Cathy Lucas, Constantin Popp, Daniel Brew, Distractfold Ensemble, Earth Moon Earth, Emma Richards, ensemble music, Fanfarlo, Haddington Concert Society (promoters), Jonny Hill, Lætitia Sadier, Linda Jankowska, listening to women, Liza Lim, Maïa Barouh, Martyna Poznańska, Mauricio Pauly, Miles Cooper Seaton, Monocreo (record label), Oliver Coates, Orlando, Rocío Bolaños, Sam Salem, School Of Hypnosis, Stereolab, Tobia Poltronieri

September 2016 – upcoming London gigs – free (in all respects) Miles Cooper Seaton & Friends residency at Café Oto (26th-30th)

23 Sep

Over the last four days of September, Miles Cooper Seaton (one limb of the Akron/Family trio, and as of the last three years a roaming solo artist) is setting up home in Café Oto. He’s there for an exploratory residency which should cover the whole range of his work – from spontaneous musical narrative to immersive ambience, intimate songwriting performance, outright improvisation and explorations of sacred space (both constructed and induced).

All of this should draw on Miles’ mixed heritage of freak-folk and post-hardcore experimentalism, his interest in spiritual and “functional” music (from post-European choirs to pre-Colombian chants), as set against personalised songwriting, and the “visceral, confrontational and humanist values” which he formed on his journey through the worlds of countercultural art and punk rock, as well as encounters and collaborations with the likes of Hamid Drake, Michael Gira, Keiji Haino, William Parker and the Sun Ra Arkestra.

As it happens, you’re invited along too.

Kammer Klang presents:
Miles Cooper Seaton & Friends Residency
Oto Project Space @ Café Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Monday 26th to Friday 30th September 2016, 10.00am-6.00pm (plus evening shows) – free events – information

Here’s what Miles himself said as part of the announcement (interruptions and asides added by me afterwards):

“After being asked by Kammer Klang to perform as part of their series (…more on that later…), the idea came up to spend time in Cafe Oto’s Project Space. I was immediately attracted by the opportunity to engage the atmosphere where I would be staging ‘Transient Music’, as I consider the piece to be so deeply about the place where it occurs. Maybe the work itself is about building a context to inhabit, a temporary home inside the deluge of messages and impressions. In any event, applying that same schema onto a residency appealed to me.

“Recently, work has led me to spend the majority of my time in Italy with musicians and artists local to the cities and villages I visit. Two of the many people I have met along the way who have informed, inspired or facilitated the continued development and understanding of the nature of this work are Alessandro Cau (promiscuously collaborating improvising/experimental percussionist and timbre researcher) and Tobia Poltroneri (Veronese singer, songwriter and guitarist for C+C=Maxigross, as well as curator of Lessinia Psych Fest). They will join me at the studio at their leisure to work on what seems interesting.

“Daily, the door will be open for intervention, sonic and otherwise, from the surrounding neighbourhood and what-or-whomever compels itself in our direction.

“There will also be two evening events in the Project Space. In addition to Cau and Poltroneri performing solo, I will perform some works in progress, and more will be announced…

“Perhaps we will manifest a well-tuned collective psychic environment that fosters lateral approach, favors a whim, and provides fertile soil for the tangents that eventually result as (in this case artistic) innovation. Perhaps nothing will happen and we’ll just enjoy the time together. Either way, time will pass.”

At least some of the promised events and activities have solidified now. As stated, throughout the whole residency there’s the opportunity for anyone to drop into the studio space and join the creative process between eleven in the morning and seven at night. At eight in the evening on Wednesday 28th, Miles, Alessandro and Tobia will deliver a triple set of intimate solo performances; and for the whole of Thursday 29th they’ll be exploring Western, African and Cuban forms during an all-day drop-in improvisation session featuring local guest musicians (with the day intended for listening, and the night intended for dancing).

All of this is free to attend. Whether or not you’re booze-bribeable, there’s free beer available to help sustain the atmosphere.

Here’s some additional performance and interview footage of Miles, to add to the understanding.

Tags: Alessandro Cau, Café Oto (promoter/venue), Kammer Klang (event), London (England), Miles Cooper Seaton, Tobia Poltroneri

September/October 2016 – upcoming and ongoing London gigs and music theatre – Laura Moody’s ongoing work in ‘dreamplay’ at The Vaults (plus a solo song show on October 11th); Keir Cooper and Rose Biggin collide pole dancing and noise-guitar in their ‘Badass Grammar’ revival at Camden People’s Theatre (5th & 6th October)

22 Sep

A couple of interesting (and very different) elisions between music and theatre, plus a solo gig…

* * * * * * * *

Currently engaged in providing live cello for Jocelyn Pook‘s score to the current Globe Theatre production of ‘Macbeth’, audaciously accomplished cellist and singer-songwriter Laura Moody (see passim) is also doubling down at Waterloo to perform in BAZ Productions‘ performance piece ‘dreamplay’.

BAZ Productions present:
‘dreamplay’
The Vaults Theatre @ The Vaults, Arch 236 Leake Street, London SE1 7NN, England (use the Launcelot Street entrance off Lower Marsh)
Saturday 10th September 2016 to Saturday 1st October 2016 (Tuesday to Saturday 7.30pm; Saturday matinees 3pm; BSL Performance on Saturday 24th September) – information here

A reworking of and response to August Strindberg’s classic proto-expressionist work of the same name (and scripted by BAZ director Sarah Bedi and the performers), the piece features “a mysterious woman (who) arrives on Earth, intent on uncovering the truth about human suffering. Her dream-like quest leads her through shifting landscapes and into contact with a host of disturbing characters as she searches for the ever elusive Door, behind which she is certain the answer lies … Can she discover the unconscious truth and return home?” (Sadly, ‘dreamplay’ is already halfway through its run – if I’d known about it earlier myself I’d have posted about it sooner…)

Direct from Laura: “I appear as a variety of characters, as part of a wonderful cast of five, performing all the music I’ve created for the show live. I also give my acting debut! I’m really delighted that just a few days into opening my music/soundscape for ‘dreamplay’ has been nominated for an Off West End Theatre Award for best sound design.

“Played out in the tunnels underneath Waterloo Station, ‘dreamplay’ is an immersive, challenging piece that casts you, the audience, as the dreamer and leads you through a labyrinth of scenes, images and situations prompting fundamental questions about humanity. I, for example, finished opening night contemplating how exactly I had managed to acquire quite so many inexplicable bruises on my limbs and HP sauce on my bow. Such are the mysteries that await you, and many more…”

Laura Moody performing in ‘dreamplay’ (photo © Cesare De Giglio)

Once ‘dreamplay’ is finished, Laura will be performing one of her intermittent London solo gigs – an hour-long song set with no support act – at City University..

City University presents:
Laura Moody
Music Department @ City University, Northampton Square, Finsbury, London, EC1V 0HB, England
Tuesday 11th October 2016, 7.00pm -free event requiring ticket reservations – information here

To whet the appetite for this, here are a couple of videos shot back in June at the Dartington Estate during Laura’s gig there, in which she duets with Adem on a version of her song We Are Waiting (and on Adem’s own Love And Other Planets).

* * * * * * *

Earlier in the year, Keir Cooper (who’s previously graced this blog as guitarist and composer for noisy experimental jazz-rockers A Sweet Niche) teamed up with fellow theatremaker and physical performer Rose Biggin to create the performance piece ‘Badass Grammar’, in which Keir’s blistering guitar is paired with Rose’s dynamic pole dancing in an hour-long dialogue of ideas.

Rose and Keir describe ‘Badass Grammar’ as “sexy, smart, witty as houses and obviously featur(ing) big bold dance and electric guitar duets.” A longer description suggests “a theatrical collaboration between a pole dancer and a guitarist, a composition in exploded view. With a mischievous agenda, the performance invites in the mucky subjects of shame, power and privilege. And takes them dancing. Peering down at the nuts and bolts, the muscle and bone. The pole dislocated, the guitar unfretted. Sparkling, witty, savage, fabulous: we draw on the invisible histories of our disciplines and are building a new one. Starting now. Come with us.”

Following its initial performances at The Yard, ‘Badass Grammar’ is being revived for Camden People’s Theatre as part of the annual Calm Down Dear festival of feminist performance.

Calm Down Dear #4 presents:
‘Badass Grammar: A Pole/Guitar Composition in Exploded View’
Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, Euston, London, NW1 2PY, England
Wednesday 5th & Thursday 6th October 2016, 9.00pm – information (presented in a double bill with ‘40 Days Of Rain‘ on the 5th)

Below, there’s a brief and tintinnabulating minute-and-a-half-long excerpt from Keir’s score – spilling, mercurially elusive guitar-noise shapes passing through hard rock distortion and riffing, and refracted as if glancing off the chromed mirrors of the pole podium. Some of the music from this and other theatre work should eventually surface on his proposed ‘Bodies‘ album, which will incorporate Keir’s guitar-and-effects-pedal contributions to collaborations with assorted artists across a variety of live dance and performance disciplines (including “strip punk” and flamenco).

In an expositionary piece written for Bellyflop Magazine back in May (and which you can read in full here) Rose and Kier present and explore some of the implications of their show; not ducking around the “massive inflatable grey elephant that comes tied to every pole” in the form’s inescapable ties to sex work, but raising other questions in response, including “are women to be judged harder if you don’t like their job?… What if I’m actually one of many feminists on the pole? Does that mean I can be listened to yet? Or still spoken for?”

As they state, “we’re making a show. It’s pole dance, which is sometimes sexy, and came from strip clubs. It’s also live electric guitar, which is often a lot of willy-waggling. It’s a show about shame, power and privilege. Let’s see what happens.

“Pole is a very visible arena for tensions around women’s bodies, women’s work, shame, power and privilege. Far from a casual choice – it is impossible not to be political when near this object… When we discuss our performance with folks, somebody will ask if Keir is pole dancing and Rose is playing the guitar. Sometimes this is asked as a joke – when it’s a joke, it’s always asked by a man. But sometimes it’s a genuine artistic question, and as such it’s a valid one.

“The short answer is no, because artistically, we’ve decided it would be pretty boring to watch people doing something they’re terrible at. (For an hour.) But the longer answer is no, because we think it is more interesting to utilise the forms from where we are and examine how it came to be that we got here. And what we will do now…”

I’ll just pinch from one more source to add a bit of extra colour. Here’s Rose’s irreverent, practical list from her ‘Badass Grammar’ article in ‘Standard Issue’ magazine, detailing what she’s learnt from the form…

…and not forgetting…

Tags: Adem, cello music, electric guitar music, Jocelyn Pook, Keir Cooper, Laura Moody, listening to women, London (England), pole dance, Rose Biggin, women of heart and mind

September 2016 – upcoming gigs, Aldershot and London – Knifeworld’s “prog all-dayer” with William D. Drake, Prescott, Eschar, Barringtone and others; Laura J. Martin, Oly Ralfe and Duotone at Daylight Music; Muscle and Marrow, Father Murphy and Tolerance Manoeuvre at New River Studios (all 24th)

20 Sep

A nicely-filled Saturday coming up…

* * * * * * * *

Knifeworld + William D. Drake + Prescott + Eschar + Barringtone + others tbc
West End Centre, Queens Road, Aldershot, GU11 3JD, England
Saturday 24th September 2016, 2.00pm – information

Fresh off his solo show in Glasgow on Thursday (and the band’s appearance at ArcTangent in August), Kavus Torabi leads his Knifeworld octet over to Aldershot, curating and headlining what the venue’s calling a “prog all-dayer”. In a pleasing echo of Kavus’ Roastfest mini-festival from a few years ago (with which this particular show shares a few acts and sensibilities), the remit actually stretches out a good deal further than that. I’m not sure whether this is slightly sloppy marketing on the part of the West End Centre, or whether it’s a further sign that prog’s finally slipped out of its straitjacketing… at any rate, the day also features revitalized elements of latterday psychedelic rock, motorik pop, alt.jazz fusion and art punk cheek and coffee house tunes (old Regency coffee houses from a couple of centuries ago, that is; not latterday beard-and-espresso joints) as well as record stalls and “questionable company.”

It seems almost redundant summing Knifeworld up here, since I’ve covered them so often in previous posts; and more so in that their dazzling, goofy-but-serious voyages of complex guitar, voice and brass interplay are making increasing inroads into a bigger potential audience. The same goes for the second act on the bill, William D. Drake, who continues to carve out a subgenre of his own. There’s not yet a word for music which combines acoustic psychedelia and friendly, frowsty pop with echoes of Georgian parlours, sixteenth-century catches and never-were folk tunes. I keep trying to think of one that doesn’t sound twee, rather than encompassing the beaming English warmth which Bill’s music embodies. While I continue to fail to do that, here are a couple more of his tunes from recent live shows – one jaunty bounce, one unrolling magic-carpet reverie.

Prescott aren’t strangers to this blog either – a hiccuping, percolating instrumental team of four smart, oblique talents who’ve all been round the block more than a few times (lending their individual skills to a bagful of other artists and bands including Pere Ubu, Stump, Snorkel, Scritti Politti, The Keatons and Frank Sidebottom). Kev Hopper, Rhodri Marsden, Frank Byng and Keith Moliné are all far too grounded to do anything other than laugh off the idea of being a supergroup, yet they do form something considerably more powerful when they come together: rubbery, convoluted groove-rock improvisations which come across as part particle accelerator, part mutant squash court, and part horse-laugh. From another angle, they’re a post-punk upending of 1980s jazz-fusion powered by a wry/awry sensibility, creating something pretty serious out of a very English irreverence and inquisitiveness. They’re what you’d expect to get if those smart skeptical bastards raising eyebrows at the backs of every other arty gig were challenged to get together and do better, and actually did.

New to both ‘Misfit City’ and to general Knifeworld entanglements are Woking instrumental rockers Eschar, who play an exuberantly tuneful and metallic take on psychedelic post-rock. Filtering sunny melodies and joyous little tempo curlicues through a jackhammering heavy attack, they sound like a grinning, breakdancing road-mender. A little more familiar is Barringtone, sequel to briefly-glowing mid-Noughties electro/oddpop stars Clor. Pumping out a motoric yet shapeshifting art-pop somewhere between Neu! and XTC (and compared, in their peripatetic shifting of tone, structure and subject matter to Todd Rundgren’s Utopia), they’ve been at it for eight years now but are yet to drop a full album. Instead they’ve fired off an intermittent series of quick releases on a succession of labels, popping briefly in and out of view like a stealth submarine to flash a bit of technique and invention before slipping under again.

More bands are being added to this bill in a last-week squeak of hope and enthusiasm. I’ve no idea of who these are likely to be (keep checking on the Facebook event page for periodic news shouts) but it’s reasonable to expect that a complicated ArcTangent ethos/Torabi-esque “funny music” atmosphere is going to prevail.

If the above doesn’t do it for you, you could stay in London for another free/donation-only folk-and-songwriter-filled noontime gig by Daylight Music, plus an evening gig from Chaos Theory which addresses the more expansive and heterogenous side of post-rock. As usual, both have provided their own press releases, so I’ll use those (only working in extra information where it might be necessary…)

* * * * * * * *

Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 233: Laura J Martin + Oly Ralfe + Duotone
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 24th September 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

“Liverpudlian singer-songwriter Laura J. Martin is a “musician of startling originality”, according to The Sunday Times. Her extraordinary, eclectic music speaks of disconnection and England’s blandification: some of the tracks on her third studio album, ‘On The Never Never’, tell of her feelings when returning home to Liverpool to find that all of the town’s individuality seemed to have been erased and replaced by gleaming empty flats.

“Shot through with wit and humour alongside the sociopolitical themes (one of the characters talks of bleaching toilets and taking trips to Lanzarote) ‘On The Never Never’ skips through waltz timings, bears influences from Scott Walker to the Compass Point Allstars and picks up a guest vocal from Benjamin Zephaniah along the way. The album itself was recorded in Nashville with renowned Lambchop/Bonnie Prince Billy producer Mark Nevers and features members of Lambchop, Silver Jews and The Jesus Lizard. Laura has produced a hopeful record, full of joy, beauty and tongue-in-cheek looks at those in charge.

“Duotone is the alias of songwriter Barney Morse-Brown, cellist with multi-platinum artist Birdy, Chris Wood, Eliza Carthy, Jackie Oates and BBC Folk Award winners the Imagined Village, His mesmerising solo performances move seamlessly between riotous energy and heartfelt intimacy: his debut album ‘Work Harder & One Day You’ll Find Her’ and the critically acclaimed second LP ‘Ropes’ saw him navigating his way through a personal loss.

“Barney’s new album ‘Let’s Get Low’, is an intelligent and thoroughly modern record, infused with the melodic structures of ’80s pop and the emotional honesty of the best of the classic singer-songwriter era; a remarkably optimistic collection of songs, it presents a new perspective on his experiences and explores the meaning of home and his sense of place. Written at home on his narrowboat over a period of two years, it further reveals a songwriter who is unafraid to explore real-life experiences that are often hidden from view.

