Alistair Zaldua is a composer, violinist and improviser. Alwynne Pritchard is a composer, vocalist, actor and writer. They began improvising together in Bergen while Alistair was at a residency at Alwynne’s music-theatre company Neither Nor. The restless invention and rapid musical reaction of Alistair’s amplified violin provides a counterpoint to Alwynne’s astonishing range of vocal techniques that can flit from playful to confrontational in a heartbeat.
‘a delivery between that of a rock-music diva and a verbal and physical contortionist’ (All About Jazz)
‘Pritchard explored a wide spectrum of vocal timbres through vowel shaping, varied vibrato speeds, tongue clicks, and vocal fry, all with incredible control of technique’
(I Care If You Listen)
Fresh from their London debut (at Iklectik), the quartet patternbook will play the opening set this evening. Maureen Wolloshin (oboe, cor anglais), Frances Knight (piano, accordion) Heledd Francis-Wright (flutes) and Nadia Tewfik-Bailey (violin) play improvised music with delicacy, poise and a generosity of listening.
🔗
Alistair Zaldua
Website
👂 Postcard #2 from album remote music
👂 Postcard #1 with Trio CZW (Canterbury)
Let Spin are a post-jazz quartet who’ve been making waves in the UK and European jazz scenes since they formed in 2012. Their new release, 'Thick As Thieves', sees their fiery energy find a more organic feeling of growth and reflection through collective improvisation.
Let Spin are: guitarist Moss Freed (Union Division, Spike Orchestra), saxophonist Chris Williams (Led Bib, Sarathy Korwar), bassist Ruth Goller (Skylla, Melt Yourself Down) & drummer Finlay Panter (Beats & Pieces Big Band).
‘British Punk Jazz with a wiry electrical crackle’ Uncut
‘I'm absolutely loving this album! It's a full listening journey’ Corey Mwamba, Freeness BBC Radio 3
‘An album of energy and synergy, Let Spin again show their absolute muscle and charm’ ★★★★ Liverpool Sound and Vision
The poet David Herd will read from his recent collection 'Walk Song'. Voted a book of the year by the Australian Book Review, this work grew from the Refugee Tales project and speaks of the need for activism, solidarity and a language of welcome.
‘passionately engaged, moving towards real change, charged with the vivid strength of a collective commons’ (Blackbox Manifold magazine)
🔗
Let Spin
Let Spin website
👂 Let Spin - Waveform Guru on Bandcamp
👁 Let Spin - Thick as Thieves trailer on YouTube
David Herd
David Herd - Walk Song
👁 David Herd reading 'Prologue' on YouTube
BL!NDMAN percussion quartet (playing Maureen Wolloshin, Sophie Stone, Joe Inkpen, Jan Foote), Patternbook, Els Van Riel & Stevie Wishart, Magz Hall & the Free Range Orchestra
Canterbury is warmed from its midwinter chill by striking presentations and performances by local, national and international sound makers, focusing on the newest of new music and sound.
and dynamic artists from the across the EU, including the Blindman percussion quartet from Brussels. An event open to all with an interest in new music and sound.
3.30pm-6.30pm
Daphne Oram building
3.30pm onwards: Student films, sound works and installations.
5pm: CCU Student Electronic Performances
5.30pm-6.30pm: The annual Daphne Oram lecture, Dr Magz Hall (room DO 0.14)
7pm-8pm
Anselm Studio 1
BL!NDMAN Percussion Quartet premiere new works by
Maureen Wolloshin, Sophie Stone, Joe Inkpen and Jan Foote.
8.15pm-10pm
St Gregory's Centre for Music
8.15pm-8.35pm: patternbook; Maureen Wolloshin, Heledd Francis-Wright, Nadia Tewfik-Bailey and Frances Knight.
8.35pm-9.30pm: Els Van Riel live projection, Stevie Wishart (hurdy gurdy)
9.30pm: Free Range Orchestra
Free entry, booking essential (see below)
Email: artsandculture@canterbury.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1227 922994
A collaboration between the Gulbenkian Arts Centre and Free Range
The singer Maggie Nicols was a founding member of the Feminist Improvising Group in 1977 as well as being a key member of John Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Keith Tippett's ambitious jazz-rock group, Centipede. For over 30 years she has run regular improvisation meetings called The Gatherings.
The Free Range Orchestra grew out of our series of events. They are a collective of musicians, dancers and poets with a shared love of improvisation and experimentation. Their performances combine the uncompromisingly anarchic with a celebration of creativity and community.
For this, the final show of our tenth anniversary year, Maggie Nicols will lead the orchestra in a series of adventurous and playful group improvisations.
Information about tickets
You are invited to pay what you decide for this performance at the Gulbenkian.
