Quick post about a livestream gig I’m doing next Monday, 7th June. A trio set with Tom Ward and Tullis Rennie for City, University of London! We’ll be playing some City students’ compositions along with our own improvised trio music. Head to the City website for details of how to tune in, as well as info on the rest of their Summer Sounds concert season.
A lovely couple of mid-December gigs coming up. On Friday 13th December it’s the return of my trio with Otto Willberg and Tullis Rennie, this time at Hundred Years Gallery:
And then the next night, Saturday 14th December, it’s the last BRÅK of 2019 at waterintobeer! With a host of Yuletide guests….
Come one, come all, to hear some improvised music this festive season…
In August I’m heading to Belgium to play at Sound In Motion’s Summer Bummer Festival 2019 in Antwerp! The festival have put together a trio of me, Dirk Serries and Tullis Rennie. A first meeting in this lineup, so it should be a really nice set. The rest of the day looks great too…you can read more about the festival on the Sound In Motion website.
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!
The excellent waterintobeer have invited us back for a third series of BRÅK improv gigs in the shop. I’m looking forward to playing duos with Dee Byrne, Rachel Musson and Alex Ward this time around, and Colin and Tom also have a great selection of guests lined up. Join us in Brockley for more evenings of beer and music…
In other BRÅK news, I’ve just seen some great photos by Arek Golosz taken at our September and October gigs last year. You can check out the full selection on the gallery page of our new BRÅK website, but here are a couple of my sets with Tullis Rennie and Kim Macari:
A new thing for the Autumn: BRÅK. With Colin Webster and Tom Ward, I’ll be co-hosting this new night of improv triple bills at the excellent beer shop waterintobeer in Brockley (our local!). We were invited to put on some music at the shop earlier this year as part of the Brockley Max festival, and after that initial gig went really well we’ve been asked back for more. Each date will see the three of us play with different duo partners. Check out Colin’s poster below for the lineup. The name is pronounced ‘brock’ (geddit?) and apparently means ‘noise’ in Norwegian and ‘fight’ (!) in Swedish…
A cluster of new releases have appeared over the past month or so, while this blog has been concentrating on Sloth Racket activities, so here they are in one post.
First up, I’m really pleased to have collobarated with Tullis Rennie on Blurts/Growls, an album compiled from our live trombone/baritone sax improvisations at Cafe Oto Project Space and Free Range in Canterbury late last year. We spent some time together cutting up the music into shortish tracks, making it more of a ‘studio’ type project, although it’s assembled from live recordings. The album came out on Luminous as half of a special LUME Festival double release, and Tullis was even cool with me doing some white goods themed cover art…
The other half of the festival release was the third volume of the Live At LUME fundraiser album series. This edition is a selection of live recordings from the LUME Lab gigs we put on at IKLECTIK in the first half of this year, with tracks from ensembles led by Julie Kjær, Craig Scott and Anton Hunter. All proceeds from sales of these albums go towards future LUME activities: it makes a big difference for us that there’s a small stream of extra income we can use to supplement any project funding we’re able to secure. Have a listen to the ace new music by Julie, Craig and Anton below.
Finally, Tullis and I appear again on Noon: 22nd Century, a new cassette from the Zero Wave label. The album is two live sets by Far Rainbow with guests: one one side Colin Webster and me, and Tullis and me on the other (me me me!). The set with Tullis is from the same Free Range gig that we took some of the Blurts/Growls material from, so there’s a nice connection between the two albums. The tape has super cool artwork by Emily Mary Barnett (who plays drums in Far Rainbow).