“This is a particularly special Daylight Music as it features the London premiere of Oly Ralfe’s new instrumental piano project, accompanied by Barney on cello. A musician, artists and filmmaker, Oly made significant contributions to the work of The Mighty Boosh both onscreen and in print (including songs, poem cameos and direction) as well as creating the Dylanologist documentary ‘The Ballad Of AJ Weberman’.

“For a decade or so, he’s led his own pop-folk ensemble The Ralfe Band, whose three albums and soundtrack for the film ‘Bunny & The Bull’ have been variously described as “moon-eyed beauty”, “regally drunk” and “alternately sweetly hushed, spooky and sad.” Mark Radcliffe of BBC 6 Music has been a long-time champion of Oly’s music, saying “there is something of the strange and beautiful in everything he does, like the mood created by the darkest of fairy tales. I’m a big fan…””.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL4oVZeg4Rg

* * * * * * * *

Chaos Theory Promotions presents:
Father Murphy + Muscle And Marrow + Tolerance Manoeuvre
New River Studios, Ground Floor Unit E, 199 Eade Road, Manor House, London, N4 1DN, England
Saturday 24th September 2016, 7.30pm – information here and here

“A special event at the amazing artist community venue that is New River Studios in north London, in which two wildly exciting duos from dark experimental label The Flenser will join us from the USA and Italy to present us with their latest terrifying works. This will be a stimulating experience.

“After Father Murphy captivated us with their EP ‘Pain Is On Our Side Now’ (and terrified us all at the launch of their phenomenal and stimulating album ‘Croce’ last year), the hairs are already standing up on the backs of our necks in anticipation of working with the Stephen O’Malley, Jarboe and Michael Gira-endorsed visionaries once more.

One of the most mysterious and enigmatic musical entities to come out of Italy in recent years, Father Murphy are known for their collection of dark psychedelic/industrial cabaret, written as a response to living in a deeply Catholic environment. Merging shadowy, muddy and murky atmospheres with unexpected blurts of impossibly catchy noise pop, their sound is both textural and nuanced but also noisy and chaotic. Identified by Simon Reynolds and Julian Cope as part of the “new Italian Occult psychedelia”, Father Murphy are the sound of the Catholic sense of guilt – a downward spiral aiming at the bottom of the hollow, and then digging even deeper.

“Muscle And Marrow – a duo from Portland, Oregon – write music that is intense and vaporous. Formed in 2013 by Kira Clark (voice, guitar) and Keith McGraw (drums, sounds), Muscle And Marrow quickly discovered their distinctive sound. Taking inspiration from visual and feminist art, as well as contemporary poetry and literature, they are an entity that is as thoughtful as it is fervent and as experimental as it is immediate.

“In April 2016 the band released their new album ‘Love’: a more powerful record than their previous release, with elements of joy, strength and anger present. During the album’s writing process Kira lost a family member, and much of the lyrical content focuses on loss, but also on love in general: how to love better, more and at all, and what happens when someone else loves you — the trap of that love but also the freedom it affords. Additionally, ‘Love’ touches on feminism and female archetypes, a topic that Kira is very interested in. These new songs are just as beautiful and complex as those on the band’s debut, but on ‘Love’, Muscle And Marrow push their craft further, bringing them to the frontier of avant-garde dark music.

“Having heard murmurings about Tolerance Manoeuvre for some time, we stood up and paid attention when they performed a brilliant live set on deXter Bentley’s Hello Goodbye Show on Resonance 104.4fm. With a unique combination of guitar, cello, trumpet and vocals, Tolerance Manoeuvre furrow a particularly British seam of post-rock previously mapped by the likes of Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis, but with their own, highly-personalised take. Managing to fuse stark yet luscious melody with ornate orchestration, the trio meticulously unfold and reconfigure space and structure to create a beguiling tapestry that is simultaneously dense and delicate.

“A mainstay on the London underground music scene since 2011, Tolerance Manoeuvre have played at venues as diverse as The Hundred Years Gallery, the Servant Jazz Quarters and the Macbeth, have appeared on MTV Greece, have shared the stage with acts such as The Wytches, Seward, Cara Sebastian, O-Arc and Fear Of The Forest, and have a vinyl LP available at all good record shops courtesy of Flashback Records.”

Tags: Aldershot, Arctic Circle (promoter), Barringtone, Chaos Theory (event/promoter), Clor, Daylight Music (event), Duotone, Eschar, Father Murphy, Frank Byng, Kavus Torabi, Keith Moliné, Kev Hopper, Knifeworld, Laura J. Martin, London (England), Muscle and Marrow, Oly Ralfe, Prescott, Rhodri Marsden, Stump, Tolerance Manoeuvre, William D. Drake

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Categories 2016, alternative rock, art pop, art rock, classical fusion, experimental/avant-garde rock, jazz fusion, jazz rock, post-progressive rock, post-rock, progressive rock, psychedelic folk, psychedelic rock, rock, singer-songwriter

September 2016 – upcoming London classical gigs – BBC Singers perform Jonathan Harvey tribute, also featuring music by Benjamin Britten and a Wim Henderickx premiere (23rd)

18 Sep

A quick reminder/primer for this week’s London concert paying tribute to the late British composer Jonathan Harvey and concentrating on his love for a cappella choral music:

* * * * * * * * *

BBC Singers: ‘Other Presences: The Music of Jonathan Harvey’
LSO St Luke’s, 161 Old Street, St Luke’s, London, EC1V 9NG, England
Friday 23rd September 2016, 7.30pm – information here and here

“Haunting, spiritual, ecstatic: Jonathan Harvey’s music blurs the boundaries between east and west, body and soul. Its lucid, bell-like resonances and pioneering use of electronics will take you on a journey into new and transformative worlds.

“’Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco’ is an electro-acoustic masterpiece. Spinning sonorities ring out as it blends sound samples of a cathedral bell and the voice of a chorister. The looped, harmonised trumpet parts in ‘Other Presences’ weave sounds that echo the music of Tibetan Buddhist purification rituals. ‘Forms Of Emptiness’ sets the vivid flashes of joy in poetry by e.e cummings against a Buddhist Sanskrit chant, creating moments that feel transient and scarcely real.

“Experience Harvey’s compelling music alongside Britten’s virtuosic cantata ‘A.M.D.G.’ and a new work by Wim Henderickx, whose music reflects his fascination for eastern sound-worlds and philosophies.”

Performers:

BBC Singers – choir
Martyn Brabbins – conductor
Marco Blaauw – trumpet
Sound Intermedia – electronics

Programme:

Benjamin Britten – ‘A.M.D.G. Op.17’ (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam)
Jonathan Harvey – ‘Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco’
Jonathan Harvey – ‘I Love The Lord’
Jonathan Harvey – ‘The Annunication’
Jonathan Harvey – ‘Other Presences’
Wim Henderickx – ‘Blossomings’ (world premiere)
Jonathan Harvey – ‘Forms Of Emptiness’
Jonathan Harvey – ‘How Could The Soul Not Take Flight’

There’s more on the Wim Henderickx piece in a post penned by the composer himself at ‘Classical Diary’. In it, Wim discusses the interest in Buddhism and spirituality which he shared with Jonathan Harvey, and which led to his composing ‘Blossomings’ as both a salute to Harvey and a triptych setting of texts from different and parallel religious traditions, starting with eighteenth century Tibetan Buddhism (‘From the blossoming lotus’ by Jigme Lingpa), twelfth century Christianity (Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘Holy Spirit’) and 13th century Islam (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī’s poem ‘O love’ (text by Rumi). As well as going deeper into the significance of the chosen texts, Wim also comments on the musical structure of the piece, with its inspirations of Tibetan open-air ceremonial music, its use of mixed choir performing multiple functions, the double bell trumpet employed by the soloist as commenter and introducer, and the way in which optional electronics “create a sonorous background of the harmonic material sung by the choir (and) give the work a spatial effect.”

Meanwhile, here are versions of some of the other material on the concert programme, drawn from a variety of sources:

Tags: BBC Singers, Benjamin Britten, double bell trumpet (instrument), E.E. Cummings, Hildegard of Bingen, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, Jigme Lingpa, Jonathan Harvey, LSO St Luke's (venue) - St Luke's - London, Marco Blaauw, Martyn Brabbins, premieres, Sound Intermedia, Wim Henderickx

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, a capella, acoustic music, chamber music, choral music, classical (Western art music), cross-cultural music, electro-acoustic music, previews

September/October 2016 – film time – Dutch Uncles’ Robin Richards performs live score for ‘Birdsong: Stories From Pripyat ‘ in Manchester, Stockport and Salford (30th September, 6th-7th October); Scalarama Glasgow screens Cardiacs’ ‘Maresnest’ concert movie with live solo show from Kavus Torabi (22nd September)

17 Sep

Still from ‘Birdsong’ (Pripyat Palace of Culture)

In a couple of weeks’ time, Robin Richards (bass guitarist and driving force in Stockport art-poppers Dutch Uncles, and cross-disciplinary composer on the not-so-quiet) unveils the latest in his growing series of film collaborations, via three screenings and live score performances in the Manchester area.

“An amusement park in the Ukrainian city of Pripyat was due to be opened on the 1st May 1986, but the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred just a few miles away on 26th April. The park’s owners opened the park for a couple of hours the following day for the people of Pripyat before the city was evacuated. Eerie images of the deserted Pripyat Amusement Park now permeate the visual representation of the city’s desolation.

“Robin Richards: “Since hearing about the trips young evacuees from Pripyat and neighbouring towns made to my hometown Stockport as part of charity programmes over the last twenty-five years, and reading personal accounts of those affected by the catastrophic nuclear disaster I have wanted to create an art piece depicting the stories, whilst also addressing environmental and scientific dimensions. I am fascinated by the gestural vocabulary of film and its relationship to the formal properties of musical composition. I want to push beyond the notion that music should always be in service to visual narrative, and explore the possibilities of music’s power to create and transform meaning.”

Still from ‘Birdsong’ (Pripyat ferris wheel)
“The resulting piece, comprising a forty-minute original film and live score with chamber ensemble will be performed at related venues in North West England in late 2016, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the disaster. A screening of the film with recorded score is programmed as part of an exhibition in Kiev in late October 2016.

“Combining the immediacy and energy of live musical performance with the visual impact of film, ‘Birdsong: Stories from Pripyat‘ aims to revisit a dramatic and devastating historical event using personal and scientific narratives to draw out the tensions and truths at play in our collective, cultural memories of this unfathomable event. This cross-artform project brings together original contemporary classical composition with film to explore an historic event through storytelling, montage and archival footage.

Robin Richards’ forty-minute score incorporates first-hand testimonies of evacuees and liquidators from Ukraine and Belarus, while Clara Casian’s filmmaking process is underpinned by nuclear research, and incorporates found and archival footage with original material filmed on location in Ukraine. The pair made a four-day research trip to the Chernobyl exclusion zone in May 2016 to meet with local artists, filmmakers and historians, collect original footage and archival material. The narrative arc of the film follows the journey of people with first-hand experience of the disaster, as personal records and testimonies are interwoven with original material. Music enters into a continuous dialogue with film as part of a nuanced artistic process, designed to evoke the experiences of people from Pripyat and their recollections of the evacuation and the cleaning process following the 1986 disaster.”

The piece will premiere as the highlight of HOME’s Artist Film Weekender in Manchester, followed by a second performance in Stockport’s historic art deco cinema The Plaza and a third at the University of Salford. Dates below:

HOME Cinema, The Great Northern Warehouse, 235-253 Deansgate, Manchester M3 4EN, Friday 30th September 2016, 8.30pm – information
Stockport Plaza, Mersey Square, Stockport SK1 1SP, Thursday 6th October 2016, 7.00pm – information
Peel Hall, Peel Building @ University of Salford, 43 Crescent, Salford, M5 4WT, England, Friday 7th October 2016, 7.00pm – information

Each night also features another showing, performance or event.

The University of Salford performance will also feature a question and answer session with Robin and Clara (also billed as a music-and-film masterclass with Robin, who’s an alumnus of the University’s Music course, having graduated in 2011 with a first-class honours degree, the Elgar Howarth Composition Shield and the Award for Innovative Audience Engagement).

The Manchester performance will be preceded by the showing of another Robin Richards-scored film, ‘Wizard’. Directed by Nick Middleton, this is “a short film about magic and madness”, which premiered earlier in the month at The Smalls film festival in Shoreditch, London.

The Stockport performance will be accompanied by ‘Celluloid History Songs’, by Anglo-African Mancunian singer-songwriter Josephine Oniyama: a “spellbinding… live multimedia performance against a backdrop of historical footage drawn from the North West Film Archive held at Manchester Metropolitan University, and edited by filmmaker Kim May of Asta Films. The specially-commissioned songs were influenced by scenes of Northerners at leisure, taken from the archive’s many inspiring images of industrial working-class people, young and old, discovering ways to spend their new leisure time.” This work was previously performed at HOME’s 2015 launch event, in tandem with Robin’s own previous soundtrack engagement (a new score for Pal Fejos’s 1928 silent New York romance ‘Lonesome’).

Update, 22nd September 2016 – Robin has just shared a recording of one of the ‘Birdsong’ soundtrack pieces. As he describes it, it’s “inspired by the liquidators working on the Chernobyl nuclear plant after the disaster. The liquidators were civil and military personnel called upon by the Soviet Union in to clean, burn and bury contaminated areas and materials around the power plant. The first part of this section is based on archival footage of the liquidators cleaning and digging in 1986, with the rhythmic jostling of the strings representing the movement of the workers, and the deep synthesisers representing the overriding radiation. The second part is inspired by the testimonies of four liquidators we interviewed in Borispol during our trip to Ukraine in May this year; their memories of the clean up and the years that followed the disaster.”

* * * * * * * *

Scalarama screening of ‘Maresnest’ (poster stencil image by Abe Peachment)
A little earlier in the month – as part of September’s ongoing Scalarama film festival – there’ll be a public showing of the Cardiacs’ concert film ‘Maresnest’ in Glasgow.

Organisers Luminous Monsters call ‘Maresnest’ “the greatest concert movie ever made! Recorded one glorious afternoon at the Salisbury Arts Centre in 1990, ‘Maresnest’ captures all of the manic intensity and joyous delirium of one of the UK’s, nay, the world’s finest bands. Theres nothing quite like Cardiacs at full force. ‘Maresnest’ takes Cardiacs kaleidoscope-prog and ultra-pop impossibility and gives it a fiery hoof up the colon. From the bruising, nigh-industrial intro through the perilous frenzy of To Go Off And Things to the sustained climax of unlikely minor hit Is This The Life?, this is delirious, potent stuff, the sound of wild ideas obsessively woven from flesh and wire and moments.”

While this isn’t exactly a once-in-a-lifetime showing – the film was disinterred from VHS purgatory to be reissued and released on DVD three years ago – there are three extra selling points. The first is that the event is another of those fundraisers for the much-needed medical rehabilitation of Cardiacs’s life-mauled Tim Smith (see plenty of past ‘Misfit City’ posts for more on this particular story). Another is that the event also features a solo set from the band’s onetime guitarist Kavus Torabi (these days better known for Knifeworld, for exuberant radio hosting and for an ongoing role as the post-Daevid Allen frontman for Gong), who’ll be performing “songs of extreme loveliness and brilliance.”

The last is that Luminous Monsters are quite right about the value of ‘Maresnest’. It’s one of the great rock concert films, comfortably up on the same level with the likes of ‘Stop Making Sense’, ‘Tourfilm’, ‘The Last Waltz’ and ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’. Capturing the band live in 1989 – then, as ever, inhabiting a murky cult status which could nonetheless draw thousand-strong crowds – it also caught them at a particularly turbulent time. The one-off seven-piece version of their close and familial lineup, as featured in the film, featured a guesting recent departee plus a new recruit and a pair of longstanding mainstays who’d both soon be gone from the band. Cardiacs shows were already volcanically energetic events, laced with disturbing performance-art overtones in which the band played at being frightened, stubborn children at odds with the perplexing and fascinating world around them. The fact that the aforementioned recent departee was Tim’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Sarah, and that the show was teetering on the edge of disaster due to equipment breakdowns and raw nerves, added an extra frisson of tension and imminent madness to this particular concert.

Fortunately, the band rose both to and above the occasion – pulling a powerful, massing set out of this chaotic fuel, and it was all caught on tape. Though ‘Maresnest’ is laced with and interrupted by additional faux-found footage from backstage (in which, in nightmarish glimpses, the band continue to act out disturbing dysfunctional and childlike personae; like ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ being wrenched out of shape by David Lynch) it’s ultimately about the music – which is ecstatic, churning, and strangely shamanic, tapping into a distorted British sub-mythology of old war films, children’s television and everyday ritual, and whipping it up into an ambiguous apotheosis for a delighted crowd.