Click here to book
Links:
Maggie Nicols & the Feminist Improvising Group
Maggie Nicols singing Stormy Weather
Free Range cordially invites you to celebrate the birthday of Kat Peddie. In honour of the occasion, Kat has been writing, rewriting and performing a birthday play ever since she hit the same age as Christ. In this, her 37th year, she brings the show to Free Range.
Performed by Kate’s Bush, an experimental Poets’ Theatre company comprising Kat Peddie, Ibi Reichl & other more rotational members (including Harry the Beagle) The Birthday Party is a Pinter rip-off like no other, exploring the intricacies, meanings and ambivalences of gift economies, love languages and, of course, birthdays.
The Playtime will be supported by Give Me Merci. Give Me Merci know that learning a new language is hard but, with their radical new phrase book,they are here to help…
Party bags pending an AHRC grant application.
About Kat Peddie
‘Unsettling, vibrant and seriously moreish’ (Gareth Prior)
Kat Peddie is a poet who writes plays. Her performance work is inventive and laugh-out-loud funny, taking a satirical look at modern poetry and gender politics through a wry absurdist lens.
Kat is one half of the band Kate’s Bush. She works closely with the Free Range Orchestra and co-hosts the Range Free Variety Show & Open Mic.
Kat is also a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her publications include Spaces for Sappho (Oystercatcher 2016), the digital opera The Octopus (composed by Lauren Redhead, Pan y Rosas Discos 2020) and poems and photographs published in Tears in the Fence, Shearsman Magazine, Snow, Tentacular, Datableed, Golden Handcuffs Review, Litmus, Molly Bloom and Junction Box, among others.
‘[Her] poems leave spaces on the page and only the clearest of words are left as stone markers, memorials … [they are] hard-edged and personal; they are full of meetings’ (Ian Brinton)
Links:
Excerpt from Spaces for Sappho (2016)
Digital opera The Octopus (2020)
Bohemian Rhapsody by the Free Range Orchestra (2019)
A vibrant, disorientating collage of projected animations, short films, live drawing, poetry, live music and sound.
Students from the Visual Communication course at the University for the Creative Arts curate a teeming happening of simultaneous performances. Previous events have involved rock bands, specially designed costumes, members of the Free Range Orchestra, a children’s book transformed into an installation, bespoke voice overs and multiple projections.
Links:
UCA Canterbury website (Visual Communications course)
Puppeteer and shepherdess, Kristin Fredricksson, teams up with expert on daimonic imagination and altered consciousness, William Rowlandson, to create a truly extraordinary event involving stories, shamanic journeying and sheep.
If you are interested in performance, baking, myth, rural life, ritual or geopolitics, or want to spend an evening using games and processes to get familiar with non-human perspectives (and leave with a gift), join us.
With thanks to Verpėjos residency, Lithuania.
Kristin Fredricksson is an award-winning performance-maker and a researcher, lecturer, mover and puppeteer. Her themes are the ecological body, climate and civilisational collapse, autobiography, trauma and memory. Fredricksson’s work has been presented in theatres such as the Barbican in London and La Villette in Paris, in outdoors performance festivals such as Norfolk & Norwich Festival and as installations in inside and outside spaces. She teaches histories and philosophies of art, somatic approaches to art making and the ecological body on the MA Art, Society, Nature at The Margate School.
William Rowlandson is a writer and educator. He is author of books and articles on Latin American cultural and political history, Cuban literature, Borges, Swedenborg, mysticism, psychedelics, the Imaginal, Faery, angelology, and the Daimonic. He is also one of the founding members of the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, an exciting new initiative arising out of the MA Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred that ran for many years at Canterbury Christ Church University. He is co-founder and Deputy Chair of the Canterbury Climate Action Partnership (CCAP), an independent company mobilising action towards a more sustainable, clean and biodiverse future.
Links
Kristin Fredricksson website
William Rowlandson website
While children in the UK are putting on makeup and eating fistfuls of sweets, other cultures use this time of year to celebrate and honour their ancestors believing that this is the time when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest (Day of the Dead, All Saints Day, Halloween, Samhain).
For this special event audience members are invited to tell stories of their ancestors with optional musical accompaniment, with sound beds provided by our very own Sam Bailey and Goodwin Sands Radiogrammer Ben Horner. Expect drama, light and dark, puppetry, and more.
The stories can be happy or sad, prepared in advance or made up on the spot. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing your story in person you can record it as a voice memo on your phone and email it to sam@freerangecanterbury.org and we can play the audio as part of the show. There will be live musicians providing optional improvised sound design and accompaniment for the stories.
The evening will begin with a specially commissioned piece for drum kit and clarinet by Shastik Cret Menagerie, designed to create the listening for these stories.
