BRÅK is back at our Brockley beer shop haunt waterintobeer with a winter season of gigs. Join us in November, December and January for more improvised duos in South East London. Hosts Colin Webster, Tom Ward and me are joined each month by guest artists. More info can be found at brakbrakbrak.co.uk
I just got back from a great week at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, running a five day music course for Aldeburgh Young Musicians called Sound Explorations! I put together a team of amazing artists – Sam Andreae, Dee Byrne, Graham Dunning and Nathan Gregory – and we collectively devised the week-long course taking in improvisation, experimental scores, composition, sound art and foley theatre.
The Aldeburgh Young Musicians programme invites guest artists to work with their cohort of young people, using the amazing facilities at Snape (see above – the main room we were working in!). As well as sharing our practice with the AYMs and making new music with them, it was also really nice to spend a week hearing about and experiencing each others’ work, plus collaborating together.
The setting was beautiful too: I got to see the sea for the first time since before the pandemic! Aldeburgh and Snape Maltings is an inspiring place to work, and I was so lucky to work with such a badass team of artists.
LUME has three new gigs booked at Hundred Years Gallery this autumn. I’ll be playing a solo set, a duo with Ruth Goller, and a trio set (cr-ow-tr-io) with Otto Willberg and Tullis Rennie. The trio will be launching our new album ‘Hold Music’, out on Luminous in December. Head to the LUME website for all the info about these gigs.
On Saturday 9th October, Sloth Racket will play its first gig since September 2019 – and it’s something a bit different. A few months ago Marsden Jazz Festival invited us to play at their 2021 edition as part of the New Stream programme, but it soon became apparent that Anton would be away on parental leave. As the band hadn’t played live for so long, Anton suggested we do it anyway – with a guest. Interesting! The festival were up for this plan, but everyone agreed that we shouldn’t just book a ‘dep’ guitarist. It was an opportunity to do something new and take the group into another sound-world…
With this in mind, we’ll be playing a special one-off set with our friend the amazing improviser Hannah Marshall on cello! This will be the first time we’ve played with a different line-up, and we’ll also be playing all-new music, bringing in ideas that have come out of our online lockdown R&D project ‘A Room Inside The Internet’ from earlier this year. I can’t wait to get most of the band together for this first meeting of new/old collaborators, and see where the music takes us.
You can catch our set at 5pm in St Batholomew’s Church, Marsden. There’s music all afternoon: we’re on after Vula Viel and John Pope Quintet, so it’s probably worth turning up for the whole event. All the info is on the Marsden Jazz Festival website and tickets are on sale now.
We’re getting close to the day when Spinningwork, a quartet that so far has only played online, will finally gather in the same room! Our set at Newcastle Festival Of Jazz And Improvised Music 2021 will also be the recording of our forthcoming album on the New Jazz And Improvised Music Recordings label attached to the festival. Tickets for our set are on sale now.
Film poster for Aelita: Queen of Mars
Ripsaw Catfish has a couple of live dates coming up this month, our first since pre-pandemic times. We’re at the Hexagon Theatre at the mac, Birmingham on 23rd September, sharing the bill with Richard Foote’s Double Trombone Quintet for TDE Promotions. After that we head to Manchester to play for NQ Jazz on 26th September, soundtracking the 1924 soviet sci-fi film Aelita: Queen of Mars for their film night.
Between those two gigs we’re going into the studio to record our third album for Raw Tonk Records. The label will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2022, and this release will be part of a batch of Raw Tonk Ten Years albums. During lockdown Anton and I have been experimenting with bringing my tabletop synths and objects into the Catfish setup, and I’m looking forward to continuing these explorations in the same room as each other…
Coming up on Friday 6th August, a duo set with Dee at s10c. This is the gig series attached to the Lewisham studio that I share with Sam Andreae, Mio Ebisu, Tom Ward and Hannah Marshall. Hannah, Sam and Mio put on a lovely gig in the space in 2019, so it’s great to see them starting up again. And the first gig for Dee and I for a long time too! The programme is still developing, so keep an eye on the website so see which artists will be involved.
