They’re here….fresh new Sloth Racket shirts, the next phase of our birthday celebrations! Features a giant, fire-breathing sloth climbing over a cityscape that includes buildings from almost all* the places band members have lived since we formed: London, Dundee, Shipley, Stockport and Berlin…plus the Tyne Bridge as our first ever gig was in Gateshead.
Grab yours from our Bandcamp now! Other colours available…
*Not sure how this happened, but I forgot Manchester!
I had an excellent time last week at Robyn’s Rocket – this chirpy photo encapsulates the mood of the whole night! I was invited to join Mikey Chestnutt (right) and host Robyn Steward (left) for a trio set, which was good fun and traversed some suitably sci-fi sonic territories. Robyn’s Rocket is an inspiring project; playing there gave me a lot of food for thought about inclusivity at gigs – you can read about the work Robyn and the team do on the Robyn’s Rocket site.
(Photo by Siân O’Connor)
I’m heading down to the seaside in March to play a solo set at Sonics Hastings! Looking forward to revisiting my solo electronics setup and checking out some rad local sounds. The festival runs across the whole weekend and includes a long form collective improvisation on the Sunday afternoon – have a look at the rest of the lineup over on the festival site…
Out today is Ten Years of Live Sloths, an epic one hour and forty minutes-long live album with a track from each year of Sloth Racket’s existence! As part of our birthday celebrations this year I dug deep into the band’s archives and put together this selection. Recorded live all around the UK (and, in 2020 and 2021, over the internet) these tracks are a previously-unheard mix of unreleased material and live versions of material from our studio albums, lovingly excavated and served up in a freshly-mastered package for your listening pleasure….
More on this soon as a whole bunch of things are about to unfold, but this is a quick post to flag up TWO Sloth Racket live dates next month. As our tenth birthday year begins, we’re heading to:
Glasgow – 8th February – Old Hairdressers
Birmingham – 23rd February – Centrala (Fizzle)
Info at the links above!
Throughout this year we’ll be playing around the UK to celebrate ten years of Sloths, and there will be exciting releases and merch news too. Watch this space…
I recently rediscovered these videos, made by an audience member (!), of all three live sets at Ink-Paper-Sound last March. Although making and publishing these without letting any of us know is pretty dubious behaviour, when it comes down to it the videos are a really nice document of our evening at Cafe Oto, so I’m posting them here. It was a fantastic event celebrating the launch of Setlist 3 with a packed house – a special night that I will remember for a long time!
Our Sloth Racket set:
The two fantastic trio sets:
2024 is done – and on only the third day of 2025 I’ll be ringing in the new year with this excellent bunch of people at Cafe Oto. Tickets on sale from the Oto site now!
I’m out and about this week with the live band for Tullis Rennie’s ‘Safe Operating Space’ project. We had a fantastic night in Hastings on Saturday and we’re looking forward to bringing the music to London on Thursday – tickets for our early show at the Vortex are on sale now from the venue website. Between now and then we’re also playing a showcase set at Bristol Beacon, then this coming weekend Tullis heads up to Manchester and Glasgow for two solo A/V shows. If any of the dates are near you, I highly recommend checking this project out. Tullis’ music is great and the combination of electronic and acoustic spaces is fresh and exciting.
The Safe Operating Space album is out now on Efpi Records:
I’m very happy to have been invited back to hcmf// this year, for a solo set in support of Ghost Trance Duo on Saturday 23rd November! I’ve been working on a solo album project for a few months, and will be taking this opportunity to pull together some of the elements from that into a new live set. I’m calling it Patch Dynamics, and it will be in three sections:
1. Designs for defying gravity
2. Lift it out of itself
3. Under your pillow rush herds of walruses and whales
The music will combine sounds collected from the Lyra-8 and other instruments, with some live improvisation. Taken from ecology, the concept of patch dynamics seems to map onto not only the construction of sound and music out of interdependent elements, but also the fragility (and strength?) of arts ecosystems in the way that artists and projects connect across different scenes, places and art forms. The text I wrote for the festival went like this:
Patch dynamics is a set of three pieces constructed for this set as part of an ongoing solo project. Fragments of music and sound made using synthesisers, objects, saxophone and small instruments are combined to create a collage, with the performance guided by three graphic scores that are themselves (papery) collages inspired by the grouped audio samples. The visual realm of printed matter and drawings and the sonic realm of music are muddled and interlinked; ‘patch dynamics’ is a borrowed ecological term, describing a concept in which ecosystems and landscapes are understood as a living, constantly-changing mosaic of distinct, connected patches.
Anyway, it will be interesting to get stuck into the solo project and I’m glad to have a live date to help move it forward. I’ll be on before Ghost Trance Duo at 21:30.
Anton and I spontaneously released a new Ripsaw Catfish EP a few weeks ago! Office Hours is a series of tracks recorded in Anton’s, well, office. Originally intended just as private documents of a play together, we liked them so much we decided to put them ‘out there’. Add a photo of what was on my own desk, and the release was done. Hope you enjoy!