Links
Goodwin Sands Radiogram
Shastik Cret Menagerie - Pocket Sardine
Léonore Boulanger: voice, harmonium, toy piano, casio SA-46, jew's harp, megaphone
Jean-Daniel Botta: voice, guitar, double bass, piano, music box, casio SA-46, balafon, trumpet
Laurent Sériès: percussions, toy piano, flute chinese hulusi, toy box
Singer Léonore Boulanger & multi-instrumentalist Jean-Daniel Botta are joined by percussionist Laurent Sériès to make music described by their label as ‘atomised French song, disfigured jazz, Kandinsky-esque primitive music in an ultra-violet hopscotch’. They are touring in support of their fifth album, Un lièvre était un très cher baiser (A Hare Was A Very Small Kiss) based around poems by ‘naive’ Austrian poet Ernst Herbeck, whose totem animal was a hare.
They return to Free Range after an extraordinary performance in 2019. Their previous album, Practice Chanter, was likened to ‘a mosaic, due to the sheer quantity and variety of sonic fragments that is somehow made to cohere in these 16 wild, wonderful tracks. Songs that are constantly alive and unpredictable’ (The Quietus)
Joining them on their UK tour is Glaswegian songwriter and bassist, Howie Reeve. Poised somewhere between the prog-rock outlandishness of Frank Zappa and the earthy avant-folk of Richard Dawson, Howie has been described as:
"A unique and singular figure in the current British underground … performing solo on acoustic bass guitar, delivering a fragmented and dexterous music that takes in post-punk, avant-folk "(Chris Joynes)
Links
Le Nouveau from the album Practice Chanter (2019) by Léonore Boulanger
Minuit from the album Feigen Feigen (2016) by Léonore Boulanger
Extract from Petites Planètes (2013) by Léonore Boulanger
Bloodlines (2019) by Howie Reeve
Double Rainbow (2019-2020) Howie Reeve with NoMeansNo guitarist Andy Kerr and French saxophonist Cathy Heyden
A concert of two sets each led by distinctive composer/performers who co-run a new group called Free Women. Each Free Range season will include an event curated by Free Women.
Maureen Wolloshin & Khabat Abas
Anna Braithwaite with Phil Self & Samuel D Loveless
Anna Braithwaite, Maureen Wolloshin, Heledd Francis Wright, Nadia Louise Tewfik Bailey and Frances Knight
Composer, singer and performance artist, Anna Braithwaite, multi-instrumentalist Phil Self, and vocalist and trumpeter Samuel D. Loveless bring their project ‘Sirens of the Deep’ to Free Range. Originally conceived as a sight-specific performance on the deck of a Cold War submarine floating in the Medway, Sirens has been described as a ‘post-digital musical ritual designed to reconnect a fractured society’ and was a commission for the Electric Medway festival in August 2022.
Improviser, researcher and oboist, Maureen Wolloshin will be playing as a duo with the Kurdish-Iraqi cellist, improviser and composer, Khabat Abas.
The night will begin with a performance from a new, all women ensemble featuring Anna Braithwaite, Maureen Wolloshin, Heledd Francis Wright, Nadia Louise Tewfik Bailey and Frances Knight
About the musicians
Anna is a composer, singer and performance artist. She builds her unique, site-specific compositions in close dialogue with people and places, foregrounding the weird and theatrical concealed within the everyday.
She is a regular performer at Free Range, most recently as part of the Moonseed Collective (FR#220) and earlier, reacting to the Feminist Improvising Group’s recording from the album Another Evening at Logos 1974 79 81 with Sylvia Hallett and Gemma Storr (FR#169)
Khabat’s practice is based on sound and memory. It reflects on the socio-political, from a feminist perspective, in the war zone. Khabat builds cellos from different materials. These include a cello made from a bombshell found in her home city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq. Alongside improvising and instrument-making her creative practice often incorporates sound installation and videography.
Maureen’s music extends the sonic range of the oboe and cor anglais. She recently commissioned a new instrument (from musician and inventor Henry Dagg) called the Gliss Anglais. Her compositions explore connections between graphic notation, touch, and sound and are presented as a sonic painting for the performer to navigate.
Phil divides his time between singing groups and community choirs, and regular gigging, composing and touring work with groups Yndi Halda, Will Varley, Molly’s Lips, Cocos Lovers and The Hellfire Orchestra. He is a member of The Montrose Composers Club.
Samuel is also a member of the Montrose Composers Club, as well as being a composer, vocalist, performance artist and trumpeter. His composition covers a range of genres challenging the traditional approach to composition, exploring the relationship between performer, space and audience, with accessibility and inclusivity being central to his work.
Links: