Category Archives: flyers and posters

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…

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…

New Sloth Racket album! Live dates in October!

The fifth studio album by Sloth Racket is out next month on Luminous! Recorded in April at Lightship 95 in London, then mixed and mastered by Alex Bonney, Organising Space will be available to pre-order from 23rd September as a digital album and CD. The physical format features a risograph-printed sleeve designed by me and printed up by Footprint Workers Co-op in Leeds. We’re all really happy with how the album has turned out, and I can’t wait to send it out into the world.

The band are out and about to celebrate the album with three live dates, including an album launch at Cafe Oto on 10th October. Tickets are on sale for all three dates: links can be found on the Sloths website. Join us…

Ripsaw Catfish new album and live dates

It’s been five years (!) since the release of the second Ripsaw Catfish album Namazu, so Anton and I are pretty excited that our third one will be coming out later this month! Recorded last September in Manchester, then mixed and mastered by Alex Bonney, Carapace sees us add my electronics to the mix and take the duo in a new direction. We’re very happy that it will be released on Raw Tonk again too. You can pre-order the album from Friday 10th June and it’s out on Friday 24th June. My flyer for this features Colin Webster’s awesome linocut album artwork, which will appear on the sleeves in hand-printed form.

To coincide with the release we’re going out on a mini-tour, with three live dates in the UK:

18th June – BRÅK @ waterintobeer, Brockley, London | 19:00, £5 or more
We’re launching the album in the beer shop! It seemed fitting considering that the label boss and 50% of the band are involved in running the gig. Info about BRÅK is on our website, and you can find out how to get to the shop on the wib site.

26th June – Soundhunt @ Thrive, Cambridge | 19:00, £5
Another new series here run by Dominic Lash and N.O Moore, who we’ll be sharing the bill with. The gig is happening at Thrive, a great vegan cafe within walking distance of the station. More venue info on the Thrive site.

19th July – Chance Meeting @ NIAMOS, Hulme, Manchester | 19:30, £9/£6 unwaged
In our other home city we’ll be playing at this brand new night, sharing the bill with THRAA. All the info you need can be found on the Chance Meeting site, where you can also follow a link to buy tickets for the gig.

Looking forward to getting out there with this band again!