Olie Brice (double bass, electronics)
Alexander Hawkins (keyboards, electronics)
Matt Wright (turntables, electronics)
Fusing influences from DJ Premier, Konono No.1 and the UK free improv scene, Spheric Totemic bring a ritual of splintered rhythm, bass and keys to Free Range. Featuring Olie Brice (Olie Brice Quintet, Somersaults) Alexander Hawkins (Alexander Hawkins Ensemble, Anthony Braxton Quartet) and Matt Wright (Trance Map, Evan Parker Electroacoustic Ensemble).
oliebrice.com
www.alexanderhawkinsmusic.com
matt-wright.co.uk
*Please note - Neil Charles was originally slated to play as part of the Spheric Totemic trio, but can no longer make it. He has been replaced for this show by Olie Brice.
Skylla is the extraordinary new project from Ruth Goller. Best known for her work with jazz-rock bands like Acoustic Ladyland or Melt Yourself Down, Goller’s new music is more mysterious and subterranean. Using unusual tunings and harmonics on bass guitar, Goller unearths hidden, secret sounds that are literally given voice by singers Lauren Kinsella and Alice Grant.
It's kinda like a cross between Derek Bailey and Arthur Russell, and it's just really really beautiful (BBC 6 Music)
Very close, intimate sound.. so close and so tactile that you can feel the music stroking you on the shoulder (BBC Radio 3)[Goller] unravels an intimacy so deep it feels almost blasphemous to be privy to its wonders. (ECM reviews)
ruthgoller.bandcamp.com/album/skylla
This is the first screening of a rough cut of a new feature-length documentary about Henry Dagg, a musician and creator of new musical instruments who lives in Faversham. His many creations include:
The Sharpsichord: perhaps his best known instrument, a 2.5 -ton programmable automatic harp made from stainless steel, which was used by Bjork on her Biophilia album.
The Catastrophony: an organ of tuned miaowing cats that reduced Prince Charles to tears when Henry played it at Clarence House.
The Rochester Independent College Gate Harp: a 5-ton Stainless Steel Gates & Railings installation incorporating a 6-octave musical instrument.
The Hooty-Scooty: a combination of a hurdy-gurdy and a scooter.
The journalist and filmmaker Richard Fleury has been on a 10-year journey making this extraordinary film featuring Bob Geldof, Stewart Lee, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Jools Holland, Evan Parker, Tony Banks, and many more.
Henry Dagg links:
Henry Dagg performing with Bedford Handbell Ensemble at FR#156: youtube.com/watch?v=q-D_hdGbAKM
Bjork, 'Sacrifice', featuring the Sharsichord: youtube.com/watch?v=fjw3pt03CuA
Henry Dagg playing the Catastrophony at Jools Holland's Hootenanny, 2010 (with
Richard Louis Dray: youtube.com/watch?v=cHfBQCJaJoI
Henry Dagg at Free Range #120: soundcloud.com/free-range/fr-120-henry-dagg-full-set-2016-02-11
Black Top, the duo of multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson and pianist Pat Thomas, is a shape-shifting unit whose freely improvised performances combine twisted loops, samples and dub-effects, drawing on their Afro-Caribbean roots with a spontaneity and daring rooted in experimental free-jazz.
Returning to Free Range after their 2019 performance, they are joined by the gifted 24-year old saxophonist, flautist and composer, Xhosa Cole (BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year 2018).
[Black Top’s latest album, Some Good News,] vibrates with wild energy from start to finish … But what really lifts this above the average is the unit's ability to switch seamlessly into diasporic pan-global grooves … This 21st century melting pot is brimming over with thrills. (Jazzwise)
Links
Black Top (live at Free Range 2019)
https://soundcloud.com/search?q=black%20top%20free%20range
Xhosa Cole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5S8zWkNJpQ
We are pleased to present the drummer Roger Turner improvising as duo with the guitarist Pascal Marzan.
Pascal Marzan plays a microtonal 10 string guitar. After studying classical guitar in Paris in the 70's and 80's, playing music by Luciano Berio and Tristan Murail, Pascal became interested in improvisation and the music of eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. He was particularly drawn to central Asian music from Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, and Kyrghyztan.
The drummer Roger Turner has been described by The Wire as "one of the giants of free improvisation":
‘He has a virtuosity as astounding as it is inexplicably hilarious. i have rarely heard such an exquisite combination of volcanic power and finely- honed precision' (The Wire)
The opening set features the poet Kat Peddie reading from her own work alongside a collaboration with Walt Whitman, the Free Range Orchestra and the audience.
Pazcal Marzan duet with Phil Durrant (bandcamp)
Roger Turner with Chris Biscoe at FR#130
Kat Peddie conducting the Free Range Band for FR#166
turners-site.com
*The original line-up for this evening included Phil Minton, who was unable to play because of ill health.
Zubin Kanga performs new works exploring cyborg pianism by Louis d’Heudieres, Alwynne Pritchard, Luke Nickel and himself.
In these performances Zubin combines the piano with a range of sensors, synthesizers, strobe lights, electronics, video, an instrument made of glass and other technologies.
Louis d’Heudieres’ Reflects dans Sequana (2022) is a speculative fiction about Debussy's piano music and a Celtic river goddess cult. Making use of a sampler keyboard, electronics and video, it looks at traditional piano music through a warped lens, incorporating themes of pianistic technique, romantic hero-worship, and ritual cleansing.
