Quick post about an impending gig! I’m at the Horse Improv Club on Thursday 17th April, joining The Remote Viewers on Lyra-8. This is a fun group for me, getting to interact with two saxes (Adrian Northover and Dave Petts) and bass (John Edwards) on my synth.
Please note the venue change for this gig, which will be at Living Space near Waterloo. Tickets can be bought in advance over on the Horse tickests page.
A couple of notable gigs coming up this month that I felt warranted a blog post, weirdly both happening in universities…
Over the past couple of months, Tullis Rennie and I have been working together to develop a new iteration of our duo practice. It’s been a while since Blurts/Growls came out in 2017 (!), and although we’ve worked together loads since then it hasn’t been in duo format. The catalyst for this new chapter was an invitation to be part of INTRASPECT VII, a concert series at University of Surrey organised by Bill Thompson. Bill was keen to bring my 2021 hcmf//project And then the next thing you know to Surrey, and rather than repeating it exactly as it was then, I decided to create a totally reworked version for this performance, collaborating with Tullis.
In the studio in Hastings, earlier in March
Whereas in 2021 the cardboard fragmented score object was suspended from the ceiling and was not interacted with by the players, this time I wanted to make it a changing, shifting structure that we can alter. So there will still be hanging elements, alongside new standing elements and smaller parts that we can add or remove from the main structures. Working with the physical objects will be part of what we’re doing on stage, alongside electronic and acoustic sound-making. It will basically be, as Tullis said in one of our rehearsals, a giant playground…trombone, saxophone, electronic instruments, and a table of small objects/instruments will all be available. If this sounds like the kind of thing you’d like to see and hear unfolding live in front of you, the gig is happening on Thursday 3rd April in PATS Studio One at the University of Surrey and tickets are free.
Work in progress table structure
It seems unbelievable that another year has passed, but coming up the week after the Surrey gig is the final concert of my current cohort of students at the City St Georges Experimental Ensemble! On Wednesday 9th April we’ll be descending on the Performance Space at City with guest artist Iris Colomb, and sharing the bill with the Field Recording Ensemble led by Kate Carr. The students have been exploring new sonic territories this year and it promises to be an exciting night of improvisation, collaboration and…experimental room layouts?! Free tickets are available on the university website, and you can also catch Iris and me playing duo at BRÅK on Saturday 12th April.
My collage for the CUEE/FR gig listing
I had an excellent time last week at Robyn’s Rocket – this chirpy photo encapsulates the mood of the whole night! I was invited to join Mikey Chestnutt (right) and host Robyn Steward (left) for a trio set, which was good fun and traversed some suitably sci-fi sonic territories. Robyn’s Rocket is an inspiring project; playing there gave me a lot of food for thought about inclusivity at gigs – you can read about the work Robyn and the team do on the Robyn’s Rocket site.
(Photo by Siân O’Connor)
I’m heading down to the seaside in March to play a solo set at Sonics Hastings! Looking forward to revisiting my solo electronics setup and checking out some rad local sounds. The festival runs across the whole weekend and includes a long form collective improvisation on the Sunday afternoon – have a look at the rest of the lineup over on the festival site…
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…
I recently rediscovered these videos, made by an audience member (!), of all three live sets at Ink-Paper-Sound last March. Although making and publishing these without letting any of us know is pretty dubious behaviour, when it comes down to it the videos are a really nice document of our evening at Cafe Oto, so I’m posting them here. It was a fantastic event celebrating the launch of Setlist 3 with a packed house – a special night that I will remember for a long time!
Our Sloth Racket set:
The two fantastic trio sets:
2024 is done – and on only the third day of 2025 I’ll be ringing in the new year with this excellent bunch of people at Cafe Oto. Tickets on sale from the Oto site now!
I’m out and about this week with the live band for Tullis Rennie’s ‘Safe Operating Space’ project. We had a fantastic night in Hastings on Saturday and we’re looking forward to bringing the music to London on Thursday – tickets for our early show at the Vortex are on sale now from the venue website. Between now and then we’re also playing a showcase set at Bristol Beacon, then this coming weekend Tullis heads up to Manchester and Glasgow for two solo A/V shows. If any of the dates are near you, I highly recommend checking this project out. Tullis’ music is great and the combination of electronic and acoustic spaces is fresh and exciting.
The Safe Operating Space album is out now on Efpi Records:
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.
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.