Luminous Monsters present:
Scalarama 2016: ‘Cardiacs – All That Glitters is A Maresnest’ + Kavus Torabi (live set)
The Old Hairdressers, 23 Renfield Lane, Glasgow, G2 6PH, Scotland
Thursday 22nd September 2016, 7:30pm – information here, here and here

It’s been a good month for Cardiacs-related news: more of that coming along shortly. Meanwhile, for more info on Scalarama’s ongoing events around the UK (and at the festival’s outpost in Spain), click here.

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Tags: Cardiacs, Clara Casian (filmmaker & visual artists), Dutch Uncles, Glasgow (Scotland), Josephine Oniyama, Kavus Torabi, Kim May (filmmaker), Manchester (England), multimedia, Nick Middleton (filmmaker), Robin Richards, Salford (England), Scalarama (event), Stockport (England)

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Categories 2016, alternative rock, art punk, art rock, chamber music, classical fusion, crossover, documentaries, experimental/avant-garde rock, films, instrumental music, orchestral music, post-progressive rock, previews, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, rock, sound collage, storytelling

September 2016 – upcoming gigs – multimedia Messiaen in Sheffield with ‘Sounds of the Birds’ (21st)
16 Sep

Following yesterday’s post regarding imminent piano concerts in London, here’s news about one in Sheffield. Part of Sheffield University’s ongoing Festival of the Mind this month (and part of the university’s Sound Laboratory series), it’s a free show blending one of the twentieth century’s major piano works with new visual content and scientific context. Not an offer you get every day…

* * * * * * * *

“Birdsong is something that most of us hear every day, but how much notice do we really take? As part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind, the language of birds will be translated for solo piano in a unique, immersive and multi-sensory two-hour performance providing a mesmerising meditation on music, nature and landscape.

“Our adventure through science, music, nature and imagination is led by Tim Birkhead (ornithologist and Professor of Behavioural Ecology at the University of Sheffield), with pianist Noah Kang performing Olivier Messiaen’s monumental masterpiece ‘Catalogue d’Oiseaux’, which reproduces the songs of seventy-seven different birds (from the brightly insistent call of the skylark to the menacing tones of the tawny owl). The performance will capture the magic of birdsong, whilst immersing the audience in bold new visuals (inspired by Tim’s research and realised by Sheffield-based design team Human) which follow the music’s original task of vividly capturing the birds’ interactions with a series of stunning French landscapes.

“The concert itself starts at 7.30pm, with Professor Peter Hill providing a pre-concert talk about Messiaen and birds at 6.10pm.”

Festival of the Mind presents:
Tim Birkhead/Noah Kang/Human: ‘Sound Laboratory: Sounds of the Birds’
Firth Hall @ University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield, S10 2TN, England
Wednesday 21st September 2016, 6.10 pm – free event (but requires pre-booking) – information

On the offchance that you weren’t already aware of this, Peter Hill is himself a celebrated interpreter of Messiaen’s piano works. Here’s part of his own version of the ‘Catalogue’.

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Tags: Festival of the Mind (event), multimedia, Noah Kang, Olivier Messiaen, Peter Hill, piano music, Sheffield (England), Sound Laboratory (event), Tim Birkhead (ornithologist), Yvonne Loriod

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, classical (Western art music), festivals, instrumental music, performance art, previews

September 2016 – upcoming London classical and classical fusion gigs – Kimiko Ishizaka’s completion of Bach’s Art of Fugue at St Johns Smith Square (23rd); Ayako Fujiki launches ‘brightwater’ at the 1901 Arts Club and St Olave’s Hart Street (28th & 29th)
15 Sep

Here’s a quick scoot around a pair of London classical gigs coming up this month from two very different Japanese pianists – one specialising in pure yet innovative interpretations of baroque masterpieces, the other using romantic keyboard works as a springboard towards her own neo-romantic classical-fusion compositions.

Once again, most of what I’ve got here is press-release turnover…

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Kimiko Ishizaka (photo © Philippe Ramaker)

Kimiko Ishizaka: ‘J.S. Bach: ‘Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080′. Completed.’
St John’s Smith Square, Smith Square, Westminster, London, SW1P 3HA, England
Friday 23rd September 2016, 6.30pm – information

“A mesmerizing completion of one of the most challenging
keyboard works of all times. Confronting the ultimate tragedy of music history, German-Japanese pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, (renowned for her highly-praised, best-selling recordings of Bach), presents her completion of Bach’s unfinished masterpiece, ‘Die Kunst der Fuge’, BWV 1080.

“Upholding the musical logic of Bach, yet offering an expressive response, Kimiko’s approach was based on a thorough study of all preceding fugues, coupled with a conviction that Bach would have concluded with something powerful, dramatic, expressive and architecturally true to the existing musical structures. Premiered in March 2016 in Cologne, Germany, ‘Die Kunst der Fuge, komplett’ comes to the UK for the first time this September.

“Kimiko’s sound production is strongly influenced by her success as a competitive athlete and her exploration of the physical mechanisms that are responsible for creating any given sound on the piano. Never listening to other pianists’ recordings, Kimiko takes inspiration purely from her own imagination. Her history also involves recording Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ in 2012 as part of her Open Goldberg project – this was the first recording to be fan-funded, open source and completely free. Her 2015 release of ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’, also fan-funded, was a number-one best-selling commercial success and is regarded by some critics as their favorite recording of the work.”

* * * * * * * *

If you’d prefer something lighter, then there’s always the option of seeing Ayako Fujiki in a couple of shows right at the end of the month. There’s a clip of her below, in concert, performing one of her more fusion-based projects – admittedly, the New Age minimalism might not be everyone’s cup of tea (and yes, I do mean you, occasional reader who drops in sometimes because I also cover noise-rockers playing in various throat-cellars). But I’ve got to admit that I like the way Ayako simultaneously handles a concert grand, a cherry-red workstation and a backslung white keytar, all whilst resisting the urge to throw a set of glammy Rick Wakeman shapes.

Ayako’s upcoming London concerts showcase a more acoustic, neoclassical side to her music. While it might be touched and partially shaped – like much crossover work – by its composer’s work in advertising and incidental soundtracking (the associated video has the air of a fashion-shoot, with Ayako making much of both her personal beauty and her sense of poise and presentation), the music retains its own airy substance. In some respects, it’s similar to the neo-romantic Chopin-esque compositions which made David Lanz a New Age star in the 1980s (even as he steered well clear of that genre’s more insipid failings). More details on Ayako’s work and inspirations follow:

“A virtuosic Japanese pianist born in Tokyo, and a concert performer from the age of seven, Ayako Fujiki was influenced by the riches of European culture and fell in love with the energy and diversity of Spanish classical music. She chose to move to the vibrant and eclectic city of Barcelona to study under renowned pianists such as Alicia de Larrocha (one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, and also the first Spanish artist to win the UNESCO prize).

“Still based in Barcelona, Ayako continues to explore the duality between Japanese and Mediterranean heritage and culture. Combining her rigorous classical background with contemporary taste and technique, Ayako finds inspiration in romantic, world, minimal, electronic and even Japanese contemporary epic music.

“Having established herself as a leading classical concert performer on the Spanish music scene, and having released three albums interpreting work by other composers from Schubert to Debussy to Granados), Ayako’s current release ‘brightwater’ allows her to engage on a more personal creative level through the development of her own compositions. She has previously composed orchestrated pieces with piano and a variety of other instruments for films, advertising and documentaries, incorporating classical and electronic musical techniques.

“‘brightwater’ comprises pieces written for solo piano, two pianos and piano trio. It was recorded in Barcelona with contributions from Cristian Chivu (violinist and concertmaster of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona y Nacional de Cataluña) and Cristoforo Pestalozzi (lead cellist in the Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu). The album propels the listener through a unique combination of cultures.

“Contributing to the established chronicle of musicians and composers taking inspiration from nature, the album offers Ayako’s reflections on the transience of landscapes, forests, rippling water and broken stones: capturing the beauty of eroded nature, she translates the slow but persistent effect of the natural elements on rocks and trees.”

The two London dates are as follows:

1901 Arts Club, 7 Exton Street, Waterloo, London, SE1 8UE, England, Wednesday 28th September 2016, 5.00pm (album launch event) – information

St. Olave Hart Street, St Olave’s Hart Street, 8 Hart Street, City of London, London, EC3R 7NB, England, Thursday 29th September 2016, 1:05pm – information

* * * * * * * *

Incidentally, and returning to the subject of keytars – if anyone’s interested in the idea of an eighteenth-century version, there’s one being played here…

https://youtu.be/E9kNXqggQbs

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Tags: Ayako Fujiki, Barcelona, Cristian Chivu, Cristoforo Pestalozzi, David Lanz, Johann Sebastian Bach, keytar, Kimiko Ishizaka, London (England), orphica, Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona y Nacional de Cataluña, piano music, Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Tokyo (Japan)

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, acoustic music, ambient music, Baroque music, chamber music, chillout, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, cross-cultural music, crossover, easy listening, electro-acoustic music, instrumental music, minimalism, previews, Romantic music

September 2016 – upcoming gigs – Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Andrew Heath and Christopher Chaplin in Stroud (15th); Daylight Music returns to London with Michele Stodart, Alright Gandhi, Alev Lenz and Joli Blon (17th)
1 Sep

Towards the middle of the month, there are opportunities to see a German kosmische pioneer playing up in the quiets of Gloucestershire, and to catch the return of Daylight Music semi-acoustica to London. Read on…

* * * * * * * *

Stroud Valleys Artspace/Resound presents
Hans-Joachim Roedelius + Andrew Heath + Christopher Chaplin
The Brunel Goods Shed, Station Approach, Stroud, GL5 3AP
Thursday 15th September 2016, 8.00pm – information here and here

“Resound presents a fantastic opportunity to see a true pioneer. Hans-Joachim Roedelius – the Godfather of Ambient – is a pioneer in the field of the exploitation of electrically generated tones, sounds and noises. One of the founders of contemporary popular electronic music, he was a key player at the birth of kosmische, Krautrock, synthpop and ambient music. Onetime collaborator Brian Eno describes him as “one of the true originals of modern music. His delicate and wistful compositions seem to come from some long and secret musical tradition – like the meditations of Sufi poets, or the haikus of Zen monks.”

Hans-Joachim Roedelius
Roedelius’ collaborations with Eno, Dieter Moebius, Michael Rother and many others (in groups such as Cluster, Harmonia, Geräusche and PlusMinus) are at least the equal of the more well-known innovations of German cohorts Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Can. His forty-plus solo albums are just as radical in seeking an unlikely reconciliation with the past – cross-wiring Krautrock’s brutalist modernism with an earlier strain of Teutonic enquiry, melding weird improvised electronica with folk, jazz and classical sounds to often stunning effect.

Roedelius has also worked as nurse, physiotherapist, masseur, escort of the dying, writer, poet, photo-collage-artist, producer and curator.”

Playing at Stroud’s Goods Shed for the second time (the first was in 2012), Roedelius will be joined by two of his latterday collaborators.

Andrew Heath initially came to attention as half of the ’90s ambient keyboard duo Aqueous (who recorded 1997’s ‘Meeting The Magus‘ with Roedelius) in which he was the digitally-inclined partner of quixotic analogue player Felix Jay. Following Felix’s retirement, Andrew has continued various aspects of the Aqueous project in both visual and musical forms, seeking to “introduce both the listener and the viewer, to a sonic and visual hinterland… a dreamlike state that lies somewhere between sleeping and waking.”

Christopher Chaplin spent most of his early career as an actor (in keeping with his family heritage – he’s one of the sons of Charlie Chaplin). However, his personal artistic roots are as a pianist – having studied, as a young man, under Irène Dénéréaz in Vevey. In 2005, Christopher reorientated towards work as a composer and musician, working variously on theatre music and orchestral string pieces, but also with Viennese electronic musician Kava. In 2011, he was personally chosen by Roedelius to record and remix one of the latter’s live piano sets: the results led to further collaborations including the ‘King Of Hearts’ album in 2012 and further concerts played around the world. In October 2016, he releases his solo album debut, ‘Je suis le Ténébreux’.

* * * * * * * *

A couple of days later, in London, ‘Misfit City’ favourite Daylight Music starts up its autumn season of pop, acoustica, classical crossover and electrophonic treats, all packaged up for the Saturday lunchtime crowd.

Arctic Circle presents:
Daylight Music 232: Michele Stodart + Alright Gandhi + Alev Lenz + Joli Blon
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 17th September 2016, 12.00pm – free event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

What they’ve told us, so far, about the lineup…

“Michele Stodart has taken temporary leave of The Magic Numbers to release her second solo album. Brushed with country and blues, her beautiful, intimate music will hold you close while breaking your heart.

“Alright Gandhi came together in 2014, meeting and meshing during chaotic underground jam sessions in Berlin; rather than making experimental music, they claim they’re making music that likes to experiment.

“Alev Lenz is a remarkable songwriter, composer and singer, whose music fuses filmic, world and classical influences. Her bittersweet voice and utterly personal lyrics combine with inspiring hooks that take you by surprise.

“Joli Blon are a British Cajun band, who’ll have you tapping your toes with traditional Louisiana dance tunes.”

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Tags: Alev Lenz, Alright Gandhi, Andrew Heath, Aqueous, Arctic Circle (promoter), Berlin (Germany), Christopher Chaplin, Cluster, Daylight Music (event), Geräusche, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Harmonia, Joli Blon, Kluster, London (England), Michele Stodart, PlusMinus, Stroud (England), The Magic Numbers

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, acoustic pop, ambient music, Cajun folk music, chillout, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, electro-acoustic music, electronic, electronica, instrumental music, kosmische & Krautrock, minimalism, pop, previews, psychedelic ambient music, rock, singer-songwriter

September 2016 – sounds over water – a preview of Claudia Molitor’s ‘The Singing Bridge’ at Somerset House and Waterloo Bridge, London (9th-25th)
30 Aug

Quick news on an imminent (and free) immersive event coming up in central London, for anyone who likes the intersection of music, event and historical curiosity. It’s part of the month-long Totally Thames festival…

Totally Thames in partnership with Somerset House present:
‘The Singing Bridge’ by Claudia Molitor
Waterloo Bridge, London – starting at Somerset House (New Wing), Strand, London, WC2R 1LA, England)
Friday 9th to Sunday 25 September 2016, 4.00pm to 9pm (Wednesday to Friday) & 1.00pm to 6.00pm (Saturday & Sunday) – free event – information

“Fascinated by the rich and largely unearthed social history of Waterloo Bridge (and its rebuilding during World War II by a predominantly female workforce), composer and artist Claudia Molitor presents a brand new work comprising a musical response to the bridge: its history, its structure and its surrounding landscape. The work is available to experience in-situ on Waterloo Bridge itself during September.

“Collect a headset from Somerset House to begin your forty-minute musical experience that features new compositions by Molitor, with contributions from poet S.J. Fowler, London-based folk band Stick In The Wheel and drum-and-synth duo AK/DK. The Singing Bridge weaves you along Waterloo Bridge and its surrounding paths to give you time and space to consider your relationship to this bridge and its environs. As you drift through the piece, it evokes images of London’s urban landscape and the sprawling River Thames. The clunks and clicks of Claudia’s prepared piano, along with the wheezing drones and location recordings, give the piece an industrial feel. There is also a chance for reflection with the melancholic Below the Siren’s call; a nod to the past with traditional folk piece Sweet Thames, and to the present with AK/DK’s Electricity.

Regarding the participants:

Claudia Molitor is an Anglo-German conceptual composer, and half of the duo Lemon Drizzle (whose site-sensitive part-performance art works unravel the relationship and the perceived roles of composer and performer). Interested in the confluence of music and other media, she has also composed more traditionally-performed work for contemporary classical orchestras and ensembles such as Apartment House.

AK/DK (Graham Sowerby and Ed Chivers) use acoustic drums and a myriad of synthesizers to create complex and evolving music with layers of arpeggios, crashing drums and searing electronic sounds. Their largely improvised live shows are juxtaposed by more delicate compositions and commissions for theatre, film and installations.

Claudia Molitor: ‘The Singing Bridge’
Stick In The Wheel “rip apart the preconceptions surrounding folk music” (‘Clash Music’). Their abrasive delivery of both original and traditional tracks, is not empty nostalgia, but a voice linking now to then. Stripped-back songs speak for themselves, telling tales of everyday life. Four-times nominated for BBC Folk Awards and winners of ‘fRoots’ Album of the Year 2015.

S.J. Fowler is a poet and artist. He has published five collections of poetry and been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, The British Council and the Wellcome Collection. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and performed at venues across the world from Mexico City to Erbil, Iraq. He is a lecturer at Kingston University and curator of the Enemies project.”

