Category Archives: composition

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.

Ink-Paper-Sound: Setlist 3 zine launch at Cafe Oto

I’ve put together a special night at Cafe Oto next month, to celebrate the third edition of the Setlist zine series! On Tuesday 19th March a great bunch of improvisers – all of whom are involved in the project as contributors – will play sets using material from the zines. We will have two new trios assembled especially for the event, a set from Sloth Racket, and projections of some of the zine artwork. There will be copies of the brand new hot-off-the-press Setlist volume three, which features another super nice lineup of contributors to be announced shortly. The trios on the night will be:

Khabat Abas / Dee Byrne / Bell Lungs

David Birchall / Kate Carr / Tullis Rennie

Sloth Racket will play a set using zine material mashed through some of my compositions from the band’s repertoire so far!

Most likely the night will focus on the first two zines, meaning that the music will take as its starting points text and visual contributions by some of the following: Kim Macari, Bell Lungs, Anton Hunter, Angela Guyton, Graham Dunning, Kate Carr, Dee Byrne, Old Bort, David Birchall and Sam Andreae.

Tickets are on sale from the Cafe Oto website now!

And you can grab your copies of the first two zines from my webshop…

‘And then the next thing you know’ at hcmf// 2021

This post is an attempt to document the process of making my piece And then the next thing you know (coming up on Friday 19th November at hcmf//), as it has involved working in new ways. I wrote briefly about this here last summer, when I was chosen as one of the artists to receive a COVID-19 commission from hcmf//. The brief was to create a new work for up to three players to be performed at the 2021 edition of the festival, and my pitch was a trio piece for Tullis Rennie, Otto Willberg and myself inspired by Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View.

I’ve had a photo of Parker’s artwork – the fragments of an exploded garden shed hung in a gallery space – pinned up by my desk for a few years. The image of the component parts suspended in space resonates with my ideas about structuring compositions; a lot of my approach to writing music involves breaking down the elements of a composition and thinking about what should be pre-determined (and to what extent) by me in advance and what should be improvised collectively in the moment by the band. Then, when the pandemic hit in early 2020, the deconstructed fragments frozen in space began to reflect both my state of mind and the state of my work life, which had been turned upside down by cancellations, postponements and general uncertainty. It was these feelings that led to my idea for the hcmf// piece.

My plan was to make a giant graphic score and then deconstruct it – destroy it really – so that it became a collection of disconnected fragments. The original structure of the score and the information within it would be lost, leaving a garbled mess of partial material and no obvious way to go about playing it. This would then become a giant hanging object that I would suspend in the performance space, and that would be our ‘score’ for a piece improvised trio music.

Something was taking shape…maybe

Turning an idea into reality

Once it had sunk in that this was really happening, my first job was to work out how to construct the physical object. What would it be made of? How big did it need to be? How and where would I make it? This was a fascinating process and opened up a whole new area of making something. Although I regularly make physical objects as part of my work – collage scores, booklets, a zine, hand-printed CD covers, etc – I’d never made anything this….big. Plus, the space we would play in was suddenly important in a new way: I needed to know its dimensions so I could have an idea about the size of the hanging score-fragment-cluster-object. Once I had that information, the way forward seemed to be to build a scale model. Again, not something I’ve needed to do before…

Scale model in progress

Busting out the paint and cardboard

Over the summer of 2021 I started to gather what I needed to make the score. I wanted the whole thing to be made out of recyclable (and ideally compostable/biodegradable) materials, so I settled on using greyboard; a very stiff, recycled cardboard. It has a textured looking surface but is actually smooth and perfect for painting onto. After working out the size of my giant score (6m x 4m!) I ordered up the board.

Initially I’d imagined the score to be a greyscale object, with the information painted on using black lines – like a giant version of my usual paper scores. Once I started gathering materials though, I realised I wanted to add colour. As time went on, the grey and black object seemed a bit bleak, and I wanted to add an injection of energy and hope, so I decided to use….neon paint! For the black lines I got some really fat paint markers.