Alwynne Pritchard's Heart of Glass (2019 rev. 2021) takes inspiration from Werner Herzog’s experimentations with hypnosis in 1976 film, Heart of Glass, to create a work in which the pianist seems to be hypnotised, performing around the piano (and in multiple personas on screen) in a performance inspired by drag, butoh dance and trance states.
In his 2021 piece, Steel on Bone, Zubin uses MiMU sensor gloves to morph and granulate the delicate, visceral and violent sounds from the inside of the piano.
Luke Nickel's hhiiddeenn vvoorrttiicceess uses Soundbrenner’s haptic metronomes alongside dreamlike roller-coaster visuals and the sounds of Ravel filtered through an AI, in a play of vertiginous tempi between the hands.
The performance is part of Cyborg Soloists, a multi-year artistic-research project innovating new types of interactions between musicians and new technologies, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
zubinkanga.com
lukenickel.com
alwynnepritchard.co.uk
louisdheudieres.com
Alistair Zaldua and Sam Bailey will improvise short pieces for violin and piano before Zubin Kanga's performance.
‘[Saxophonist Evan Parker] is the greatest living exponent of free jazz … if you’ve ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug’ (Stewart Lee, The Guardian)
From very early on in his musical investigations, Evan Parker has always been interested in electronic music. The music to Forbidden Planet was one of his childhood inspirations.
From his earliest days with Paul Lytton's contact microphones on all available surfaces, through to recent projects with Matt Wright playing a laptop via VCs3, FM synthesis and all technologies in between, electronic music has been an essential part of his collaborations. He now plans to combine his virtuosity on the saxophone with the 'retrophonic' technology of Henry Dagg.
The musician/instrument maker Henry Dagg is a veteran composer of electronic music specialising in tape-based musique concrete techniques and electro-acoustic instrument development who has collaborated with various artists including Matthew Herbert, Hannah Peel and Bjork. He will be using a range of vintage electronic sound sources and modifiers to improvise a dialogue with Evan parker's saxophone performances, while using techniques such as variable tape delays and speeds, ring modulation and frequency shifting effects to expand the soundscape of the instrument.
Opening this evening is Filter Feeder aka composer, percussionist and DJ, Julian Doyle.
Filter Feeder encompasses experiments with analogue electronics, home made electro-acoustic devices, political sample/field recording sound collages, a kind of driving abstract dub and DJ mixes blending traditional music from around the world with contemporary electronic tracks. These sounds are then processed and manipulated, looped and filtered to create a rhythmic soundscape heavily informed by the space and abstraction of dub.
Evan Parker
https://evanparker.com/index.php
Henry Dagg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Dagg
Henry Dagg’s ‘Catastrophony’
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1328423647243236
Henry Dagg’s ‘Sharpsicord’ or pin-barrel harp
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=971739156245022
Filter Feeder / Julian Doyle
https://www/soundcloud.com/filter-feeder
The Visual Communication courses at the University for the Creative Arts Canterbury present immersive visual storytelling through short animated films and improvised interventions from all year groups.
University for the Creative Arts
The works of Andrew Kötting have a connection with an English tradition of visionary curiosity and hybrid art-practices exemplified in the work of William Blake or Derek Jarman.
The eponymous Whalebone Box is found entangled in a fisherman’s net, washed up on a remote beach in the Outer Hebrides. This object has the anonymity and moral authority of tribal art, of a fetish, a relic or an accidental survivor. It is dangerous. In 2018 the box was taken on an 800 mile reverse pilgrimage from London back to the Isle of Harris. Kötting’s daughter, Eden, narrates the story, working as both muse and soothsayer. It is finally buried in the sand on the very beach from which it came BUT something happens at the very end of the film after the credits have finished rolling, something extraordinary and miraculous.
’You can feel the ghost of Derek Jarman in Kötting’s work: the use of collage; the investigation of memory; the allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest; the deconstruction of cinema itself. Yet, The Whalebone Box has something even more personal in its subtle exploration of the bond between father and daughter, an expression of love that had me laughing one moment and crying the next. With such a tender, beating heart, this is in some ways Kötting’s most unexpectedly accessible work’ (Mark Kermode in The Guardian)
Watch trailer for The Whalebone Box: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqNQqDLwhhU
Andrew Kötting
Rocío Bolaños will perform the premiere of "Classic Escalation of Commitment" by Panos Ghikas, a real-time composition for bass clarinet and fixed audio. Rocío will also perform "multicounterspeechless" by Sivan Cohen-Elias (commissioned by Distractfold), followed by an improvised duo with Panos featuring drums and electronics with bass clarinet.
Rocío is a member of award-winning contemporary music ensemble Distractfold.
Panos is a composer-improviser whose output spans surrealist post-pop to post-complexity free-improvisation strategies with collaborators such as the composer/singer Jennifer Walshe. He runs Micro Records, has released 60 albums, played over 400 concerts with his band The Chap, released remixes of Beck and Bloc Party and has had music premiered in 5 countries with distinguished contemporary classical ensembles.
Rocío Bolaños
distractfold.co.uk/rocio-bolaos
Panos Ghikas
panosghikas.com/unrealtime/#Hello_Video