‘The Singing Bridge’ will also be available as an album from NMC Recordings, which includes “a downloadable ‘film poem’ that explores Waterloo Bridge and its surroundings with a soundtrack featuring some of the pieces from the album.”

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Tags: AK/DK, Claudia Molitor, listening to women, London (England), multimedia, S.J. Fowler, Stick In The Wheel

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, classical (Western art music), cross-cultural music, crossover, electro-acoustic music, experimental music, festivals, field recordings, folk music, interactive performances, performance art, poetry, previews, sound collage, soundscapes, spoken word, storytelling

September 2016 – upcoming London gigs from Julián Elvira, rarescale, Katsuya Nonaka and Ute Kanngiesser (1st, 6th, 10th, 11th) – post-classical chamber music, premieres and improvisations for assorted flutes, shakuhachi, blowables, cello, etc. (Plus Katsuya’s London film premieres.)
27 Aug

Here’s news on four upcoming shows in London during early September, two of which are brought to us by flute-centred ensemble rarescale…

* * * * * * * *

Crasmusicas presents:
Julian Elvira presents ‘Blowing’
The Barge House, 46a De Beauvoir Crescent, De Beauvoir Town, London, N1 5RY, England
Thursday 1st September 2016, 7.00pm – information

Spanish musician Julián Elvira is the principal flautist with Banda Sinfónica Municipal de Madrid. He’s also the developer of the Pronomos flute – a carefully considered redesign of the existing orchestral instrument, designed to improve its ability to cope with the microtonal and enhanced timbral demands being brought to bear on it by contemporary music. His solo show, ‘Blowing’, is “a unique performance of improvised music exploring the sonic qualities of different flutes and pipes. The sounds of the traditional instruments are manipulated and transformed, creating a music experience that moves from ancient to ultra modern sonorities.”

* * * * * * * *

rarescale: “Falling Out Of Cars”
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Tuesday 6th September 2016, 7.30pm – information

Direct blurb from the press release:

“In the final concert of its 2016 season, rarescale presents new chamber works for flutes (including low flutes and baroque flute) with piano, guitar and electronics. New works by Steve Kilpatrick, Jonathan Pitkin and Yfat Soul Zisso receive their first performances, and pianist extraordinaire Xenia Pestova presents solo works by Ailis Ni Riain and Ed Bennett. This programme promises a broad range of repertoire, from the simple elegance of Laurence Crane’s ‘Erki Nool’ to the extended techniques of Scott Miller’s ‘The Frost Performs its Secret Ministry’.”

Performers:

Carla Rees – flutes
David Black – guitar
Xenia Pestova – piano
Michael Oliva & Scott Miller – electronics

Programme includes:

Steve Kilpatrick – ‘Falling Out of Cars’ (world premiere)
Jonathan Pitkin – ‘Multi(poly)phonie’s (for quarter-tone alto flute & guitar) (world premiere)
Scott Miller – ‘Anterior/Interior’ either/and/or The Frost Performs its Secret Ministry
Yfat Soul Zisso – new work (world premiere)
Laurence Crane – ‘Erki Nool’
Ailís Ní Ríain – (unspecified work)
Ed Bennett– ‘Bright White Lights’
Daniela Fantechi – (unspecified work)

The new Pitkin composition is “a short but wide-ranging piece (which) pushes both instruments in unexpected directions in order to play with conventional expectations of foreground and background, melody and accompaniment, and monody and polyphony.” I couldn’t find any information on the new Daniela Fantechni piece, and rarescale haven’t specified which Ní Ríain item might be on the list, but I’ve made a few educated guesses below (as well as including an Yfat Soul Zisso flute piece which might point the way towards her new one).

https://vimeo.com/141547512
https://vimeo.com/177103766

* * * * * * * *

IKLECTIK presents:
Scott Miller & Carla Rees with Julian Elvira & Katsuya Nonaka
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Saturday 10th September, 6.30pm – information

Scott Miller‘s ‘Anterior Exterior’ – see above – is one of the pieces which might be being performed at the Forge show. This particular performance is taken from ‘Devices and Desires‘, the album which he and rarescale partner Carla Rees released in 2012.

This side of their music will be reflected in the week’s second rarescale-related gig, down in Lambeth at IKCLECTIK. A combined sponsor’s sales pitch and evening of spontaneous creation (put together in association with Kingma System Flutes and Kyma Electronics), the show will provide “a demonstration of contemporary and traditional flutes, electronics improvisation systems and their potential for collaboration and innovation”. This will incorporate a “Devices and Desires” set in which Carla and Scott improvise with two special guests.

The first of these guests is Julián Elvira, still around following his solo show earlier in the week. The second guest, Katsuya Nonaka, is a particularly diverse creative character. A traditionally trained player of the shakuhachi flute, he’s also a member of The Seppuku Pistols, whose gimmick (playing alleged “Edo era” punk on traditional Japanese instruments while toying with Japanese ultra-nationalist imagery) might make them a broad-batingly provocative art project… or might not.

Outside of such stunts, Katsuya’s polymathic approach spills over into his other jobs and occupations – rice farming, translation, skateboarding, cartooning and illustrating, and film directing. He has happily combined three of these – the skating, the shakuhachi and the filmwork – in his short ‘Future Is Primitive‘ documentary investigating his view of the connections between and shared pressures brought to bear on both ‘board and bamboo flute (which will be receiving its London premiere the same week, on 9th September at House of Vans, in the tunnels beneath Waterloo station).

* * * * * * * *

IKLECTIK presents:
Katsuya Nonaka & Ute Kanngiesser
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Sunday 11th September, 8.30pm – information

In fact, it’s a particularly busy week for Katsuya Nonaka. As well as the previous two events of his that I’ve mentioned (plus the follow-up screening of ‘Future is Primitive’ at Dalston’s Doomed Gallery on 13th September) he will be playing another IKLECTIC show on the 11th, this time with London-based German improvising cellist and sometime AMM member Ute Kanngiesser, whose musical approach is devoted to “unscripted” music and who specialises in a “layered” approach.

As far as I know this is a first musical meeting for this particular pairing. I’m not sure that there are that many embeddable samples which I can treat you too as a preview; but here’s a clip of Ute’s eerie prolonged cello harmonics for the curious…

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Tags: Ailis ni Riain, AMM, Carla Rees, cello music, Crasmusicas (event/promoter), Daniela Fantechi, David Black, Ed Bennett, flute music, IKLECTIK Art Lab (promoters), Jonathan Pitkin, Julian Elvira, Katsuya Nonaka, London (England), Michael Oliva, music for electronics, piano music, premieres, Pronomos flute, rarescale, Scott Miller, Steve Kilpatrick, The Forge (promoter/venue), The Seppuku Pistols, unusual instrumentation, unusual instruments, Ute Kanngiesser, Xenia Pestova Bennett, Yfat Soul Zisso

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, acoustic music, chamber music, classical (Western art music), cross-cultural music, documentaries, electro-acoustic music, experimental music, films, improvisation, instrumental music, minimalism, New Music, previews

August 2016 – upcoming gigs – odds and ends – Dennis bring North-Eastern mining-town pop to London (19th); noisy psychedelic rackets cooked up by Three Dimensional Tanx in Lancaster (20th) and by the Rocket Recordings All Dayer in London (20th – with Teeth of the Sea, Gum Takes Tooth, Necro Deathmort, Housewives, Anthroprophh, H.U.M, Kuro, Coldnose)
17 Aug

I’m not even going to pretend that there’s a connecting thread within this post – it’s just a roundup of Friday and Saturday gigs while I try to fit some more updates into what’s going to be a busy August outside of the blog.

It seems that my rant about ersatz brass bands and the appropriation of Northern British folk forms earlier in the month has borne some fruit, or at least generated some kind of knock-on effect. I’ve just been emailed about Dennis, an eight-piece “folk pit-pop & colliery brass band” from Hetton-le-Hole in the minelands of County Durham, who claim heirdom to “a working class cultural heritage and community spirit.” and who are playing a free gig in London on Friday. In many ways they’re a sugared-tea version of ascerbic ‘80s Hullensians The Housemartins – a soul-touched ‘60s guitar pop, with the soul horn section transmogrified into the distinctively mournful, dusty sound of a pit head brass ensemble.

While some of that comparison’s on point – they’ve certainly got the tunes, and spring even more directly from the culture, with even the guitarists learning pit brass back in primary school prior to an apprenticeship in indie – Dennis do lack the Housemartins’ explicit political bite. There’s little of the gadfly lyrical attacks, or an equivalent to Paul Heaton’s upfront socialism and targeting of privilege and exploitation. Instead, much of their ethos is expressed via their visual identity. Artwork and videos are festooned with mining and trade union banners and footage of workers’ marches, while some clips make use of elderly retirees in mining town social clubs (notably, the latter are invited to join in with the singing, instead of being treated either as craggy scenery or as crushing embarrassments).

Outwardly, Dennis seem to deal in softer topics – more personal, adolescent or universal, or more diffuse folky sing-alongs – but a quick closer look reveals an undercurrent of glowingly nostalgic communalism (the band are veterans of fundraisers and community support events), and lyrics which hanker back, obliquely, to community spirit and mutual help. Perhaps more will be revealed on their debut album ‘Open Your Eyes’, due at the start of September when they’ll be playing on home turf at Northumberland’s Coquetfest.

Dennis, and Sapien Records Ltd. present:
Dennis
Mau Mau Bar, 265 Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London, W11 1LR, England
Friday 19th August 2016, 7.00pm – free event – information

* * * * * * * *

Over in the North-West, Lancaster psych-punk five piece Three Dimensional Tanx are playing a hometown gig on Saturday. With Stooges, Can and Velvet Underground comparisons in the bag, they’re following a pretty clear lineage: personally, I’m also hearing Question Mark and the Mysterians plus the garage rock end of the Sy Barrett Floyd; while other songs beat relentlessly at the forehead like Suicide or embark on long, stewed musical journeys.

What I like about this band is the dogged way in which they conduct themselves, and the way in which they seem to have colonised this particular Lancaster pub – circling around in its schedule like a persistently returning comet and playing several sets each time, as if pushing themselves through an arts lab. Turning the show into a five-decker lysergic sandwich, North-Western vinyl archivist Sie Norfolk (Sunstone Records/Psych Fest) will take slots before and after the band as well as during a break between sets, playing a “psychedelic dance party” from his record collection. If they’re going to continue to make this thing a regular event, I hope that they succeed in turning it into a psychedelic node, feeding more mindstretcher bands into and through Lancaster and beyond.

Three Dimensional Tanx + DJ Sie Norfolk
The Golden Lion, 33 Moor Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1QD, England
Saturday 20th August 2016, 9.00pm – information

* * * * * * * *

Staying in choppy psychedelic waters, the Rocket Recordings label has an eight-band concert back down in London, hosted (inevitably) by those persistent stewards of noise at Baba Yaga’s Hut. Many of the names are familiar – certainly to the dedicated noisies who follow the Hut and swing hard with ‘The Quietus’ – but for those who might not know them so well, here’s a quick primer.

As Baba Yaga favourites, Teeth Of The Sea keep popping up in here: a craggy yet celebratory electro-psychedelic throb from a full-band rock lineup embracing techno, polytextured brass, analogue synthwarp, tough corners of metal, and dance imperatives that span Chicago clubs and mud-sodden English field parties. Meanwhile, Necro Deathmort were among the electro-industrialists running rampant at at Cafe Oto last October: an all-out banger project which swings like a macabre wrecking ball across the borders of hard techno, blootered industrial electronica and doom metal. This year’s album ‘The Capsule’ takes a step into the scuzzy pack-ice of dark ambience: glowering, and majestically dour.

An explicitly magickal Anglo-French-Swiss trio of Mark Wagner, Heloise Zamzam and Olmo Uiutna, the spiritually/psi-ritually-inclined H.U.M. played at April’s Gnod Weekender. Back then I described them as a “psychic cross-cultural art coven”, creating consciousness-expanding installation-cum-ritual sound performances via chants, drones and drums, with both the music and Mark’s improvised narratives drawing on cybernetics, the occult, sound visualisations, and ancient alchemical ideas. They also like Rimbaud, Artaud, Colombian shamans and the Gallic pop of Francois Hardy, which makes for one hell of an art-sprawl.

Both Housewives and Anthroprophh showed up in ‘Misfit City’ only the other day, as participants in the current Sax Ruins/Massicot tours – the former an amelodic No Wave-inspired noise quartet, the latter a trio led by a sludge-guitar hero balancing “fifty years of psychedelic culture and esoteric art” on his shoulders.

That leaves Gum Takes Tooth, Kuro and Coldnose. Two of these, at least, are two-person teamings. Gum Takes Tooth are drummer Thomas Fuglesang and singer/synth-player/electronoise generator Jussi Brightmore, who pursue a rhythmic communion with their audiences inspired by psychedelic rituals and sound-system block parties (their recent single, Bone Weapon, sounds like a choral mass conducted inside a floor polisher). Kuro is a new project uniting bass guitarist Gareth Turner (an Anthroprophh contributor and half of Big Naturals) with French amplified violinist Agathe Max (a classical music escapee who’s been making improvised sonic textural music for two decades). As for who Coldnose are, nobody seems to know. Perhaps they’re just an idea to fill up the poster. Perhaps they’ll simply coalesce on the day.

Baba Yaga’s Hut presents:
Rocket Recordings All Dayer (featuring Teeth Of The Sea + Gum Takes Tooth + Necro Deathmort + Housewives + Anthroprophh + H.U.M + Kuro + Coldnose)
Corsica Studios, 4-5 Elephant Road, Elephant & Castle, London, SE17 1LB, England
Saturday 20th August 2016 – information

There’ll also be barbeques and beer, the latter an Intergalactic Pale Ale devised by Rocket label people in collaboration with London hopsmasters Brewage à Trois. Yep, there’s a signature beer for psych-happy London heads now…

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Tags: Agathe Max, Anthroprophh, Baba Yaga’s Hut (event/promoter), Big Naturals, Coldnose, Coquetfest (festival), Dennis, Gareth Turner, Gum Takes Tooth, H (Heloise Zamzam), H.U.M, Housewives, Kuro, London (England), Mark Wagner, Necro Deathmort, Sie Norfolk, Teeth Of The Sea, Three Dimensional Tanx, Uiutna (Olmo Uiutna)

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Categories 2016, acoustic pop, alternative folk, alternative rock, ambient music, chamber pop, chaos music, classical fusion, drone music, electro-acoustic music, electronic, experimental music, experimental/avant-garde rock, festivals, folk music, folk-pop, freaktronica, garage rock, improvisation, industrial music, industrial rock, instrumental music, kosmische & Krautrock, minimalism, noise, noise rock, pop, previews, process music, psychedelic ambient music, psychedelic rock, rock, sludge metal, space rock

August 2016 – upcoming gigs – London goes prog-happy at the Lexington – The Gift + We Are Kin + Tiger Moth Tales’ Macmillan fundraiser (7th); the David Cross Band with David Jackson and Richard Palmer-James (9th)
5 Aug

I think I’ve previously described the Boston Music Room – one of my own local venues – as London’s current home of prog. If so, the Lexington, down in the hinterlands between Kings Cross and Angel, is making a good showing as a second home. Two imminent shows reinforce that reputation, making next week a good one for London’s prog village.

* * * * * * * *

Resonance, in association with Prog Magazine and Orange Amplification present
The Gift + We Are Kin + Tiger Moth Tales
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Sunday 7th August 2016, 6.30pm – information here and here

The name that’s missing from the promoters’ line-up above is Bad Elephant Music: London’s ever-industrious cottage label for various types of prog, and home for two of the acts on the bill. In some respects, this is a shuffled and re-run of a similar gig back in February, in which The Gift’s mix of symph/prog/folk grandeur plus flashy AOR (and We Are Kin’s exploration of art rock shapes and northern English socialism) lined up with a pair of one-man bands in the shape of steampunk balladeer Tom Slatter and troubadour rocker jh. Now The Gift are back, and so are We Are Kin, with only the choice of one-man-band changed. Here’s the official blurb from the Elephant:

“The Gift, fresh from their triumphant performance at An Evening Of Bad Elephant Music, will be headlining the event, bringing their own particular brand of symphonic progressive rock on stage. The band is currently working on the followup to 2014’s ‘Land of Shadows’, and may well be previewing a song or two here.

“Making the journey down to ‘that London’ all the way from Manchester, We Are Kin will be playing a selection of songs from their new album, ‘The Waiting Room’, as well as from their acclaimed debut, ‘Pandora’. Their twin vocal lineup wowed the audience at Abel Ganz’s Christmas party last year, and is sure to be a highlight of this event.

“Tiger Moth Tales is the brainchild of Pete Jones, who will be performing solo for this event. His live shows have been widely acclaimed for their virtuosity, emotion and huge sense of fun. Pete’s two album releases ‘Cocoon’ and ‘Storytellers Part One’ will both be represented in his performance, and he may well throw in one or two cover versions of the prog classics!”

