When you’ve lived such a rich musical life as 80-year old saxophone legend Evan Parker the stories pour out. But what happens if you blur the boundary between anecdote and musical improvisation?
Evan Parker and Matthew Wright (Trance Map) join forces with long-time collaborator and sonic storyteller Filipe Gomes. Evan and Matt have recently released ‘Transatlantic Trance Map’ with False Walls and ‘Horizons Held Close’ with Relative Pitch. Evan and Filipe (Arco Barco, Ramsgate Radio) have recently collaborated on Daniel Blumberg’s Oscar-winning score for the hit film The Brutalist.
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
Reserve your ticket here: canterbury.ac.uk/events/2025/yapada-trance-map
YAPADA: Duo and trio improvisations.
7pm - 8pm
Dan Herbert: Unrealtime and electronics
Yannis Patoukas: electric guitar and electronics
Panos Ghikas: electric viola, transducer feedback and Unrealtime
TRANCE MAP+ 8.30pm - 9.30pm
Evan Parker: soprano saxophone
Matt Wright: turntable, live sample and sound design
Milana Zarić: harps
Richard Barrett: electronics
Evan Parker and Matt Wright met in 2008 and out of their first studio sessions developed Trance Map, a project that mixes field recordings, samples from cassettes, turntable scratching and the live processing of Evan's relentlessly evolving saxophone lines. For this very special event, they are joined by the duo of harpist Milana Zarić and composer/electronics pioneer Richard Barrett.
Milana Zarić and Richard Barrett have been working together since 2013 in a wide variety of contexts from duo performances to collaboration with ensembles on several continents, and ranging from free improvisation to the performance of intricately notated compositions.
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
Wintersound is a festival of new music involving Canterbury Christ Church University, North Western University (Illinois) and Free Range.
The Six Tones combine traditional Vietnamese instruments and musical traditions with experimental Western music. Way back in 2015 this extraordinary trio gave a memorable performance inside glass boxes at a Free Range event in the Sidney Cooper Gallery. The Six Tones are Nguyễn Thanh Thủy (who plays đàn tranh) and Ngô Trà My (who plays đàn bầu) and the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö.
For this special Free Range performance, we present two members of the group: Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Stefan Österjö.
Wintersound continues on 17/01/25 with a series of talks and performances addressing the topic of ‘Musical glocalities and their influence: sound, geography, community’. Events are free but booking is required.
More info on WinterSound here: www.canterbury.ac.uk/events/2024/wintersound-2025
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
Since the first Feral Choir about 35 years ago, singer and vocal experimenter Phil Minton, has led them in Japan, Brazil, France, Belgium, Germany, United States, Netherlands and Poland. Using the full range of sounds that the human voice is capable of, a Feral Choir is formed just a few days before each performance. If you are interested in exploring the totality of your voice, get in touch. Participation is free, no previous experience is necessary.
Email sam@freerangecanterbury.org if you’re interested.
Think of this as a wild, adventurous continuation of Canterbury’s ancient choral tradition, celebrating the approaching Winter Solstice with howls, groans, croaks and laughter.
Feedback from previous Feral Choir participants:
“You have let the sun enter into my head”
“After singing with the feral choir I felt elated and alive. My voice felt bigger afterwards, and I find myself still appreciating how much it can do.”
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
On Thursday 21st November, we present a collaboration between the Free Range Orchestra and Brighton's Safehouse collective. For 20 years Safehouse has been a hub for improvising musicians in Brighton, running regular performances and workshops featuring some of the UK's finest musicians making music alongside a local community of players.
Thanks to the Outlands Network Exchange Programme, which aims to foster connections between grassroots experimental music organisations in the UK, we are able to do something extraordinary in the current UK arts and bring two large improvising ensembles together to play John Zorn's game piece, Cobra.
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
‘Through The Eyes’ is an immersive performance offering a deep dive into the sensory experiences of neurodivergent individuals, shedding light on their unique encounters with the world. Exploring the performers' personal narratives, the work hones in on their intricate relationships with sight, sound, touch, and more. The audience is guided through literal sensory encounters, such as walking on textured objects or heightened auditory experiences.
The strengths and challenges experienced by the audience is the primary focus of the work creating a supportive environment, one that recognises beauty in the architecture of every brain. The event also showcases a new speaker-like object, crafted in collaboration with Henry Dagg, called the ‘Timpanator’.
‘una’ is a group of neurodivergent artists, performers, and creators that transcend the disconnected nature of arts education and advocacy, creating community centred performances for participants of every age, creative experience and walk of life.
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)
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
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
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: