CUEE 2024 concert

It’s that time of again…the City University Experimental Ensemble end of year concert is upon us! I’ve been leading the ensemble again this year and their final concert will take place next Wednesday 10th April in the Performance Space at City, University of London. It’s a public event, so all are welcome and tickets are free! Come along and hear the students present a programme of improvisation, conduction, a piece by guest artist Sam Andreae – plus there will be a film screening from the Field Recording Ensemble. Register your place on the City events page.

(I’m also pretty happy with my photo collage for this, above, using parts of Sam’s score and some photos of rehearsals/recordings…)

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!

Out today: Setlist 3!

The third installment of my Setlist zine project is out today! For Setlist 3 I asked four of my favourite artists from the improvised/experimental music world to send me a question. As before, the texts are intended as starting points for improvisation, and I love what people came up with! The zine features work from:

honor ash
Laura Cole
Caroline Kraabel
Han-earl Park

As per the others, these zines are A7 riso-printed booklets on recycled paper, printed and assembled by the amazing Footprint Workers Co-op in Leeds. This time I went for neon pink ink – a decision I’m very happy with!

Copies are available from my webshop – or you could wait until the launch event next Tuesday 19th March at Cafe Oto! Either way, hope you enjoy it, and if you use it for a performance I’d love to hear about it.

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…

The Horse Improvised Music Club / Shrike Records Takeover at IKLECTIK

I’m a part of this huge lineup at IKLECTIK on 10th January, very sadly one of the last gigs happening there as the venue is being forced to close. All proceeds will be going towards future IKLECTIK projects as the organisers move forward to a new chapter. It should be a fantastic night, and I’ll be in a quartet with Sue Lynch, Charlotte Keeffe and Steve Noble…

Synth gets festive

Last year I was invited to record a Christmas carol for Corey Mwamba’s Freeness show on BBC Radio 3. I had just got the Lyra-8 synth about a week ago, and the result of those two things convenging was a fun session messing about with mashing samples of me singing a carol through the synth’s external input and seeing what happened. I remembered about the track today – so it’s now up on Bandcamp! Pay what you want, or not, for some pretty dark and mangled festive cheer….

Setlist zine volume 2 out today!

The second installment of my Setlist zine series is now available! After the first volume focussed on four-word micro-texts, for this one the brief was images. Any visual material was welcome, so long as it didn’t include any words at all. A fantastic group of artists are on board for this zine:

Sam Andreae
Old Bort
Angela Guyton
Bell Lungs

Kim Macari

It’s been a great process assembling the work into the zine format; quite different from the text-based one, bringing up different considerations to take into account when dealing with other people’s visual work and making sure it looks good. I went with a darker ink colour for this one, to give the images more definition, and I’m pleased with my choice of purple. After thinking about paper colour options for a while, I ended up sticking with the same as volume one in order to give maximum ink-paper contrast.

You can pick up a copy from my webshop, and hopefully this volume will also start to appear in physical-world shops too as I find stockists for the zine project.

If you do get hold of a zine – whichever volume – and use it in a performance, I’d love to hear about it! Do drop me a line as I’m interested to know what the zines end up doing….