Just one final note – the gig’s a fundraiser for Macmillan Cancer Trust, emphasising a community that’s broader than just the prog one.

* * * * * * * *

The David Cross Band (with special guest David Jackson) + Richard Palmer-James
The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Road, Islington, London, N1 9JB, England
Tuesday 9th August 2016, 7:30 pm – information here and here

Despite nearly five decades in music, David Cross is still best known for his contributions to three albums at the start of his career. During a two-year early-‘70s stint with King Crimson (incorporating ‘Starless And Bible Black’, ‘Larks’ Tongues In Aspic’ and ‘Red’) David added “delicacy, and wood” to what some consider to be the band’s finest incarnation – part proto-punk-Mahavishu Orchestra, part stately electric-classical chamber group, and part droning/clattering/blaring building site. In its relatively brief and always restless lifespan, this particular Crimson lineup lay athwart the path of progressive rock, heavy metal and European improvisation like a splinter-ridden sleeper across the tracks: innovative, stern and ornery.

David’s amplified violin was a key part of the band’s powerful Euronoise, bringing in evocative melodies and moods which varied between Roma scurries, fall-of-Rome dramatics, foggy drones and angry squeals. As was the case with many of the departures from Crimson, David’s was passionate, painful and galling: progressively swamped by the band’s incremental climb towards avant-rock brutality, he was eventually forced out by its bruising, bristling volume and the implacable battering of its rhythm section. It took a few decades for him to salvage a more cordial relationship with Crimson leader Robert Fripp: nonetheless, the reconciliation has led to a return to the large extended Crimson family including guest spots and latterday Soundscape duets as well as recent “electric chamber music” with Crim-connected composer Andrew Keeling.)

Immediately after Crimson, though, David had to follow a different winding path of his own. From mid-‘70s work with trans-Manche psych/prog/fusioneers Clearlight (and experiments with big-band improv whilst leading the sadly undocumented Ascend) he went on to a long learning process during which, by his own admission, he failed at jazz. On the other hand, he successfully honed an affinity with alternative improvisation and with other forms. Theatre, in particular, proved to be a natural home, with David working up on stage and behind the scenes as well as in the pit band or composer’s slot. Theatricality also bled through into his other musical work. A trio he formed with keyboard player Sheila Maloney and saxophonist Pete McPhail took to the arts centres to perform musical interpretations of Samuel Beckett plays, while from the turn of the 1980s David was carrying out interdisciplinary performances with dancers, painters and the like (something he’s continued up until the present day).

After a decade away, a return to fusion and avant-rock in the late 1980s saw David becoming a keystone of Geoff Serle’s Radius band; an interesting, if airlessly pastoral, British answer to Material’s electro-funk. He was also a quarter of one-shot project Low Flying Aircraft, in which he joined forces with Crimson-orbit jazz pianist Keith Tippett, drummer Dan Maurer and budding teenaged guitar whiz Jim Juhn in a leaf-storm of nervy electroacoustic frenzy and scattered early sampler sputters. (For my money, it’s probably his most interesting post-Crimson bandwork to date.). He’s stayed busy ever since – this year, for instance, saw the release of violin-and-electronica duo album with Sean Quinn of Tiny Magnetic Pets, plus a live album from Japanese dates in which he guested with Crimson spinoff trio Stick Men.

All of this suggests the work of a musician whose reputation should be broader and better respected. It’s probably only the taint of grand prog – and of the “wrong kind” of fusion – which keeps him from it. In experimental rock (or, more accurately, in the media commentary which covers it, particularly on the British side) there still seem to be very clear, if dubious and snobbish, rules about who’s allowed credibility, and why. It’s not easy to escape from those fencings; and without this side of his history, David might have had his due.

For better or for worse, David’s most enduring project has been his own David Cross Band. Anchored since the mid-’90s by cohorts and co-composers Mick Paul (bass) and Paul Clark (guitars), it displays his electric violin – by turns stately, romantic, gnarled or locustlike – coursing fluently over a grandiose, detailed bed of prog pomp, deep metal, and flaring jazz-rock gestures. This year, however, the band’s taken an intriguing and strategic left-turn. With their latest album ‘Sign Of The Crow’ barely out of the gate, they’ve unexpectedly replaced keyboard player Alex Hall with veteran avant-prog sax hero David Jackson, once of Van Der Graaf Generator.

David Jackson in full 1970s effect (photographer unknown)
Musically adventurous and visually iconic, Jackson spent his Van Der Graaf years festooned with multiple instruments, blowing double-horn brass sections through brain-buggering electronics and being described as “a Third Reich bus conductor”. Since then, he’s spent much of his time working on the gesture-to-MIDI Soundbeam electronic project (bringing out the musicality of disabled children) while sometimes venturing out for gigs on the strength of his experimental rock reputation. Since crossing paths with David Cross at one such gig in Verona years ago, Jackson has been one of his frequent improvisation partners, making him an overdue natural fit for something like this. Regarding their chemistry, here’s a lengthy fly-on-the-wall video of the two of them playing (alongside Yumi Hara and Tony Lowe) at a release show for the Cross/Fripp ‘Starless Starlight’ album of Crimson-inspired Soundscape duets. Covering the show from rehearsal to performance, it hints at some of what the Cross/Jackson duo might be bringing to bear on the band shows; something which might well be transformational, pulling the band up and out of its shiny prog-metal box and perhaps delivering David Cross some of the broader respect he deserves.

The new Cross Band lineup, completed by Space Cowboys singer Jinian Wilde and by poly-disciplinary drummer Craig Blundell (who displays a heartening taste for post-dubstep playing when people let him off the prog leash), made their live debut in Wolverhampton last month. While no videos have emerged from this, there have been enthusiastic reports; and as King Crimson tours as a grand septet with a long-denied, fervently-delivered battery of archived ’70s classics, the Cross band are studding their own set with live deliveries of 21st Century Schizoid Man and Starless.

The London gig’s also intriguing in that it features a rare-as-rocking-horse-shit British solo slot from Richard Palmer-James. Originally the embattled first guitarist and wordsmith for Supertramp (a long time before they hit big at the American breakfast bar), Richard was the long-distance lyricist for King Crimson during David’s tenure and has subsequently carried out the same favour for twenty years of various Cross bands. Based in Bavaria for forty-odd years, he’s spent most of it embedded in production and writing work for German pop: since the turn of the century, however, he’s revived his original love for playing blues and country guitar. Most likely it will be this side of him that we’ll see at the Lexington on Tuesday. Still, who knows what the sense of occasion might bring out?

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Tags: Alex Hall, Bad Elephant Music (record label), Craig Blundell, Dan Maurer, David Cross, David Jackson, electric violin music, fund-raising, Geoff Serle, Jim Juhn, Jinian Wilde, Keith Tippett, King Crimson, London (England), Low Flying Aircraft, Mick Paul, Paul Clark, Pete McPhail, Radius, Richard Palmer-James, Samuel Beckett, Sean Quinn, Sheila Maloney, Sheila Maurice-Grey, Soundbeam, Supertramp, The Gift, Tiger Moth Tales, Tiny Magnetic Pets, Tony Lowe, Van der Graaf Generator, violin music, We Are Kin, Yumi Hara (Yumi Hara Cawkwell)

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Categories 2016, art rock, classical fusion, experimental/avant-garde rock, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz fusion, jazz rock, pop, post-progressive rock, previews, progressive metal, progressive pop, progressive rock, rock, singer-songwriter, theatre music

August/September/December 2016 – music dramas in London and Edinburgh: Héloïse Werner & Jonathan Woolgar’s ‘Scenes From The End’ (10th to 27th August variously, plus more in December) and Zoe Lewis’ ‘Britten in Brooklyn’ (31st August-17th September)
4 Aug

Some news on a couple of pieces of music drama showing in London and Edinburgh this month – one a fully-fledged conceptual solo piece (involving original contemporary classical compositions and diverse performance techniques), the other a more conventional theatrical play themed around the wartime exile of Benjamin Britten.

Here’s a little more information about each of them (combed, shaped and styled in a hurry, from the press releases).

* * * * * * * *

“‘Scenes from the End’ is a tour-de-force showcase for Héloïse Werner – soprano, sometime cellist and member of (amongst others) contemporary classical ensemble The Hermes Experiment, vocal ensemble Shards and original folk bands The Coach House Company and The Amazing Devil.

“Héloïse’s increasing interest in the dramatic potential of the unaccompanied voice has led her to experiment with a wide range of more contemporary techniques. ‘Scenes from the End’ is a fully staged, physical drama that combines classical and operatic vocal techniques, as well as improvisation, acting and body percussion. In it, Héloïse aims to confront the audience with the uncomfortable themes of death and grief, challenging them to reevaluate their own attitudes towards these difficult issues.

‘Scenes from the End’ is a collaboration with young composer Jonathan Woolgar (a previous award-winner of the BBC Proms Young Composers’ Competition) and with director Emily Burns. Using a colourful array of vocal and theatrical means, the show paints historic, comic and tragic pictures of “the end”, from the heat-death of the universe to the end of an individual life. This is virtuoso music theatre on a scale that is both cosmic and intimate.”

‘Scenes From The End’ is being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with a couple of preview performances in London a week and a half beforehand. There’ll be a further run of London performances in December.

Camden Fringe Festival @ Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PY, England
Wednesday 10th August 2016 & Thursday 11th August 2016, 7.15pm – information

Edinburgh Fringe Festival: Lime Studio @ Greenside (Nicholson Square), 25 Nicolson Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9BX, Scotland
Monday 22nd August 2016 to Saturday 27th August 2016 1.55pm – information

Tristan Bates Theatre, 1A Tower St, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9NP
Tuesday 6th December 2016 to Saturday 10th December 2016, 7.30pm (plus one 3pm performance on the 10th) – no information online yet

Although Héloïse is someone I’d like to catch up with for a chat at some point, for the moment I’d better point you in the direction of this recent interview she’s done (freshly published today!) with the LaLaLa Records vocal music homepage, covering ‘Scenes From The End’ and several of her other projects.

* * * * * * * *

“Based on true events, the world premiere of Zoe Lewis‘s passionate and thought-provoking play ’Britten In Brooklyn’ takes place in the beautiful and unique setting of Wilton’s Music Hall. Starring Sadie Frost and directed by Oli Rose, it plays for a strictly limited season of 21 performances.

“New York City, 1940. A dilapidated house in Brooklyn Heights. The bohemian lifestyle of Benjamin Britten, WH Auden, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee in the artistic community at 7 Middagh Street starts to unravel as World War II becomes a brutal reality. Exiled in America for his beliefs and a national disgrace, Benjamin Britten must decide which way his conflicted political ideals lie but the constant parties, doomed affairs and John Dunne, the mysterious stranger, provide an easy distraction.”

‘Britten in Brooklyn’
Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, Whitechapel, London, E1 8JB, England
Wednesday 31st August 2016 to Saturday 17th September 2016, 7.30pm (plus 2.30pm matinee performance on Wednesdays and Saturdays) – information

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Tags: Benjamin Britten, Camden Fringe Festival (event), Carson McCullers, Edinburgh (Scotland), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (event), Emily Burns (theatre director), Gypsy Rose Lee, Héloïse Werner, Jonathan Woolgar, London (England), Sadie Frost, Shards (vocal ensemble), The Amazing Devil, The Coach House Company, The Hermes Experiment, W.H. Auden, Wilton's Music Hall (venue), Zoe Lewis (playwright)

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, 21st century classical music, a capella, acoustic music, classical (Western art music), classical songs, festivals, music drama, opera, performance art, previews, song cycles, theatre music

July 2016 – video premiere – North Sea Radio Orchestra’s cover of Robert Wyatt’s ‘The British Road ‘
27 Jul

It’s nice to have a ‘Misfit City’ premiere once in a while. This is the brand new video clip for The British Road, North Sea Radio Orchestra‘s cover version of a Robert Wyatt song. It’s from NSRO’s new album ‘Dronne’ which is coming out on the band’s own label The Household Mark on 9th September. The song itself will be out as a download single on August 5th: the video’s another genius pocket production by Chaos Engineers.

Singalong time:

Those foreigners are at it again
When will they learn to fight like our men?
There’s nothing new under the mirror
And it’s time for one more bedtime story
Get beauty sleep for morning glory
How can I rise if you don’t fall?

Robert Wyatt originally recorded The British Road for his 1985 album ‘Old Rottenhat’: it’s also on the ‘Mid Eighties’ compilation. It’s part of a set of songs composed in “a conscious attempt to make un-misusable music” which was done in the face of covertly (or nakedly) aggressive right-wing politics appropriating or co-opting songs for cheerleading or for broadcast padding. The song itself is a typically cryptic Wyatt threading of oblique satire and Dada-jazz playfulness over a friendly, ever-so-slightly plaintive melody, taking glancing swipes at petty nationalism and irritable torpor as it rolls along. (If you’re weary of all of the recent Brexit sabre-rattling and bottlecough, it’s a real restorative.)

North Sea Radio Orchestra: ‘Dronne’
The NSRO take on The British Road immediately bears their own stamp. Elements are blended in from early English airs to Germanic-electronic organ haze; there are dewdrop metallophones and passionate bird-flight string parts; there’s budding pastoralism charged with bursts of motoric minimalism; and there’s a kernelled heart in Craig and Sharron Fortnam’s softened everyperson vocals, ever-so-slightly shaded by a touch of Wyatt Cockney. It originally stems from a 2014 concert night performance of Wyatt’s music for the Nuits de Fourviere Festival in Lyon, which Craig was invited to direct and arrange. As well as producing both this and other NSRO arrangements of assorted Wyattisms, the event had a profound effect on Craig’s approach to the rest of ‘Dronne’:

“Being the composer and producer has led to me having total control over all aspects of making NSRO records. This way of working is, of course, a double-edged sword, as spontaneity and inspiration can be lost under all that control. Robert Wyatt seems to tread the line between the two with great skill, incorporating lots of elements of chance into his albums. Re-working his songs while trying to maintain freedom within the arrangements has been a great inspiration while making ‘Dronne’. This record features lots of improvising which I have edited and manipulated; certain accidents within have been left intact – these elements of chance are a real antidote to the necessary microscoping and control-freakery needed to create NSRO records.”

If you’re interested, French experimentalist Pascal Maupeu recorded another version of this song six years ago, under his Mop Meuchiine alias – part grinding industrial underpass music, part Krautrock ice-cream van, part rough-edged chamber ensemble (while still finding space for a banjo). Here it is.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on ‘Dronne’, you can pre-order it now from Rough Trade, Piccadilly Records, iTunes and Amazon.

For more ‘Misfit City’ coverage on North Sea Radio Orchestra and its related bands (including some very early NSRO work indeed), click here.

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Tags: Craig Fortnam, Mop Meuchiine, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Pascal Maupeu, premieres, Robert Wyatt, The Chaos Engineers (audio-visual producers)

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, acoustic music, acoustic pop, baroque pop, chamber music, chamber pop, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, classical songs, cover versions, cross-disciplinary pop, crossover, electro-acoustic folk, electro-acoustic music, folk music, minimalism, pop, previews, psychedelic folk, singer-songwriter

July 2016 – upcoming gigs – London jazz with Dave Storey Trio and Rob Barron Trio (28th); Laura Moody plays not-jazz at the Manchester Jazz Festival (28th); plus a plea to help save the flooded Arch1 venue in east London
26 Jul

At short notice, here’s some quick news of a London jazz gig:

Jazz Nursery presents:
Dave Storey Trio + Rob Barron Trio
IKLECTIK, Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Lane, Waterloo, London, SE1 7LG, England
Thursday 28th July 2016, 7.30pm – information

Pianist Rob Barron specializes in piano-led hard bop in the Wynton Kelly, Cedar Walton and George Shearing tradition. On this occasion, his trio is completed by double bass player Calum Gourlay and drummer Joshua Morrison: while I’ve not got anything by the trio which I can play you, here’s the showreel for Rob’s quartet (featuring himself and Joshua).

The other trio on the bill is headed by dynamic, constantly occupied London drummer Dave Storey, whose busy CV includes work with Ivo Neame, Chris Batchelor, Hannes Riepler and Mike Outram (plus, oddly enough, a stint with symphonic proggers The Enid). He leads the psychedelic-leaning woodwind player James Allsopp (Fraud, Golden Age of Steam) and the nimble young bass guitarist Conor Chaplin through a wide repertoire of jazz from ballads to driven up-tempo pieces, with an emphasis on “interaction, intensity and playfulness”. Here’s a clip of them running their way through Giant Steps.

* * * * * * * *

Last year I did a fairly exhaustive (and exhausting rundown) of the Manchester Jazz Festival. This year I didn’t (there wasn’t enough time available, and not enough people read the last post to make it worthwhile – this blog seems to work better if I’m writing about smaller events with less existing promotional push behind them). However, I thought I’d mention that a particular ‘Misfit City’ favourite is playing the festival early on Thursday afternoon.

