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.
Category Archives: flyers and posters
Sloth Racket live dates in February!
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…
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.
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!
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…
Sloth Racket March dates
Two dates coming up for Sloth Racket next month! We’re heading to Manchester on 2nd March to play at David Birchall’s great Curious Ear series, part of a cluster of relaxed afternoon shows he’s putting on at St Margaret’s Church. Then on 19th March we’re in London for a set at a special evening I’m putting together at Cafe Oto, about which there will be more information very soon…
Sloth Racket October gigs
Sloth Racket are heading out for a geographically-challenging weekend next month, playing two gigs before we go into the studio. Buy tickets now to catch us in Glasgow or Brighton – and nowhere in between!
***Glasgow tickets and info***
***Brighton tickets and info***
Summer duo gigs with Dee Byrne – and TAPE!
This summer Dee and I are playing a cluster of gigs as a duo, in London, Bristol and Antwerp! We’re working on acoustic saxophone improvisations as well as a new electronic version of the duo with me on Lyra-8 synthesiser and Dee processing her sax with effects pedals, which we’ll do at BRÅK for the first time and then record.
24th June – BRÅK at waterintobeer, Brockley, London
26th June – Cafe Kino, Bristol with Clarkson/Grigg/Hill and Carnivorous Plants
28th June – Flim Flam at Ryan’s Bar, Stoke Newington, London
25th August – Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp, Belgium
To mark the occasion, our 2020 duo album Disembark! is now available as a cassette….you can grab one from Luminous, or from the merch table at one of the gigs. I’m very happy with how these prints came out – most of them are the product of a very hot day in the studio, when my printing got slightly freeform and chaotic, and it’s led to some rad results. Every individual case is different and will be shipped randomly!
TREAD INTO MULCH
Another gig for the duo of Graham Dunning and me is coming up this month, at the squelchily-named TREAD INTO MULCH series, run by Paul Margree. The gig is happening at Hundred Years Gallery on Friday 26th May; we’re sharing the bill with two solo sets from Paul (as Ivy Nostrum) and John Macedo. I’m really enjoying the way the duo is developing, and looking forward to another outing!
New BRÅK dates for early 2023
A new season of BRÅK is upon us once again! This month I’ll be collaborating with Khabat Abas (cello) for the first time, on baritone. In February it’s the return of my long-running duo with Benedict Taylor, but we’re going to try it out with me on live electronics. And then I’ll be taking the electronics back there again for the April gig, with Graham Dunning. Should be a nice cluster of gigs: lots of lovely guests. Join us in the shop…