It’s been a while! LUME is back, putting on gigs again in London. Our first outing is a pair of dates at Hundred Years Gallery, where we haven’t hosted a gig since December 2017. Three sets of improvised music in July and August, featuring a whole bunch of our favourite people…
Places are limited, so email the venue to reserve your place (pay on the door when you arrive).
More about the artists can be found on the LUME website, where you’ll also find a refreshed archive of all our gigs and projects since 2013. It was amazing to go through it all while working on the site….quite a list of stuff.
I’m very happy to be a guest presenter on The Efpi Show, a fortnightly radio show from the label Efpi Records – home of the first album of my own compositions Quadraceratops back in 2014. The show goes out today, Monday 21st June at 5pm on Camp Radio, and will be up on Mixcloud afterwards. [Edit: the Mixcloud player is below! And the page is here.]
Below is a complete tracklist from my episode, and I’ve included links to places where you can buy the music either direct from the artists or from their labels. Sometimes I couldn’t find the track/album in question, but I did find a place where the artist was selling other/more recent work, so I included those links. Some of the tracks are old pop songs that are widely available in the usual places…
Also on the show is an unreleased Ripsaw Catfish set recorded over JackTrip earlier this year, and an interview with Dee Byrne about her new Deemer + 1 album on Luminous.
Hope you enjoy the show! I had a lot of fun putting it together.
The Efpi Show with Cath Roberts, 21st June 2021
Camp Lo – Luchini AKA This Is It (from Uptown Saturday Night, 1997)
Andrew Weathers Ensemble – A Mountain Of Snakes, The High Plains, A Knee In The Earth (from The Thousand Birds In The Earth, The Thousand Birds In The Sky, 2020)
Rogue Three – I Really Kronenberged Up The Whole Place (from No Meat On Bumblebees, 2018)
Elliott Smith – Condor Avenue (from Roman Candle, 1994)
Okkyung Lee – Two Perfectly Shaped Stones (from Ghil, 2013)
MF Doom (prod. Flying Lotus) – Lunch Break
Deemer + 1 – Clear Seeing (from Aftermath, 2021)
[Interview: Dee Byrne]
Deemer + 1 – Kinetic Frenetic (from Aftermath, 2021)
Veruca Salt – Spiderman 79 (from American Thighs, 1994)
Silence Blossoms – King Of Everything (from Silence Blossoms, 2014)
Nut Club – Cheekbones (from December 2013, 2014)
[Ripsaw Catfish – Unreleased JackTrip set, February 2021]
Left-Handed Tapedeck Mix
(originally side A of a cassette mix for Sophie Cooper’s mixtape exchange in the first 2020 lockdown)
Ryoko Ono – pAq (from Alternate Flash Heads, 2015)
Georgia Anne Muldrow – Never A Day In Vain (from Early, 2009)
Laura Cole – Outgoing Vessels (from Enough, 2018)
Stephanie Richards – New Moon (from Fullmoon, 2018)
The Breeders – I Just Wanna Get Along (from Last Splash, 1993)
The B-52s – Dry County (from Cosmic Thing, 1989)
Max Tundra – Lights (from Mastered By Guy At The Exchange, 2002)
Scarub – Wishful Thinking (from Savvy Traveller, 1999)
Beck Hunters – Yes And No (from Has It Been Found?, 2019)
A nice gig for the Autumn has just been announced. I’m part of Spinningwork, a collaborative quartet that has been playing monthly on JackTrip during the pandemic. Tom Ward, Olie Brice, Johnny Hunter and I initially had a one-off online jam organised by Johnny, but it soon became something that met regularly. All the members are bringing compositions, and we’re now working towards an album, out in 2022 on New Jazz and Improvised Music Recordings.
The album will be recorded live at The Black Swan Venue Space, Newcastle Arts Centre as part of Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music 2021. How exciting to be going up to Newcastle for a gig again – it will be the first time in a long while. Tickets are on sale for the gig: it would be great if you could join us for this special live recording.