Despite her deft improvising skills, Laura Moody‘s dynamic voice-and-cello songs don’t exactly count as jazz – they’re more of a bridge between folk music, 20th century classical technique and the complex, experimental baroque pop exemplified by other hugely talented women such as Joanna Newsom or Kate Bush. However, her inventiveness, musical excellence and sense of adventure make her a prime fit for the fringes of the festival: a sometimes vigorous, sometimes agonizingly soulful performer. Her MJF appearance is an hour-long set in the open air in the middle of town, which will at least give her the opportunity to shake the chamber out of her chamber pop. (For what it’s worth, Laura’s also playing at Wilderness Festival on Saturday 5th August, but unless you’ve already bought the package deal for that one, you’ll not get to see her, so pull a sickie and head into Manchester this week instead…)

Manchester Jazz Festival presents:
Laura Moody
Hobgoblin Festival Pavilion, Albert Square, Manchester, M2 5DB
Thursday 28th July 2016, 2.30pm – information

* * * * * * * *

Lastly, here’s me taking a moment to sidestep away from plugging gigs so that I can forward a plea on behalf of the kind of place that puts them on. A great venue, or even just a good one, isn’t necessarily the making of a town or a neighbourhood, but they make profound contributions to the fabric of a place: the sense that there’s life there instead of just grind and torpor (or, in “nicer” neighbourhoods, just a vacuous gentility). There are plenty of potential threats to places like this, many of them stemming from the fact that many of them don’t fit developers’ idea of an economic footprint (and gentrification/profiteering doesn’t only crush arts venues – see the recent righteous ‘Organ’ blast about the predatory-rent-rise-backed eviction of repair shops from the London Fields railway arches) but sometimes it’s just damn bad luck and unfriendly weather.

Arch1, a beacon of arts endeavour and local involvement in the unloved and sidelined London district of Canning Town, fell victim to the latter last month. Thankfully the venue is down rather than out – and here’s someone running a crowdfunder to help it get back up:

“Arch1 is one of the few small independent arts venues left in London and for eight years it has been nurturing new talent in music, comedy, film and theatre. We were saddened to hear that on the 22nd June this year the club was decimated by the floods, forcing this cherished venue to close its doors and depriving London of this champion of independence.

A crowdfunder campaign has been set up to raise the £20,000 needed to completely refurbish and refit Arch1. Please support new talent in the arts by contributing to this appeal, and help save one of London’s most unique and irreplaceable venues. For more information and how to donate, please click here.”

(Update, later in the day)

Ah. Um.

The bad news…

I’m late in picking up on and posting this. The crowdfunder closed on Friday last week. Embarrassing for me, but…

The good news…

They made the funding target. The venue’s been saved. Well, that’s a sparkle in the darkness.

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Tags: Calum Gourlay, Conor Chaplin, crowdfunding campaigns, Dave Storey, IKLECTIK Art Lab (promoters), James Allsopp, Jazz Nursery (event), John Coltrane, Joshua Morrison, Laura Moody, London (England), Manchester (England), Rob Barron, The Manchester Jazz Festival (event)

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Categories 2016, acoustic music, acoustic pop, alternative folk, baroque pop, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, crossover, crowdfunding campaigns, experimental pop, folk baroque, folk music, hard bop, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, pop, previews, singer-songwriter

July 2016 – upcoming London gigs – Ant Law, Cassie Kinoshi and Zoe Rahman play Jazz in the Round (25th); Countermeasure’s spectacular a capella (31st); a two-day run for Pasek & Paul’s ‘Edges’ song cycle (30th & 31st)
21 Jul

Popping up at the end of the month…

Cockpit Productions present:
Jazz In The Round: Ant Law Trio + Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed + Zoe Rahman
The Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, Lisson Grove, London, NW8 8EH, England
Monday 25th July 2016, 7.00pm – information

I’ve just caught up with The Cockpit Theatre’s regular monthly jazz extravaganza (which is pretty good going on my part, since it’s only been happening for four-and-a-half years already…) This month, the 2016 summer season concludes with a triple bill of London jazz acts, plus the usual warm-up DJ set from Jazz FM’s Jez Nelson and Chris Philips (‘Somethin’ Else’, ‘The Blueprint’, ‘Chris’ Starpoint Radio’). As ever, the audience is positioned around the band in a thrust-stage setting, allowing a different sonic perspective and sense of involvement.

A member of Tim Garland’s all-star Lighthouse quartet, guitarist Ant Law uses bop jazz, folk-rock and Carnatic music as part of his musical palette (which also includes modern jazz, heavy metal and M-Base-inspired rhythmatism). A onetime Edinburgh University physics graduate and Berklee College alumni, he also works with Paul Riley and Trio HLK (with Richards Kass and Harold), with “proggish” fusion quartet Project DSB, plays as a regular sideman with Camille O’Sullivan and leads his own quintet. On this occasion, he’s performing with his trio – completed by drummer Asaf Sirkis and bass player Matt Ridley – delivering fluid rapid compositions in a constant state of teasing upheaval.

Led by alto saxophonist and Tomorrow’s Warrior Cassie Kinoshi, Seed are a ten-piece band combining jazz with inner-city London, West African and Caribbean influenced grooves. The stellar line-up of some of London’s most up-and-coming young jazz musicians also features Miguel Gorodi and Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpets), Joe Bristow (trombone), Theon Cross (tuba), Chelsea Carmichael (tenor sax), Joe Armon-Jones (piano), Oscar Laurence (guitar), Rio Kai (bass) and Patrick Boyle (drums). An alumnus of all-female TW band Nérija, Cassie is a diverse, inquisitive composer whose own music takes inspirations from jazz and black cultural history but also delves into lighthearted chiptunes, classical chamber music inspired by subjects as diverse as Chaucer and Tetris, and sombre electronic soundscapes.

British/Bengali pianist and composer Zoe Rahman creates music formed by her mixed heritage, her initial training as a classical musician, and her very broad musical taste, with her love for contemporary jazz as the binding agent. On this occasion, she’ll be playing solo.

* * * * * * * *

Countermeasure: 14 Characters A Cappella
The Forge, 3-7 Delancey Street, Camden Town, London, NW1 7NL, England
Sunday 31st July 2016, 2.00pm – information

Fourteen-piece Canadian vocal troupe Countermeasure make a visit to London at the month’s end, as part of their European tour. I could mine the press release for details on the prizes they’ve won and the other groups they’ve collaborated with; but the truth is that, when talking about vocal groups, somehow that mass of information always seems to mean less. Maybe one’s just impatient to be seduced by the voices… so here they are, delivering a multilayered take on Cole Porter’s I Got You Under My Skin; working in tricks and tips from close-harmony, contemporary R&B, jazz vocalese and broken beats.

* * * * * * * *

Back at the Cockpit, there’s a production of Pasek & Paul’s ‘Edges’. …

CC Productions present:
‘Edges: A Song Cycle Following Coming-Of-Age Questions’
The Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, Lisson Grove, London, NW8 8EH, England
Saturday 30th July 2016, 7.30pm
Sunday 31st July 2016, 5.00pm
– information

Part theatre musical and part song cycle, ‘Edges’ was originally written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul while they were still students at the University of Michigan, many years before they were conquering Broadway with ‘Dogfight’, ‘James and the Giant Peach’ and ‘A Christmas Story’ and being hailed as the heirs to Rodgers and Hammerstein. The piece has been described as “a witty and honest look at the choices we make and what happens when we are on the edge of our lives. Covering such issues as love, commitment, identity and meaning, ‘Edges’ follows four adults escaping expectations and their complicated relationships.”

This production of the show features musical actors Adam Bailey, Peter Cumins, Laura Mansell and Catherine Mort. Here’s a clip featuring a montage of songs and moments from a previous production at the Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, New York State.

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Tags: Adam Bailey, Albany (New York State - USA), Ant Law, Asaf Sirkis, Benj Pasek & Justin Paul, Cassie Kinoshi, Cassie Kinoshi’s Seed, Chelsea Carmichael, Countermeasure, Joe Armon-Jones, Joe Bristow, Laura Mansell, London (England), Matt Ridley, Miguel Gorodi, Nérija, Oscar Laurence, Patrick Boyle, Peter Cumins, quartet music, quintet music, Rio Kai, Sarah Marchand, Sheila Maurice-Grey, tentet music, Theon Cross, Tomorrow's Warriors, trio music, Zoe Rahman

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, a capella, acoustic music, classical (Western art music), cross-cultural music, DJ sets, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, performance art, post-bop, previews, show tunes, song cycles, theatre music, vocal music

July 2016 – upcoming London gigs – Roger Goula at Foyles’ and Servant Jazz (20th, 28th); Dedalus Ensemble play the Machines of John White (20th)
18 Jul

Classical/electronica fusion composer Roger Goula will be performing at two London shows this month in order to promote his upcoming new album ‘Overview Effect’ – the first full-length release on the new Cognitive Shift record label (a joint venture between experimental pop label One Little Indian Records and commercial soundtrack music publishers Manners McDade).

Cognitive Shift & Foyles Bookshop present:
Roger Goula
The Auditorium @ Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0DT, England
Wednesday 20th July 2016, 7.00pm – information

Cognitive Shift & Chaos Theory Promotions present:
Roger Goula
Servant Jazz Quarters, 10a Bradbury Street, Dalston, London, N16 8JN, England
Thursday 28th July 2016, 7.30pm – information

On both occasions, Roger will be performing material from both ‘Overview Effect’ (due in September) and from the preceding limited edition EP ‘Something About Silence’ (which came out in March and featured remixes by Christian Löffler and Phaeleh). ‘Overview Effect’ is inspired by “the psychological phenomenon experienced by astronauts when viewing Earth from a distance, allowing them to see the entire planet surrounded by the endless black void of space. This can cause a cognitive shift in the minds of the astronauts, giving them a completely new perspective on life, Earth and humanity.”

Here are soundclips of the original and remixed versions of Roger’s piece ‘Awe’, as featured on ‘Something About Silence’ – nearly nine minutes of grand minimalist adagio conflating the methodology of sophisticated dance electronica with the slow, sparse development and atmospherics of the post-Morton Feldman California school (as exemplified by the work of composers such as Jim Fox), the gradual looped layering of Gavin Bryars (on works like ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet’) and the holy minimalism of Henryk Górecki. Its growing arrangement steers simple modular elements towards a greater elegiac nature. Building upwards from sub-bass and clarinet and string harmonics, it adds strata of violas, then violins; developing a faster pulse and a skitter of electronic rhythm at the midpoint, with minimalist cross rhythms from the higher strings. The end sees a return of cone-rattling sub-bass, and a sudden jerk into silence as if waking.

It’s true that the latterday minimalist film scorer’s tricks are all in place; but those moving musical blocks are weighty, and the visual suggestions arresting and entirely in tune with the orbital view of the album concept. Placed back into the electronic dance world (remixed and transmogrified by classically-trained house/dubstep/electronica musician Phaelah) it becomes a stately, velvety downtempo effort; more mechanical; its squiggling monophonic crenellations stamped out as sequenced mirror-glints and chinking trance parts.

The Auditorium show is a full public event, while the Servant Jazz Quarters show is predominantly a music industry showcase (although there are twenty places available to the general public.

* * * * * * * *

On the subject of more mechanised forms of composition…

‘The Machines Of John White’: Dedalus Ensemble + guests
Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London, E8 3DL, England
Wednesday 20th July 2016, 8.00pm – information

John White had to wait until the mid-1960s to really make his name as a composer and conceptualist. Originally emerging in the late 1950s, with a powerful traditional-classical pedigree behind him, he was a student-turned-professor at the Royal College of Music he’d studied under Elizabeth Lutyens and Bernard Stevens and, from early childhood, had been on the end of a chain of person-to-person musical tutelage which he could trace back to Brahms. Already a fluent composer (and moonlighting as the conductor of various West End musicals) his growing involvement with the British avant-garde led to his development of “machines”. These were small and charming compositions based on various ordering systems (such as change-ringing patterns or numerical arrays), which, like industrial-age technology, performed considered and deliberately-limited functions.

While John’s described these works as “the result of a fully thought-out process rather than (something) subject to the changeabilities of inspiration” that doesn’t wholly capture their nature. Process-based they may be (a domestic English response to New York minimalism), but they also capture some of his personal qualities including the crucial leavening effects of his gentleness and humour (qualities which came in handy while sidestepping some of the more dour, Marxist/Maoist preoccupations of his avant-garde colleagues).

From the duets to the larger chamber works, there’s a sense of amiable workplace conversation to the White’s machines – like workmates managing to express both affection and connection despite their limited repertoire of gestures, tropes and local cliches; or like the chat of cartoon engines (it’s enjoyable to compare his compositions to the artful tootling of Vernon Elliott’s children’s TV scores.) Humour and irreverence certainly permeated pieces like “Drinking & Hooting Machine” (a text based score for musicians sipping from and blowing across bottles of “a favourite drink”, in which the potential for cheery drunken chaos increases depending on rehearsal time, length of cycle and opportunities for encore). John’s involvement with the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (the 1969 ensemble he formed with Hugh Shrapnel, Christopher Hobbs and Alex Hill) provided the opportunity to perform complex music on toy devices and outdated instruments, folding modernism back in on itself with Dada-ist irreverence and mischievous English whimsy while channelling serious intent through the fun.

“The PT Orchestra! The Orchestra YOU can afford for that extra special occasion! Restful reed-organs, tinkling toy pianos, soothing psalteries, suave swanee whistles, jolly jaw harps – NO noisy electronics! (Just the job for that lazy Sunday afternoon!) All musical material guaranteed thru-composed – NO hit-or-miss improvisation!” – Michael Nyman

Celebrating John’s eightieth birthday, Montpellier ensemble Dedalus Ensemble will be performing a selection of the machines at Café Oto. A collective in which every musician collaborates in the orchestration and interpretation, they specialise in flexible scores from across the United States and in European New Music from the 1960s to today. Noted champions of contemporary American experimental music, the Ensemble has premiered works by Tom Johnson, Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Frederic Rzewski, James Tenney before French audiences.” (Here’s a clip of them performing James Saunders’ ‘things you must do, rather than must not do’ at the ‘Coïncidences – Music we’d Like to Hear’ festival at The Forge back in 2012.)

For what it’s worth, I’ve got my own John White memory. He once turned up at Alquimia’s Electronicage concert series at the Spitz in 1999, a time when I had no idea when he was. Young-old elderly, besuited, neat and tidy, he had the amiable, comfortable air of a specialist on a home visit. He was carrying a medium sized suitcase, which he opened up and laid out to reveal a set of little readymade devices. He wound them up, pressed their buttons, set them off, and watched benignly as they ticked, clonked and squeaked through a small machine work of their own; then closed up the suitcase, waved and departed – a genteel, dining-room carney. Here’s twenty further minutes covering his world and his history.

To close, here’s a clip of a John White piano sonata in performance. If anything in what I’ve written above suggests that he’s a playful charlatan who threw his original skills away for art-prankery, this will prove otherwise. One of the hundred-plus sonatas he’s written (in addition to many more pieces of music in many other fields) it’s an enthusiastically busy, tuneful and melodically sophisticated romp in which both his humour and his extensive musical ancestry are fully to the fore.

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Tags: Chaos Theory (event/promoter), Dedalus Ensemble, James Saunders, John White, London (England), Michael Nyman, Phaelah, Roger Goula

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Categories 2016, chamber music, chillout, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, dance music, DIY music, downtempo, dubstep, electronic, electronica, experimental music, IDM, improvisation, instrumental music, New Music, performance art, previews, techno

July 2016 – upcoming London gigs – The Fidelio Trio play Beethoven, Dvořák and Schoenberg and talk to us (19th)
17 Jul

A very quick post regarding an upcoming free London show from the Fidelio Trio – sadly, they’re not playing any of the original repertoire which they’ve commissioned over the years, but if you’re interested in hearing them take on music from the established canon from classical to Romantic through to the brink of chromatic modernism, and if you’re interesting in getting a formal chance to conversing with the kind of small ensemble which does invite commissions, this might suit you.

Rhinegold LIVE presents:
The Fidelio Trio
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1R 4RL, London
Tuesday 19th July 2016, 6:15 pm – free event – information here and here

“The ‘virtuosic Fidelio Trio’ (Sunday Times) are Darragh Morgan, violin, Adi Tal, cello and Mary Dullea, piano. Shortlisted for the 2016 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards – one of the highest recognitions for live classical music-making in the UK – they perform diverse repertoire internationally, broadcast regularly on BBC Radio 3, RTÉ Lyric FM, WNYC, NPR and in 2010 were featured in a Sky Arts documentary.

Champions of classical and contemporary alike (and with a string of new commissions to their name), this recital will explore some of the trio’s favourite repertoire. Join us and experience the on-stage chemistry which caught the attention of this year’s RPS Ensemble Award jury.

