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
Canterbury Christ Church University is delighted to present its customary programme of Lunchtime Concerts celebrating the work of their students, staff and wider professional community. All Lunchtimes Concerts are free to attend but require booking.
The Free Range Orchestra is an interdisciplinary collective of musicians, composers, free improvisers experimental poets and dancers. They perform their own brand of anarchic and engaging experimental free improvisation. Expect energy, engagement, excitement and irreverence.
Part of Canterbury Festival
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:
This special event is a collaboration between the Gulbenkian Arts Centre, Free Range and world-renowned Hurdy-Gurdy maker Claire Dugue.
‘Living legend’ Valentin Clastrier is considered the inventor of the modern hurdy-gurdy which, in his hands, creates a magical and virtuoso universe. His playing is full of surprises, as is his career. Originally a guitarist alongside Jacques Brel he then discovered the hurdy-gurdy and, over the years, worked with instrument makers on prototypes of electroacoustic hurdy-gurdies leading to his current 27-string instrument.
‘deep sonorous drones supporting cascades of notes and sometimes discordant swashes of sound, with electronic effects feeding the serpentine melodies and creating hauntingly powerful, sometimes intoxicating sonic spirals’.
After winning several prestigious awards and much critical acclaim, Valentin is back in England for the first time in over 20 years and we’re very happy to have him in Canterbury!
There will be two workshops for hurdy-gurdy players earlier in the day, one with Valentin Clastrier and the other with Nigel Eaton. To book a place contact Claire at mail@claire-dugue.com
Evan Parker (soprano saxophone)
‘If you've ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug’
Stewart Lee, The Guardian‘There is, still, nothing else in music - jazz or otherwise - that remotely resembles an Evan Parker solo concert’
Steve Lake‘One of the music's greatest living instrumentalists’
The Times
For over 50 years Evan Parker has been widening the scope of what is possible on a saxophone. Using techniques such as circular breathing, Parker creates complex worlds of sound with vivid, intricate detail projected into polyphonic textures that slowly evolve and grow. It’s as if Parker dismantled all musical language associated with the saxophone and stripped it back to simply air passing through a column and, from this ground zero, created something new that is simultaneously primal, modern, hypnotic, intimate, vast and microscopic.
Information about tickets and booking
We have partnered with the Gulbenkian Arts Centre for this special event.
Tickets cost £15 (£10 students) and are available here:
Click here to book tickets
Links
Valentine Clastrier Links:
Evan Parker Links:
During lockdown the Spanish trumpeter Daniel Cano recorded a blistering duo album with the great jazz drummer Doug Sides (who has played with jazz icons such as Lionel Hampton, Chick Corea, Benny Golson and Hank Jones amongst many, many others).
Stripped right back to just rhythmic textures and a strong melodic line, the duo launched the album, Duplexity, at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London.
Duplexity is a fine showcase for the evidently strong relationship between a trumpeter whose warm, bright open tone evokes the hard-bop masters of the ’50s and ’60s and a drummer with a light touch and a supple sense of swing. Restricted means, in terms of instrumentation, but the result is a rich experience with no sense of austerity — or of overplaying to fill the spaces. (Richard Williams)
Lumpen Nobleman will DJ before and after Daniel and Doug's set.
Lumpen Nobleman is an alias of Extra Normal label boss and Contra Pop Festival organiser Kyle McCallum. As well as organising what has since 2015 been one of the musical highlights of the summer, LN broadcasts excellent, eclectic shows monthly on Repeater, Tak Tent and Margate Radio.
Listen to Lumpen Nobleman's excellent 2020 Errors and Remedies EP - with remixes by Helena Celle, Don’t DJ, Mariam Rezaei (who knocked us out at Contrapop in August) and more, here: extranormalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/errors-and-remedies
Links:
Daniel Cano website
Doug Sides website
Lockdown sessions: Ronnie Scott's presents Duplexity 15/04/2021
February Live At Free Range. Work8hop Jazz feat. Daniel Cano and Frances Knight. Composed by Matt Miles
Extranormal Records website
“Dance to it, make love to it, stare at the clouds to it” - Iggy Pop
Formed by Bex Burch in 2015, Vula Viel’s music has shifted over the course of their three critically acclaimed albums, from Afro jazz-tinged adaptations of traditional Dagaare music towards a unique sound rooted in post punk.
Placing Bex's rawly delivered gyil (Ghanian xylophone) rhythms as the central element, the band’s scything rock dynamics have seen them championed by Iggy Pop. Bassist Ruth Goller (Skylla, Acoustic Ladyland, Melt Yourself Down) and drummer Jim Hart (Cloudmakers Trio) complete the line-up. They have gained further plaudits for their pulsating live shows at venues such as Café OTO and Total Refreshment Centre.
The trio are joined by NYC legend Peter Zummo. In addition to performing his own compositions and leading his own ensembles, he has worked with myriad bands, orchestras, composers and musicians.
Peter's celebrated trombone style is one of the most beloved features of Arthur Russell's sound, with whom he played and collaborated with in the recording studio.
★ ★ ★ ★ Evening Standard
★ ★ ★ ★ Jazzwise
★ ★ ★ ★ Financial Times
★ ★ ★ ★ Songlines
The Free Range Orchestra will be playing the opening set to launch their new album, Connections, recorded live with saxophonist Evan Parker in July 2021.
Links
Vula Viel website
Peter Zummo website
#5 Go Bang (Dinosaur L, produced by Arthur Russell, feat Peter Zummo)
Arthur Russell - In The Light of The Miracle (featuring Peter Zummo)
We finish our Spring season with a performance of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto like you’ve never heard it before.
The celebrated classical soloist, Chihiro Ono, will play the solo violin part completely straight, while an orchestra of improvising musicians, dancers and poets interpret Mendelssohn’s score with theremin, live electronics, oboe, flute, saxophones, trumpet, pianos, viola, violins, double bass, voices, guitars, bass clarinet, cutlery, musical saw and tap dancing.
Following on from their performance of the Beethoven violin concerto for BBC Radio 3, experimental music groups Squib-box and ARCO and the soloist Chihiro Ono join forces with the Free Range Orchestra for this extraordinary performance of this perennial classic.
The concert also features smaller sets by members of ARCO and Squib.
chihiroono.com Chihiro Ono (violin soloist)
neilluck.com Neil Luck (conductor?!)
squib-box.com/2018/05/baggage-beethoven-violin-concerto Beethoven violin concerto
bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05zshht Beethoven violin concerto
Since 2015, Refugee Tales has organised large scale walks in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers and people who have been held in immigration detention. On each night of the walks the stories of these people are told, often in collaboration with major writers such as Ali Smith or Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Tonight Dragan Todorovic reads ‘The Migrant’s Tale’ in which the story of someone fleeing Syria is interspersed with a reimagining of ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The theatre maker, puppeteer and Feldenkrais practitioner, Kristin Fredricksson, experiments with elements of puppetry, light, gesture and music to connect with ancient storytelling traditions that often took the form of semi-improvised multimedia performances.
refugeetales.org
kent.ac.uk/english/people/117/todorovic-dragan
kristinfredricksson.com