Solo set at hcmf//

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.

Ripsaw Catfish – Office Hours EP

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!

Sightlines and light-maps: exhibition at Project DIVFUSE

I’m very happy to announce Sightlines and light-maps, an exhibition with live improvised music to (belatedly) celebrate the launch of Setlist zine vol. 4! Taking place over the weekend of 6th, 7th and 8th September at Project DIVFUSE in East London, the exhibition will focus on the two image-based Setlist zines, volumes 2 and 4, with work by Sam Andreae, Old Bort, Angela Guyton, Bell Lungs
, Kim Macari, Khabat Abas, Sophie Cooper, Hannah McCann, Livia Garcia, Tullis Rennie and Benedict Taylor. To date only seen as tiny printed pages, artists’ contributions will be enlarged to (comparatively) huge sizes and projected onto the walls. Responding to the visuals with improvised live sets will be members of improvising large ensemble ONe_ Orchestra NEw and Setlist artists.

Project DIVFUSE is a fantastic micro-artspace run by Livia Garcia (herself one of the artists who contributed to Setlist 4, as you’ll have seen above). After being involved in the zine project, Livia offered up the space to host a launch event, and we’ve ended up with a whole weekend! It’s going to be great to see everyone’s artwork in projection-form, and copies of the zines will be on sale.

Entry to the exhibition is free, and it will be open on:

Friday 6th September 17:00-19:00
Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th September 14:30-16:00

Across the weekend there will be a cluster of live performances:

Friday 6th September
19:00 – Benedict Taylor (viola) and Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone)

Saturday 7th September
16:30 – Barbie Mukoda (solo flutes)
18:00 – Caroline Kraabel (alto saxophone) and John Edwards (double bass)

Sunday 8th September
16:30 – Sue Lynch (solo saxophone)
18:00 – Kate Carr (electronics) and Cath Roberts (electronics)

Tickets for the live sets are £7, or £12 to attend two performances. There are only 8 spaces available for each set! Head to the Project DIVFUSE website to reserve your place.

SETLIST 4!

Out today is Setlist 4! The final installment in my Setlist series of mini-zines as tools for improvisation. For this zine we return to the visual realm, with a theme of (miniature) maps. Once again a great bunch of artists said yes to this and have risen to the challenge, so in Setlist 4 you’ll find work by:

Khabat Abas
Sophie Cooper
Hannah McCann
Livia Garcia
Tullis Rennie
Benedict Taylor

All the zines have been printed by the excellent Footprint Workers’ Co-op in Leeds, and this one is no exception. This time I went with a super nice teal ink, and the A7 mini-zines are riso-printed on recycled paper as usual. I’m really pleased with how they came out; the dark teal colour brings a nice high-constrast quality that works great for images – whereas with text-based zines like Setlist 1 and 3 I was able to get away with some light/bright colour inks.

Setlist 4 is available now from my web shop, which I’ve finally given a name: Ink-Paper-Sound. This was the name of the launch event I put together at Cafe Oto for Setlist 3, and I liked it so much I wanted it to stick around.

Although this is the last Setlist zine (probably), Ink-Paper-Sound is just getting started as a project. With that in mind, also out today is ‘A skeleton/some bones’, a double-sided graphic score zine by me! Fold it yourself, or get me to do it, and play the two structures either in booklet form or flat. Here’s my attempt to photograph it, which was actually quite tricky…

SPARC Symposium quartet performance

This Friday 24th May at City, University of London, a special quartet performance with Tullis Rennie, Charlotte Keeffe and Claudia Molitor! We will be taking on the stunning graphic scores that make up Wadada Leo Smith’s Four Symphonies, focussing on Spring and Summer. The material is really fascinating, and it will be a first meeting for this lovely combination of some of my favourite people. Can’t wait!

The concert is part of SPARC Symposium 2024: [Im]probable Networks. All week until Sunday, there’s an array of talks, installations and peformances happening at City and free to attend. You can register your attendance for all or some of it over on the university website…

CUEE 2024 concert

It’s that time of again…the City University Experimental Ensemble end of year concert is upon us! I’ve been leading the ensemble again this year and their final concert will take place next Wednesday 10th April in the Performance Space at City, University of London. It’s a public event, so all are welcome and tickets are free! Come along and hear the students present a programme of improvisation, conduction, a piece by guest artist Sam Andreae – plus there will be a film screening from the Field Recording Ensemble. Register your place on the City events page.

(I’m also pretty happy with my photo collage for this, above, using parts of Sam’s score and some photos of rehearsals/recordings…)

Sloth Racket + Anthropods double bill tour!

Announcing an exciting project for next month: Sloth Racket will be going on tour with Vienna-based band Anthropods! I’ve been working with Mark Holub for several months behind the scenes on this, first trying to persuade UK promoters that they want to book a double bill (harder than you might think), then writing and submitting an ultimately-unsuccessful funding application to Arts Council England.

Despite the lack of UK funding support, the tour is able to go ahead thanks to Anthropods getting a grant from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport. Without that we wouldn’t be able to bring the band over and make this cross-border European collaboration happen, so we’re very grateful. It’s a tough landscape out there at the moment in terms of making projects happen in the UK, and even with the Austrian support the tour as a whole is on an incredibly tight budget. But! It’s happening and we’re super stoked about that.

The bands will visit four cities:

17th April: Sheffield! Hosted by long-time Sloth Racket supporters Jazz At The Lescar.

18th April: Canterbury! Hosted by the awesome long-running series Free Range.

19th April: London! Hosted by essential improv scene haunt Hundred Years Gallery.

20th April: Norwich! Hosted by fresh new artist-run DIY space Ambition’s Graveyard.

If you’re local to London or Norwich, you can support the tour by buying tickets in advance. Obviously we love people showing up and paying on the door – don’t let me stop you! – but getting your tickets in advance helps ease our budget-frazzled minds and gives us an idea of how the tour finances might end up when it’s all done. This makes us happy. Plus, they’re a little bit cheaper than on the door. So if you plan on coming out to see us in those cities, head over to our London tickets page or the Norwich tickets page!

For Sheffield, you can contact Jazz At The Lescar to buy tickets by following the link on their site, and in Canterbury it’s free entry (because it’s Free Range!).

Finance realness aside, I really am excited to take the band out for a run of consecutive dates again. It’s going to be great to share the bill with Anthropods and hear how the two bands’ music evolves as we move through the tour. Hope to see you out there. Plus, I’m pretty pleased with the wonky 3-D text I drew for the tour poster.

Ending this post with a nice new photo of Sloth Racket by Jonathan Crabb, taken at my Ink-Paper-Sound night at Cafe Oto last week. Thanks to everyone who came out to that; I had a fantastic time. It was brilliant to celebrate the zine project with a packed house!