The evening starts with a drinks reception at 6.15pm, with the concert starting at 7.00pm. The concert is followed by an informal Q&A which will be conducted by Kimon Daltas, editor of Classical Music magazine.”

Programme:

Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Trio in D major Op. 70 No. 1 ‘Ghost’ – I. Allegro vivace e con brio
Antonín Dvořák: Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor Op. 90 ‘Dumky’ – I. Lento maestoso – Allegro quasi doppio movimento
Arnold Schoenberg (arr. Eduard Steuermann): Verklärte Nacht

If you’re interested in hearing how the trio take on brand new repertoire, here are some clips of them in action, presenting debut live premieres of John Buckley’s 2014 ‘Piano Trio’ (from 2014) and Scott Wilson’s ‘Head Neck Chest Four Five Six Thing’ (from March this year).

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Tags: Adi Tal, Antonín Dvořàk, Arnold Schoenberg, Conway Hall (promoter/venue), Darragh Morgan, Eduard Steuermann, John Buckley, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mary Dullea, premieres, Rhinegold (promoters/publishers), Scott Wilson, The Fidelio Trio, trio music

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, acoustic music, chamber music, classical (Western art music), Classical music, instrumental music, Romantic music

July 2016 – upcoming gigs in London and Sunderland – end-of-the-season for Daylight Music with Cecil Sharp House Choir, Lisa Knapp, Hermes Experiment, David Julyan and John Potter (9th); the live-soundtracked premiere of Somme-and-Mackem documentary ‘Asunder’ with Field Music, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Warm Digits and The Cornshed Sisters (10th)
6 Jul

This weekend, in London, mostly-unplugged afternoon Daylight Music will bow out for the summer with a distinctly maritime-toned concert – and one which features another choir as the headlining act. I’ve been tempted to give Daylight’s organisers a bit of stick for their interest in choirs this season, but it makes no more sense than ribbing them for liking performers with acoustic guitars. While, for me, the scratch-choir-does-pop-hits musical meme gets too cosy too quickly, Daylight has done its level best to vary the choral diet, with this week’s headliners delving back into deeper folk roots (and the other acts on the bill ranging out across nautical atmospheres and underwater imaginings).

At the other end of the country, in Sunderland, film-makers have teamed up with art-rockers, bleepers, folk singers and community consciousness to create a picture of the First World War’s impact on a thriving north-eastern community. Keeping true to their inspirations, they’re premiering their work there. We Southerners will have to wait, and quite rightly too.

* * * * * * * *

Daylight Music 231 – Cecil Sharp House Choir + Lisa Knapp + The Hermes Experiment + David Julyan & John Potter
Union Chapel, 19b Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 12.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like event (suggested donation: £5.00) – information

“Known for its unique, spirited and moving a cappella renditions of traditional songs from the British Isles (and occasionally beyond), Cecil Sharp House Choir is one to catch. Helmed by inspirational choir leader, Sally Davies (and open to any confident singer able to hold a tune, learn by ear and be keen to perform), the choir performs regularly at Cecil Sharp House and at a host of other venues and events including the Southbank Centre, the Roundhouse, the House of Commons and the Oslo Musikkfest.

“Singer and fiddle player Lisa Knapp burst onto the scene in 2007 with her much lauded debut album ‘Wild & Undaunted’, which contained refreshing interpretations of traditional folk songs peppered with highly distinctive original pieces. Numerous appearances across BBC Radio and BBC4’s Christmas TV folk song extravaganza followed, as well as a performance tribute to the late Lal Waterson for BBC Electric Proms. Further recordings (made in collaboration with her musician/producer husband Gerry Diver) have included the EP ‘Hunt The Hare – A Branch of May’ and 2013’s ‘Hidden Seam’ album. Lisa’s BBC work continued with Radio 4’s acclaimed ‘Shipping Songs‘ in 2015 (musing on the extraordinary sounds from far-off places on the Shipping Forecast), and it’s this which should inform her July Daylight appearance, which features a duo performance with Gerry Diver and a song sung with the Cecil Sharp House Choir.

“Park Lane Group Young Artists 2015/16 and winners of Nonclassical’s Battle of the Bands 2014, The Hermes Experiment is a contemporary classical music quartet comprising harpist Anne Denholm, clarinettist Oliver Pashley, soprano Héloïse Werner and double bass player Marianne Schofield. Their performance style has been hailed as “meticulously nuanced, witty and chic” by The Times, while The Evening Standard has acclaimed their “whole new expressive world.” Capitalising on their deliberately idiosyncratic combination of instruments, the ensemble regularly commissions new works, as well as creating their own innovative arrangements and venturing into live free improvisation. So far, the ensemble has commissioned thirty-one different composers at various stages of their careers. The ensemble also strives to create a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration and they recently created a ‘musical exhibition’ with photographer Thurstan Redding. Future plans include a residency at Aldeburgh Music in September 2016 developing a new interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale with director Nina Brazier and composer Kim Ashton.

“The Hermes Experiment’s Daylight performance this weekend will be a marine-themed set first performed in 2014 (and recently revived at a Park Lane Music Group concert at St John’s Smith Square earlier in the year), at which they performed Giles Swayne‘s ‘Chansons dévotes and poissonneuses (Devout and Fishy Songs)’, a setting of three piscatorial poems by French Symbolist Georges Fourest. Whether they’ve got time for some of the other songs for the St Johns set – Kate Honey‘s ‘Predator Fish’, Freya Waley-Cohen‘s ‘Oyster’, Josephine Stephenson‘s ‘tanka’ – remains to be seen.

“As the fourth act, David Julyan (a film composer best known for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan on Memento’ and ‘The Prestige’, as well as for horror movie ‘The Descent‘) will be teaming up with John Potter (of ambient project The Music Of What Happens) in order to create a live sea soundscape.”

* * * * * * * *

Field Music/The Royal Northern Sinfonia/Warm Digits + The Cornshed Sisters
‘Asunder’ – film premiere with live score
Sunderland Empire Theatre, High Street West, Sunderland, SR1 3EX, England
Sunday 10th July 2016, 2.30pm and 7.30pm – information

“Northumbrian art poppers Field Music (with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and electronic duo Warm Digits) are set to perform a newly commissioned live score to accompany ‘Asunder’, a film telling the tale of the North East’s involvement in the Battle of the Somme (one of the most horrific battles in World War One) through largely unknown personal experiences. The collaboration marks the Battle’s centenary. Royal Northern Sinfonia will be conducted by Hugh Brunt, Artistic Director of the London Contemporary Orchestra (and Radiohead collaborator). Sunderland folk quartet The Cornshed Sisters will also perform an a cappella rendition of traditional Wearside folk tune The Rigs of Sunderland Fair.

“‘Asunder’ brings together the stories and images of the past with music from the present to tell a poignant and relevant story of what happened to a typical British town during the First World War, with virtually all of the its men abroad fighting and all of its women and children left behind. The North East was in the front line, thanks to its shipyards and munitions factories.
Through the stories of half a dozen people from Tyneside and Wearside, ‘Asunder’ uncovers just what life was like on the home front – with bombs falling on Britain for the first time, conscientious objectors sentenced to death, and women working as doctors, tram conductors and footballers, some of them (God forbid) wearing trousers.

“The story begins in the pre-war Edwardian golden era when cricket, football and rugby boomed, and aeroplanes and cars pointed to a bright new future – only for this progress to be horrifically reversed through the early years of the war. This culminated on 1st July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme, when British, French and German forces began one of the most traumatic battles in military history. Over the course of just four months, more than one million soldiers were captured, wounded or killed in the Battle, a confrontation of unimaginable horror.

“The story is told through a beautiful film carefully crafted by documentarist Esther Johnson using archive and newly filmed footage, and narrated by Kate Adie (with Alun Armstrong as the voice of the ‘Sunderland Daily Echo & Shipping Gazette’).

“‘Asunder’ will premiere at the Sunderland Empire on 10th July before touring at selected venues around the country (dates to be confirmed).

“Field Music’s David Brewis says of the commission:

“The chance to write something completely new and play it with an orchestra doesn’t come around very often. And as we heard about the plans for the film, the idea of telling a more complete story about our home town and how the war affected it was very appealing. There’s nothing quite like hearing a full orchestra right in front of you and if we get it right, then the balance between what you see and hear on screen and what you see and hear from the musicians should be spectacular. One of the other things which intrigued Peter (Brewis) especially about this project was our love of the orchestral music from that period. Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ premiered in 1913, Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ in 1912. Bela Bartok and Maurice Ravel were composing, as was Claude Debussy, so it was a time of huge change in harmony and composition and we’ve dipped into that period for inspiration a lot.”

“Writer and ‘Asunder’ creative director Bob Stanley comments:

“For me, ‘Asunder’ is an opportunity to work with a group I’ve admired from afar for years, Field Music, and one of my favourite documentary makers, Esther Johnson, as well as a group I only discovered last year but are one of the most thrilling electronic acts in the country, Warm Digits. The premiere will be a truly unique event – the combination of a live score to a new film featuring some incredible archive footage and fascinating local stories, along with the other events going on inside and outside the Empire should be a really memorable day, and I hope one that people will be talking about for years to come. I want everyone who sees it to take pride in the region’s unique history and to feel they can help to build its future.”

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Tags: Anne Denholm, Arctic Circle (promoter), Asunder (film), Bob Stanley, Cecil Sharp House Choir, David Julyan, Daylight Music (event), Esther Johnson (filmmaker), Frey Waley-Cohen, Georges Fourest, Gerry Diver, Giles Swayne, Héloïse Werner, John Potter, Josephine Stephenson, Kate Honey, Lisa Knapp, London (England), Marianne Schofield, multimedia, Oliver Pashley, Royal Northern Sinfonia, Sally Davies, Sunderland, The Cornshed Sisters, The Hermes Experiment, The Music Of What Happens, Warm Digits

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Categories 2016, 21st century classical music, a capella, acoustic music, acoustic pop, agit-pop, alternative folk, ambient music, art pop, art rock, chamber music, classical (Western art music), classical fusion, cover versions, crossover, electro-acoustic music, electro-pop, electronic, electronica, experimental music, field recordings, folk music, instrumental music, poetry, political music, pop, previews, progressive pop, psychedelic ambient music, rock, sea shanties, singer-songwriter, sound collage, spoken word, storytelling, synth pop, vocal music

July 2016 – upcoming and ongoing gigs – some pickings from the Frome Festival, west of England (1st-10th)
2 Jul

While I missed the chance to plug the Sin Eater Festival a few weeks ago, I’m just about in time for the modest fireworks which herald the Frome Festival in Wiltshire.

I’m too late to plug the opening party (in which Frome’s own electro-poppers Sweet Machine shared a bill with psychedelic synth-cabarettier, rock biographer and all-round performance character Alan Clayson); I don’t have much to say about the festival’s big-draw act Reef (currently enjoying a new revival of their original ‘90s revival of 70s blues-rock); and I feel sorry that the free gig by “ukular fusion” band The Mother Ukers doesn’t involve furious Mahavishnukulele jazz shredding (instead of being a variation on banjo-happy rockgrass covers). But there’s plenty more on offer, so here are a few other things picked out from the billing.

It’s by no means everything on offer (the festival’s full of visual art, talks and theatre; there’s plenty more jazz and classical; and there’s a show by Billy Bragg which will probably take care of itself) but these represent the bits-between-the-bits which are closest to ‘Misfit City’s natural constituency (if such a thing exists).

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The Magical Folk Garden @ The Archangel, 1 King Street, Frome, BA11 1BH, England
Tuesday 5th-Friday 8th July 2016, 7.30pm each night – information: Tuesday 5th / Wednesday 6th / Thursday 7th / Friday 8th

At the upstairs room at the Archangel pub, The Magical Folk Garden continues to turn itself into an annual institution with a series of cushion-strewn/standing-room-only unplugged gigs, creating a “euphonious forest of folk and contemporary acoustic music from some of the UK’s finest talents.” It’s all pretty well-scrubbed and tasteful – there’s nothing to scare the horses here. That said, a few of the performers might own horses, and some might whisper them; while a few might go all ‘Poldark’ and ride off on one, bareback and bare-chested, a honey-coloured guitar bouncing up and down on the withers (it all probably depends on the state of the booze and the pollen count).

The Tuesday show features two Bath acts – lit-pop cello-and-guitar duo The Bookshop Band and romantic solo-balladeer Tom Corneill – plus the sunny pure-pop/psychedelic fizz of Trowbridge’s The Pigeons.

The Wednesday show has a band-backed performance from Frome’s Al O’Kane (a gravel-and-honey country-blues-folker who, with his mix of rolling American roots guitar and British mysticism, can come across as a one-man ‘Led Zeppelin III’). Also playing are Alex Taylor (bouncy, jazz-and-funk-tinged, broadening his sound and filling out his pockets with pedals and loops) and young songwriter Emma Shoosmith, whose output has ranged from thoughtful folkified Taylor Swift covers to the lilting ska-tinted song shown below.

The Thursday show has a chamber-folk air. Bookshop Band multi-instrumentalist Beth Porter returns with her own augmented-string quartet band The Availables and her own clutch of intricate literary songs. Also on board are the strings, percussion rustles and detailed guitar of Rivers Of England (fronted by Rob Spaulding) who, although they take on some pretty familiar modern folk tropes, land them in an interesting marginal territory in which the early-’70s John Martyn and the early-’80s Julian Cope sit down to exchange lines and tips. The bill’s completed by the lost-boy charm of Avebury singer-songwriter (and Nick Harper protégé) George Wilding with his warm, abstracted songs of distraction and heartbreak (simultaneously soothing and haunting).

The Friday folk-final involves wayward Bristol-and-Bath folk septet The Cedar. Beth Porter makes her third Magical Folk Garden appearance of the week as the band’s cellist, alongside five other musicians. Playing a variety of instruments and implements (from guitar, glockenspiel, viola, organ and ukulele to calculator, screwdriver, musical and tri-square) they weave Neil Gay’s slightly distracted songs into a musical fabric that’s sometimes Belle-&-Sebastian communal, sometimes music-school precise, and sometimes as frayed as a scrap-basket oddment.

The rest of the evening gently mixes Western with Western. Accompanying herself on guitar, baritone ukulele, harmonium or shruti box, Bradford-on-Avon’s Jess Vincent delivers a set of original country-folk songs with a sound and demeanour that’s seen her compared to both Iris DeMent and Kate Bush. Evening openers Ali George and Ruby Brown do their own take on Gram-and-Emmylou duets, filtered through Ali’s trunkful of original English folk/clawhammer guitar songs.

https://youtu.be/CgZQaSVMQcQ

* * * * * * * *

The town’s Rook Lane Chapel arts centre is hosting plenty of events. These two in particular caught my ear:

Snowapple
Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome, BA11 1DN, England
Thursday 7th July 2016, 7:30pm – information

“Snowapple is an outstanding female harmony trio from Amsterdam who draw on folk, classical and chanson influences, in unique, charming and beautiful arrangements of original songs. Having sold out the Granary for the last two years, Snowapple have earned a reputation all over Europe and the US, and this year appear in the perfect setting of Rook Lane Arts.”

Praying For The Rain
Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome, BA11 1DN, England
Friday 8th July 2016, 8.00pm – information

From the blurb: “Known for their dynamic and compelling live performances, Praying For The Rain blend contemporary folk, Celtic and world music with irresistible rhythms, memorable melodies, beautifully crafted vocals and inspired musicianship. Their music brings to mind a modern blend of Crosby, Stills and Nash, Robert Plant, to Fleet Foxes and the Dave Matthews Band, creating a truly uplifting experience. Following last year’s sell out concert, Praying for the Rain return to Rook Lane for Frome Festival 2016. Expect an exhilarating night of high energy, movement and wonderfully engaging songs.“

I’m sure I remember Praying For The Rain from when I was a regular at Martyn Swain’s wonderful Dreamhouse acoustic nights, a refuge of warm bohemian chic and unplugged music alongside the Splash Club in scuzzy mid-’90s Kings Cross. These were the same shows at which I was delighted by up-close performances from Marcy Detroit, Simons Warner and Whitaker and many more… there’s a little bit about Dreamhouse here, since someone’s been writing a crowdfunded book about the Splash years (and you can still pitch in to help it). Dreamhouse was the kind of night where you could expect table candles and belly dancing interludes most weeks; but during their own slot, Praying For The Rain completely overflowed the little Water Rats stage with finger-cymbals, accordions, cellos, cirrus-band harmonies and what seemed like about ten people on whispering percussion, temporarily transforming the place to a full-on New Age folk temple.

Although they seem rather more bluesy and straightforward-rootsy than I remember through the gauzes of memory, it’s good to see that they’ve lasted the twenty-year distance and garnered themselves a new up-to-date list of comparisons.

