Author Archives: cath

Quartz Sand album announced!

I’m super happy to post that the Quartz Sand album Stratigraphy is now available to pre-order from Flaming Pines! Quartz Sand is Kate Carr on electronics and objects, and me on the Lyra-8 synthesiser. Have a listen to some tracks and pre-order your copy over on the label Bandcamp site:

New A7 print project: Raw Materials


New A7 booklets! Following on from the 2023/24 Setlist zine series, Raw Materials is my next project for Ink-Paper-Sound. At London Centre for Book Arts this year I’ve been learning how to use the risograph machine to print my own publications, experimenting with one, two and three-colour print. For Raw Materials I wanted to create something new out of discarded, unfinished things that I found at home and in my studio, and ended up bringing together words from the back of scrap paper, elements from backburner graphic scores that I didn’t finish or use for anything, and offcuts from linocut printmaking that I then scanned to make digital artwork. As with the Setlist zines, when making these I was imagining them as starting points for improvisation, hoping that they could be some kind of raw kernels for other future live work as well as standing alone.

Raw Materials 1 and 2 are on sale now from the Ink-Paper-Sound webshop; read on for info on each one.

Raw Materials 1: Deep-Sea Hunting
Fragments of text extracted from the scrap paper pile, lino-print offcuts dragged into the digital realm, and elements from an unfinished graphic score are mashed together in this three-colour booklet, with new cover artwork (blue variant) created especially for Raw Materials.

Raw Materials 2: Boxes
Another unfinished, parked graphic score is deconstructed into its component parts and presented as a series of unevenly-sized boxes. With unifying new cover artwork (yellow variant) created for the Raw Materials series.

Guesting with Last Dream of the Morning at Cafe Oto

It was an absolute pleasure to be invited to join Last Dream of the Morning for the second night of their residency at Cafe Oto! The gig was totally amazing – what a trio. I took the Lyra-8 and it was a fantastic workout for the synth. Working with it in an improvising ensemble setting is a lot of fun as it pushes my playing to the limit; each time I do it I think the machine comes out with sounds I’ve never heard before. So that’s nice! Here’s hoping this formation plays again…

New video: Composite Mashworks!

Tullis Rennie and I have been working on documentation for our duo project, starting with this video. This improvisation is from a studio session at SET Lewisham in March,when we were trying out the performance mode of the duo before our set at INTRASPECT, University of Surrey. The project now has a name too: Composite Mashworks! More on this coming soon…

Out today: Creatures of Tooth

Out today: the first release by Creatures of Tooth! This is the duo of Tom Ward on bass clarinet and me on the Lyra-8 senthesiser. We played a set together last year at Lewisham Arthouse, then recently went into the studio for the next stage of the project. Mixed and mastered by Martin Clarke, the two resulting tracks see us stretch out and explore this acoustic/electronic combination of instruments. The recording is out today on Madwort Recordings, as a cassette and digital album.


I’m very pleased with the cassette sleeves, the design of which Tom and I worked on together and which feature a photograph of Tom’s printed in bright orange riso print. This was part of my ongoing explorations at London Centre for Book Arts as a studio member, and was a nice challenge. I drew up a template for the sleeves, printed them up and then cut them (with help!) using the LCBA guillotine. Having cut a lot of sleeves for previous releases one by one, by hand, using a knife, over many hours, I found this process pretty game-changing!

Trio gig at Moers Festival

Rehearsals are underway this week for an exciting trip to Moers Festival! I was very happy to be invited to bring a trio to perform as part of the hcmf// ‘X perimental N counters’ night at the festival on Friday 6th June. The set will be a first-time collaboration between Kate Carr, Iris Colomb and me, and we had a really great first rehearsal yesterday so I’m pretty excited about it! Info is over on the Moers Festival website.

Quartz Sand set at light.box ‘Eyre’ album launch

Coming up on Friday 9th May at Hundred Year’s Gallery is the third gig of my collaboration with amazing sound artist Kate Carr. Our duo Quartz Sand is i due to release an album on Kate’s label Flaming Pines this Autumn. In the mean time we’re very happy to have been invited to play at the launch of light.box and Tom Challenger’s new release ‘Eyre’, out on Bead Records. Head to the HYG website listing for info.