The next thing to sort out was where to make the giant score. Unsurprisingly there isn’t 6m x 4m of free floorspace in my flat, so it needed to be somewhere else. Luckily, the building where I use a shared studio has a bookable project space, and my friend and studiomate Sam had some time booked in August that he didn’t have any plans for. I moved in and spent an intense few days making the score.

Part of the score laid out

As the fragments were ultimately going to hang in space, I realised that I needed to make it double sided. This meant painting it twice. It took a day to do each side, leaving the paint to dry overnight before flipping all the panels and starting again from scratch. The two sides ended up looking really different; based on the same structure but with a lot of variation in the graphics and notation.Painting the giant score

Once it was all painted up, I had to get it out of the space asap as the room was about to be used for an s10c gig! I took a lot of photos of the score laid out – both sides and a scrambled combination of both – as this would be the last time it would appear in this form.

The other side…

Scrambled panels from both sides creating a nice effect

I then stacked up the panels onto my baritone trolley and loaded out. After that, they lived under my sofa for a couple of months…Ready for transport

Cutting room floor

It was the beginning of October when I was able to work on this project again. The painted boards were waiting under the sofa, and the next stage was the cut. I had already tested cutting the greyboard with a stanley knife over summer, so I got straight on with carving up the panels over a couple of days. It was interesting to think about the fragments hanging in the space, making sure I had a variety of different sizes and shapes. My scale model was very useful at this point to keep a clear idea of what I was aiming for – although the final arrangement would be improvised once I was in the physical venue space in November.

Off-cuts

To hang the fragments I decided to use neon-coloured twine. I conducted a few tests to see whether the twine I was looking at was up to the job, and after hanging large pieces of cardboard around the flat for days at a time decided that it was. With all my cut-up pieces finished, the next job was to make the holes for hanging. Once that was done the physical object was finished and ready to be shipped to Huddersfield!

Reinforcing the holes…with pink gaffa tapeOn its way out!

Audio fragments

In addition to the deconstructed score, I wanted to bring in an element of fragmented audio to the performance. The trio had rehearsed several times in lockdown remotely, using JackTrip, so I had server recordings of our improvisations. This struck me as the perfect raw material: the sounds of us trying to connect musically when we couldn’t be in a room together. I listened back to the sessions and pulled out some snippets, then distributed them to the trio. In performance, we will all have the material on hand to throw into the music, using samplers and electronics to mangle, chop and distort our original sounds. Here they are in their raw form:

At the time of writing, the performance is later this week. All the elements are in place and I’m looking forward to finally being in the space, impovising with the score and fragments to create some collective music together in a room….

The trio playing at Hundred Years Gallery, December 2019 – the last time we played together in person!

Save the date: Sloths inside the internet on 29th March

A quick post to say that you’ll be able to listen in to the last session of Sloth Racket’s R&D project ‘A Room Inside The Internet’ (see earlier blog post) on Monday 29th March. We’ll be playing some of the new music from the past five months of these sessions, in its current work-in-progress state. A taste of the next album?!

Full details of where to listen and what time coming soon…

More RITI scores in production last month

Sloth Racket: A Room Inside The Internet

This post is about a project I’m just starting. It’s not something public, so there’s no music to listen to, videos to check out or livestream to tune into. But it’s my current focus during these winter months, so I’m documenting it here and may write some updates as the project goes on. This weekend Sloth Racket will hold our second of five sessions in ‘a room inside the internet’!

Seth Bennett attempts a deep dive into cyberspace

When the pandemic scuppered our plans for a 2020 tour, I needed to find something that would keep us playing together and create some paid work to replace live shows. Arts Council England re-opened their Project Grants programme in July, with an altered focus to take into account the challenging conditions artists (along with the entire world) are now operating in, and I began to think about how I could put together a funding application to support us to make work, even without any touring.