* * * * * * * *

Over at the Granary, there’s a semi-unplugged triple bill and a visit from a ‘Misfit City’ favourite.

Three Is The Magic Number presents:
Three Corners + Molly Ross + Gum Girl
The Granary @ The George Hotel, 4 Market Place, Frome, BA11 1AF, England
Friday 8th July 2016, 8.00pm – free/pay-what-you-like

Regular Frome-and-Wiltshire unplugged night Acoustic Plus takes on a new identity for this three-act bill of “original songs, haunting vocals, mesmeric music” celebrating a diversity of approach via three different acts. Molly Ross offers fledgling piano pop touches on folk and R&B; Three Corners (with their roots in 1980s new-wavers The Impossible Dreamers, and featuring ex-Dreamers Nick Waterhouse and Caroline Radcliffe) play sparse, questing songs around more of a loose blues-and-jazz-informed tip; but the one I find most interesting is the dreamy beat’n’texture pop of Gum Girl.

Arch Garrison
The Granary @ The George Hotel, 4 Market Place, Frome, BA11 1AF, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.00pm – information http://cheeseandgrain.ticketsolve.com/shows/873554307

As Arch Garrison, North Sea Radio Orchestra mastermind Craig Fortnam and Stars In Battledress‘ James Larcombe explore gentle, intricate psychedelic folk: partly gentle clean chapel tones, partly kosmische textures, partly chalk-ridge geomancy. A duo of Craig’s nylon-strung acoustic guitar and James’ assorted keyboards (organ, monosynth, harmonium and piano), their two albums’ worth of songs have enabled Craig to bring the smaller and more personal songs he writes to life, when they don’t fit the grander feel of NSRO. Their ‘Will Be A Pilgrim‘ album was one of my favourites of 2014 – an unexpected gem of small voice and thinking space. Support comes from local favourites Dexter’s Extra Breakfast, playing Dave Clark’s soft-petalled and “Weltschmerzian” songs of middle-aged reflection.

* * * * * * * *

John D Revelator
The Griffin, 25 Milk Street, Frome, BA11 3DB, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.00pm – free event

At the Griffin, John D Revelator will be bringing along their dark-tinged acoustic swamp-pop for a free show. Even if there’s not actually such a thing as the “Somerset Levels delta”, they’ll lie to their last tooth and their last busted guitar string trying to persuade you that it does exist.

* * * * * * * *

Towards the end of the festival, the second of Frome’s two substantial concert halls is offering two very different performances on the same day. One is a post-lunchtime concert of vividly Catalonian Spanish classical music from the twentieth century; the other is an evening show of polymusical fusion from an all-star collective trio.

Elena Riu & Clara Sanabras: ’A Taste Of Spain’
Cooper Hall @ Selwood Manor, Jacks Lane, Frome, BA11 3NL, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 1.00pm – information

Pianist Elena Riu and singing multi-instrumentalist Clara Sanabras (the latter on voice, harp, oud, charango and guitar) perform selections from the ‘Songs & Dances’ of Catalan impressionist/miniaturist composer Federico Mompou and the ‘Spanish Dances’ of his compatriot Enrique Granados, interspersed with Clara’s performances of the original Catalan folk songs on which Mompou drew.

Birdworld
Cooper Hall @ Selwood Manor, Jacks Lane, Frome, BA11 3NL, England
Saturday 9th July 2016, 8.30pm – information http://cheeseandgrain.ticketsolve.com/shows/873554308

“Birdworld is made up of musicians Adam Teixeira (drums/percussion), Gregor Riddell (cello/electronics); and Alex Stuart (guitar). The project came about when Gregor and Adam met during self-directed Banff Creative Residencies where they discovered a shared interest in blending electronic and acoustic sounds. Since Adam moved to the UK in 2014 they have continued to develop BirdWorld, adding Alex along the way. Combining their artistic voices as both instrumentalists and composers, the trio will showcase each members original compositions arranged specifically for this unique musical exchange. Creating a unified sound that blends the inspirations of modern jazz, world music, contemporary classical, rock and electronic music in a rare concert setting.”

Here’s a video of the original two-piece in action, to give you two-thirds of an idea of what might be on offer.

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Tags: Adam Teixeira, Alan Clayson, Alex Stuart, Alex Taylor, Ali George, Arch Garrison, Beth Porter & The Availables, Billy Bragg, Birdworld, Clara Sanabras, Craig Fortnam, Dreamhouse (event), Elena Riu, Emma Shoosmith, Enrique Granados, Federico Mompou, Frome (England), George Wilding, Gregor Riddell, Gum Girl, Hot Chip, James Larcombe, Jess Vincent, John D Revelator, London (England), Martyn Swain, Molly Ross, Mother Ukers, multi-instrumentalists, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Praying For The Rain, Reef, Rivers Of England, Ruby Brown, Snowapple, Sweet Machine, The Al O'Kane Band, The Bookshop Band, The Cedar, The Impossible Dreamers, The Pigeons, Three Corners, Tom Corneil

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Categories 2016, 20th century classical music, a capella, acoustic music, acoustic pop, alternative country, alternative folk, Americana, baroque pop, blues, cabaret rock, Catalonian folk music, chamber music, chamber pop, classical (Western art music), classical songs, comedy music, country-and-western, cover versions, cross-cultural music, crossover, crowdfunding campaigns, DIY music, electro-acoustic folk, electro-acoustic music, electro-pop, electronic, electronica, festivals, folk baroque, folk music, folk rock, folk-jazz, folktronica, funk, improvisation, instrumental music, jazz, kosmische & Krautrock, New Wave rock, outsider music, performance art, pop, previews, psychedelic folk, psychedelic pop, psychedelic rock, rhythm'n'blues, rock, roots music, singer-songwriter, ska, soul, spoken word, swamp rock, synth pop, vocal music

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January 2020 – single & track reviews – Sophie Onley’s ‘Web Of Lies/Broken Doll’, Secret Treehouse’s ‘At Sunrise’, Jakk Jo’s ‘All Dat I Do’

January 2020 – single & track reviews – The Powdered Earth’s ‘The Atlantic’, Simen Lyngroth’s ‘Morning Light’, Marle Thompson’s ‘Expectations’

January/February 2020 – showcases in London with Ragga Gröndal in Earls Court (19th January) and Velveteen Orkestra, Ben Eaton, Hattie Erawan and Matt Ryan in Soho (21st January); plus Blair Coron’s ‘On The Nature Of Things’ quiet evening in London and Glasgow (21st January, 7th February) with Zoë Bestel, Anin Rose, Tom Blankenberg, Charlie Grey and Joseph Peach

January 2020 – upcoming gigs – electronica, jazz and gamelan in Bristol and London – Byron Wallen plays Boards of Canada (17th, 18th January); Bersarin Quartett and LTO (21st January)

January 2020 – various classical concerts in Britain – Manchester Collective’s ‘Ecstatic Dances’ tour with Poul Høxbro in Leeds, Glasgow, London and Manchester (15-19 January); Jamie Akers plays 19th century women guitar composers in London (16th January); Eos Ensemble play contemporary chamber quartets in London (24th January)

January to March 2020 – assorted London gigs – Holly Penfield at 100 Club (8th March) and with Ian Ritchie at the Fiddler’s Elbow (10th January); skewed surf, pop and acoustica with Kenny Process Team, Keith John Adams and The Happy Couple (13th January); Balkan/Gaelic folktronics with Arhai (18th January); plus Minute Taker’s ‘Wolf Hours’ in Manchester (24th January)

January 2020 – single & track reviews – Madrona’s ‘Alone with a Crow and a Pylon’; Madrona & Chris Cundy’s ‘Humming I’ and ‘Humming II’

December 2019 – Arch Garrison and Emily Jones on tour together around England – folk, psychedelia and other familial connections featuring The Steven Morricone Tyranny, We Are Muffy, Libbertine Vale, Little Robots, Berlin Horse, Chlöe Herington, Ian A. Anderson and Pete Aves (11th to 17th December); plus a Jones and Garrison contribution to Spratleys Japs’ Winter Wonderland show in Brighton with Panixphere, Matthew Cutts and Hot Sauce Pony (21st December)

December 2019 – upcoming London gigs – Christmas music as Daylight Music 2019 autumn season concludes with Tomorrow’s Warriors Soon Come Big Band and Junior Band and Loucin Moskofian (7th) and a Lost Map party with Pictish Trail, Callum Easter, Rozi Plain and Glasgow Dreamers (14th); plus a follow-up Lost Map show with Pictish, Callum, Savage Mansion and Clémentine March (15th)

November 2019 – three Tuesdays of (mostly) femmetronica in London – Alice Hubble, Blick Trio and Merlin Nova (5th November), Carla dal Forno and Cucina Povera (12th November), Rachel K. Collier (19th November)

November 2019 – upcoming classical concerts – Duncan Honeybourne premieres Richard Pantcheff in London (6th November); Scottish Ensemble’s ‘Elemental’ tour across Scotland with Aidan O’Rourke and Kit Downes (9th-13th November); Joby Burgess plays SOLO in London (13th November)

November 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Janushoved’s fifth anniversary party with Rosen & Spyddet, Internazionale, Yuri and others (1st November); Orlando Harrison goes Orwellian at the Horse Hospital with Tone Generator, Imperial Leather and David Rage (1st November); Paper Dollhouse, Daniel O’Sullivan, Flowers At Night and DJ King Knut at New River Studios (2nd November)

November 2019 – Daylight Music 2019 autumn season continues – Bex Burch with Beanie Bhebhe and Tom Herbert, Çiğdem Aslan & Tahir Palalı, Maria Chiara Argirò & Jamie Leeming (2nd); New Music from Wales with Gareth Bonello, Toby Hay, Georgia Ruth, Accü and Richard James (9th); jazz strands with Nils Økland, Kaidi Akinnibi & Lorenz Okello-Osengor, Helena Kay & Sam Watts (16th) and with Jherek Bischoff, Robert Stillman & Anders Holst and Rosie Frater-Taylor (23rd); Matthew Bourne’s vocal showcase with Seaming To, Keeley Forsyth,Polly Gone Wrong, Andrew Plummer and Dorothy Lehane (30th)

October/November 2019 – upcoming London gigs – (mostly) female pop and poptronica and dance – Caroline Polachek (30th November); Kin Leonn and Geiste (1st November); Imogen Heap and Frou Frou (15th November); Kedr Livanskiy and Detalji (21st November), and Yeule at nearly all of these…

October/November 2019 – upcoming London classical gigs – ‘Venus, Women And The Guitar’ (27th October); Emily Howard curates ‘Ada Lovelace: Imagining The Analytical Engine’ (2nd November); Echo Collective present Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ’12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann’ plus Félicia Atkinson (3rd November)

October 2019 – upcoming London rock, pop, noise, dancetronic gigs – Hurtling, Stephen Evens and Junodef (17th October); Gum Takes Tooth and Hyperstition Duo (18th October); Bunny Hoova, Gribs, J.B. Glaser and Halfs (18th October)

October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – Retrophonica at the Brunel Museum (13th); Charles Hayward presents Sly & The Family Drone, V Ä L V Ē, Timestretch Alarmsong and Atatat (19th)

October 2019 – sundry classical and postclassical events – Carla Rees’ ‘Solo Flute Quartet: Music for Flute and Electronics’ tour of England and Northern Ireland (9th, 12th, 16th, 18th, 24th October); Xenia Pestova Bennett plays Luc Ferrari and Annea Lockwood in London (29th October)

October/November 2019 – Moor Mother’s ‘The Great Bailout’ with the London Contemporary Orchestra in Kraków, Gateshead, Ghent and London (6th, 12th, 16th, 23rd October), with Galya Bisengalieva and Klein joining in London. Plus further Moor Mother dates in Utrecht, Helsinki and Madrid with Zonal, Eartheater and Cruhda (7th, 11th, 15th November)

October 2019 – upcoming rock gigs in England from mathcore to magic, part 2 – The Display Team’s October tour (with Project Mork, The Mighty Bossmags, Masiro, Lonely Dakota, Mutant-Thoughts, Flag Fen, Spank Hair, Barringtone, Memory Of Elephants, Alter Ego and Vonhorn); a Jazz from Hell concert in Brighton including Son Of Ugly, BallPointKen and Fukushima Dolphin (23rd October); The Hare and Hoofe, The Galileo 7 and Ulysses in London (26th October)

October 2019 – upcoming rock gigs in England from mathcore to magic, part 1 – the Octobear tour with Civil Villains, Goldblume and Bisch Nadar plus Web, Günk, Quiet Lions, Pandapopalyse, Edward Fox and Smack Jack (12th to 26th October, various); the Portals All-Dayer in London including Hawk Eyes, Lost in the Riots, Bicurious, Lakes and Cody Noon (19th October)

October 2019 (and onwards) – various upcoming jazz gigs – Yazz Ahmed’s Electric Dreams, Rosie Turton Quintet, Alina Bzhezhinska in London (3rd October); Electric Dreams in Newcastle (4th October); Forq and SEN3 in London (30th October); SEN3 in London and Brighton (1st & 8th October); Jim Rattigan’s October-to-January Pavillon tour of England (6th October onwards)

October 2019 – upcoming London experimental gigs – a London visit for Asuna’s ‘100 Keyboards’ (2nd); psychonauts UnicaZürn step up to save the Horse Hospital (5th); Andrew Heath & Anne Chris Bakker play an ambient evening with Matt Atkins, Andrew Sherwell and Kevin Buckland (6th)

October 2019 – Daylight Music’s 2019 autumn season continues – Janek Schaefer, Joby Burgess and AVA (5th October); Keith Tippett & Matthew Bourne with Tania Chen & Steve Beresford (12th October); We Like We, Otto A Totland, Rauelsson and F.S.Blumm (19th October); Susumu Yokota remembered and reinvented by Isan, Seaming To and The Imperfect Orchestra (26th October)

September/October 2019 – upcoming singer-songwriter gigs – Holly Penfield unleashes ‘Tree Woman’ in California and London (22nd September, 31st October)

September 2019 – upcoming opera – Alex Mills’ ‘Dear Marie Stopes’ in London (21st September); Keith Burstein’s ‘The Prometheus Revolution’ on film in Brighton (24th September)

September 2019 – the start of Daylight Music’s autumn season in London – The Memory Band, Far Rainbow and Ingrid Plum (21st September); Kathryn Williams’ Anthology extravaganza (28th September)

September-November 2019 – upcoming post-folk, electrop, electronica gigs – tAngerinecAt on tour across Britain (5th/7th/14th/20th September, 17th/18th/26th October, 16th November) with Flange Zoo, DIANE, Experimental Sonic Machines, Ed Dowie, La Rissa, Yorkshire vs. Essex, Factory Acts, Slow Knife, Harbingers Drum Crew, Tin Mole, Clusterfuck, Hallulugenia, SIN/RED, Hypnotique, Otis Jordan, Saint Bernadette and She Robot

September to December 2019 – upcoming rock/rocktronica gigs – Teeth Of The Sea and The Utopia Strong live in London (5th September) plus further Teethings in Brighton (with Mulholland), Rochester (with Rekkliner and the closer we are to dying) and Brussels (6th/13th September, 4th October); and The Utopia Strong running cross-country with Matters, EWEI and Reidy Scott Duo (8th September, 8th/11th-13th November, 18th-21st December)

September/November 2019 – upcoming rock/folk/psychedelic gigs – My Octopus Mind on tour in Bristol, London and Lille (5th & 6th September, 27th November), Daniel O’Sullivan and Brigid Mae Power in London (13th September)

June/July 2019 – upcoming London gigs – Jewdas’ summer shindig with Geoff Berner, Fran & Flora and Rokhl Merlot at Balabam (20th June); Sefiroth at JW3 (4th July)

June to November 2019 – upcoming London jazz gigs – Greg Foat Band and Neue Grafik Ensemble at Church of Sound (20th June); Niechęć, High Definition Quartet, EABS and trios with Marcin Masecki and Kuba Więcek for the Polish Jazz London Series (4th July, 16th August, 19th September, 18th October, 21st November)

June 2019 – assorted upcoming London gigs – Block4 and Lynda Beckett’s multi-media recorder concert (15th), Arch Garrison, Charles Bullen and Kavus Torabi play Clapham Library (15th); cellotronics-and-percussion improv with BirdWorld at Wigmore Hall (18th June); North Sea Radio Orchestra, John Greaves, Annie Barbazza and others reinvent Robert Wyatt in ‘Folly Bololey’ (27th)

June 2019 – Daylight Music’s summer season in London, continued – ‘From Call to Choir’ with Dominic Stichbury, Ben See, Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Archie and a clutch of chorals (15th June), Piney Gir, She Choir and Oly Ralfe (22nd June); Xenia Pestova Bennett, Ligeti Quartet, Snowpoet, Muted Summer Landscape and the magnetic resonator piano (29th June)

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