Over the summer I had been lucky enough to take part in online group jams as part the testing of Noise Orchestra’s ongoing R&D project. This involved ad-hoc bands of up to six improvisers, playing together over the internet using some software called JackTrip. Noise Orchestra (David Birchall and Vicky Clarke) were working towards what is now their Autonomous Noise Unit system, where players can use a simple plug-and-play device to connect to a hubserver and jam in real-time with other people also connected. JackTrip has amazing audio quality and incredibly low latency, meaning that the experience is pretty close to playing with someone in the next room in a studio, for example. Tom Ward worked on the server-side development of the ANU project, so I heard a lot about it as it developed – and it became clear that JackTrip could be the tool we needed to safely collaborate as a band during the pandemic.

The mighty ANU

I applied for a Project Grant to support a five month development period with Sloth Racket, made up of writing time for me to compose new material, and five remote band sessions – one every month from November 2020 to March 2021. ‘A Room Inside the Internet’ – a phrase used by Dave Birchall to describe JackTrip – became the project name. It was strange to write a grant application where no artists would actually meet each other, where the only in-person public engagement was in a speculative post-pandemic future, and where there was no income from other sources at all (not even any door gigs!). Noise Orchestra agreed to be a partner and provide some ANU for band members who couldn’t connect with their existing home setups, and Tom came on board to set us up our own ‘sloth server’ – the virtual rehearsal room. Our alto player Sam Andreae, who is also part of Noise Orchestra’s project, agreed to do the ANU setup.

Despite the remote-working aspect and pandemic context, the project was very appealing to me as it would focus exclusively on creating and developing new material for a block of time, without any of the other work involved in being a band, like booking tours or preparing releases. I actually like doing that work and it’s a huge part of being an artist, but it can also kill creativity and take over my headspace. In a weird dark way, the impossibility of booking live shows was a chance to step off that treadmill. I put the application in and hoped for the best.

After only four weeks, I got the decision email and was pretty ecstatic to see that the Arts Council were offering me the full amount I applied for. Since then I’ve been working on new material, and we played online for the first time in November. It’s totally different from rehearsing in person, but SO good to play together again. And we have four more sessions to try out the new music I create in the writing time. The funding has allowed us to take time for experimentation with no pressure of a performance endpoint, no studio date looming on the horizon. (Although, of course, I’d love to book both a studio date and some touring as soon as possible after the project finishes.)

Score preparation – sets of these modules went in the post to band members

The Project Grants scheme in its current guise (until March 2021) does not require the usual 10% minimum income from other sources, or the sort of public engagement that was previously expected. It’s quite similar to their Developing Your Creative Practice funding, in that during this exceptional time the Arts Council are encouraging applications that focus on R&D: basically, time to think and work on stuff – in preparation for taking our new work out there into a future where live music as we know it is happening again. If you’re an artist (working in England), maybe you knew this already. But if you didn’t, and if you have some development type work that could use funding support, it would be worth reading the Projects Grant guidance.

Noise Orchestra have now launched a website for their ANU system – worth checking out if you’re interested to read more about what they do. They have hooked up jams involving musicians from all around the UK and further afield, including live broadcasts for the Manchester concert series Curious Ear. Online collaboration is not like playing together in a room, in person. It’s something else. But I’ve found over the past few months that in its own way, it does have a good go at scratching the itch. And for bands who might find it difficult/impossible/undesirable to meet in person during the pandemic, it’s a fantastic way to keep making music together.

As part of our last session in March 2021 (closer than it sounds), there will be a live ‘open rehearsal’ broadcast; you’ll be able to tune in and hear us playing the new music from our five different locations. I’ll post the details here when I have them…

My baritone in the internet

hcmf// commission! (…and Double Bass Comments poster!)

Some really excellent news to announce today! I have been selected as one of the artists for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (hcmf//) COVID-19 Commissions. The commissions are the festival’s response to the pandemic, offering artists some paid work now when things are pretty bleak for live performance. I’ll be writing a new piece for trio, to be performed at hcmf// at a later date. With my 2020 year planner in the recycling bin due to loads of future work being cancelled or postponed indefinitely, this is really brilliant news and I feel very lucky to have been chosen. I’ll be writing about the project on the blog as it develops.

In other news, there’s a new merch item up on the Sloth Racket site for tomorrow’s Bandcamp Friday and it’s something quite special. For many years, our bass player Seth has been collecting people’s verbal reactions to his double bass (usually when they see him on public transport or walking down the street) using the hashtag #doublebasscomments. Sloths guitarist Anton recently decided that this needed to be taken to a whole different level, and asked the brilliant artist and friend of Sloth Racket Angela Guyton to make a cartoon of some of the comments. The resulting A2 POSTER is now on sale!! Edition of 20, so grab one quick for the bassist in your life…

Vonnegut Collective Mindful Miniature

The lovely Vonnegut Collective have swung into action during the lockdown with their ‘Mindful Miniatures’ project, and I was very happy to be asked to contribute a track. For the project, participants take a guided audio walk and then respond with a piece of text, an image, a video etc. These are then passed on to artists for us to respond in turn with some music and sound. A nice process! I took the opportunity to experiment with multi-tracking the homemade percussion instruments I’ve been making, as well as blowing on a piece of plastic pipe from the beer shop with a sax mouthpiece (of course). I’m pretty happy with the results, and had a joyous morning creating the track. You can listen to it on the Vonneguts’ website. Hats off to VC for providing some work for artists during the pandemic and creating good vibes.

Some percussion bits (taken on a different session – no cymbals were used on the VC track).

‘Boundaries’ released today!

Out today is something I’m really happy to be involved with: Boundaries, an LP on the new multi.modal label. Based at SPARC (Sound Practice and Research @ City), a research centre at the Music Department of City, University of London, multi.modal is run by Tullis Rennie and Claudia Molitor. In their own words:

‘multi.modal is a new London based record label that muddies the borders between improvisation, field recording and composition. Each release on the label will triangulate these artistic spaces and reflect contemporary music practices, which tend to be collaborative and multimodal.’

I was lucky enough to be invited to work with City University Experimental Ensemble in April 2017, making a new graphic score, March Of The Egos, for them as well as playing my piece Off-World (as heard on the Favourite Animals album). We performed the two pieces at IKLECTIK, and it’s this recording that you can hear on side B of ‘Boundaries’.

The title of the release refers to side A of the LP: two interpretations of Chieko Shiomi’s Boundary Music. This 1963 text score reads: ‘Make the faintest possible sound to a boundary condition whether the sound is given birth to as a sound or not. At the performance, instruments, human bodies, electronic apparatus or anything else may be used.’

The Boundaries album is distributed by NMC Recordings and can be ordered from their website. I also have a couple of copies that I’ll be selling at gigs, so come and find me on a merch table somewhere soon!

Lastly I should mentioned the beautiful design work by Alexander Rennie. Look at the gorgeous cover!

Update: I’ve been alerted to a lovely review of this record on the Further blog, in which Mat Smith describes CUEE’s performances of my pieces as ‘a vibrant, colourful, euphorically noisy collision between noir jazz and electronics’ (Off-World) and ‘a discordant, joyously sprawling piece wherein each instrument and player seems to be vying for airtime’ (March Of The Egos). Thanks Mat!

What Love

This month I’m part of Seth Bennett’s ‘What Love’ project; three gigs for a brand new group, interpreting/responding to the music of Charles Mingus. Also playing in the ensemble will be Kim Macari (trumpet), Ollie Dover (alto saxophone and bass clarinet), George Murray (trombone), Adam Fairhall (piano), Johnny Hunter (drums) and of course Seth on bass. Each member of the band will bring an arrangement of a Mingus composition (or their own Mingus-inspired new composition). It should be good fun! You can catch us in Sheffield, Cambridge and Manchester. See the flyer below for dates and venues…Update: now with rehearsal video….

New Sloth Racket video

Sloth Racket has a new video! Our good friend Ben Owen has made this great short film of us playing at a LUME gig at The Vortex in May this year. The piece we play is called ‘Shapeshifters’ and will appear on our second album, coming out in Summer 2017.

More videos of the band can be found on the Sloth Racket page. Also this month, some new nice words about the band have appeared online; from Dave Sumner on his latest Bird Is The Worm ‘This Is Jazz Today’ dispatch, and from Stewart Smith in his 2016 jazz/improv roundup on The Quietus. Thanks both!