Safe Operating Space is about the beauty of unrepeatable moments. Composer, electronic musician, improviser and field recordist Tullis Rennie with mixes recorded and live music with the extraordinary line-up of Tara Franks (cello), Cath Roberts (baritone sax) and Dee Byrne (alto sax).
Their recent self titled album explores new aspects of Rennie’s practice while reflecting thoughts on themes such as global heating, AI-generated deepfakes, family life, and Kate Bush. Working live with the album as a departure point, the ensemble play alongside, against and around fragments of the recordings, Rennie using analogue drum machines and synthesisers.
"Blending string improvisations and outré brass with expertly deployed electronics and samples...equal parts tender and affronting, slaloming gracefully around conventional approaches to rhythm, melody and harmony with a lexicon that’s unmistakably his own" – Electronic Sound
"Free improv sessions get warped into booming, boundary-pushing electronica... as if we were listening to an intergalactic visitor’s attempt at appropriating the dancefloor" – the Quietus
Listen here: https://efpirecords.bandcamp.com/album/safe-operating-space
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
A cult 70’s sci-fi novel set in a post-apocalyptic East Kent is used to bring together hoddening, puppetry, foraging and primitive music. This unique event is part of an exploration of the possibility of a stage adaptation of Russell Hoban's novel, Riddley Walker. The theatre maker Greg McClaren is collaborating with a community of artists to create a daytime walk (more details of this announced on social media) and an evening event.
We can't tell you anymore because we don't know what this one will it be until it happens! It may involve reimagining culture after a collapse and it will involve Sarah Trillo (artist), Kristin Fredricksson (puppetry, movement), Kat Peddie (text), Thomas Gavriel (Seadog books), Billie M Vigne (artist, metalsmith), Miles Irving (forager), Tim Fletcher (hoodener, archivist).
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
Steered by William Burroughs, The Faversham Motorway Intersection Enthusiasts Club is an ongoing multimedia rhythm band formed in 2018. Rooted in repetition, the act draws from the rhythms of both motorway travel and dance music, finding a shared pulse between mechanical monotony and the endless flow of traffic.
Through live performance and visual extensions, it examines the overlooked mundanity, the rigid structures of concrete landscapes, and the spaces in between. The band has taken on various forms over the years, shifting and evolving while always maintaining a sense of curiosity. The club invites listeners and viewers to engage with their surroundings in new ways, encouraging a practice of contemplation, questioning, and interaction with the familiar yet unnoticed.
Casbah is a film that attempts to reconstruct – from memory – an experimental film noir monster movie that was never made.
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
Matt Wright’s ‘Spheric Totemic’ brings DJ culture and free improv together with splintered beats and immersive sound design. with Alexander Hawkins (keyboards), Neil Charles (bass), Mandhira de Saram (violin/fx), Stephen Davis (drums) and Matt Wright (turntables and live sampling).
Spheric Totemic is the project of Matt Wright a composer, producer and sound designer based in Kent, UK. is diverse output across improvised music, chamber composition and collaborations with dance, theatre and film.
He has collaborated with some of the most dynamic artists in the contemporary sphere, including Evan Parker, Peter Evans, Ikue Mori, Claron McFadden, B’Rock Orchestra, Spring Heel Jack, Ensemble Klang, Neil Charles, Alexander Hawkins and Elaine Mitchener.
Preview: https://www.matt-wright.co.uk/spheric-totemic
Doors for this event open at 7pm. Music begins at 8pm. A wide range of refreshment are available throughout the evening from the cafe.
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.
In advance of Earth Day (22nd April) Free Range has teamed up with Extinction Rebellion Canterbury for an experiment in art activism. Local environmental groups have been invited to work with artists from the Free Range community to try new ways of communicating their messages and values.
Award winning podcaster Ben Horner, has been working with artist and Friends of the Earth activist Amanda Thesiger on a series of interviews with environmental campaigners about their visions of a better world. This will be performed with live sound design at Free Range and the Lovely World event in Faversham on 24-25th June.
Puppeteer, theatre maker, part-time shepherdess and Feldenkrais practitioner, Kristin Fredricksson, has been working with Canterbury Repair Cafe to create puppets and theatre from objects that have come through the cafe.
Opening the evening we will hear from Esme Bone and Anna Presilia, an artist duo currently in their second year of the Fine Art Masters, 'Art, Society, Nature', at The Margate School. They work with natural materials to produce sustainable work which explores growth, decay and time.
This is a celebration of local environmental activism and adventurous culture.
🔗
Extinction Rebellion Canterbury
website
The 2020 album ‘Whereness’ featured Paul Cheneour (flutes), Ansuman Biswas (tabla, percussion, waterphone, strings & flutes), Maureen Wolloshin (oboe, cor anglais) and Alistair Zaldua (violin & electronics). This album inspired the artist/filmmaker Annie Catford to make 14 quirky, playful and celebratory short films that are shown here interwoven with live improvised music and poetry from Paul Cheneour.
The first half of this evening is the debut performance of pianist Sam Bailey with drummer Corrie Dick. Sam’s creative practice spans free improvisation, music for theatre, classical music and jazz alongside site-specific work such as the year-long Piano in the Woods project.
‘Bailey’s fondness for splicing busy clusters of notes into rhythmic spaces that seem too tight for them often drove the group to a cliffhanging intensity’ The Guardian
The Mercury nominated drummer/composer/bandleader Corrie Dick has been described as,
“the perfect drummer/percussionist… colouring each piece with precision, complex rhythms/techniques and visible enjoyment” (London Jazz News).
🔗
Whereness
Paul Cheneour website
Annie Catford Instagram
👂 Whereness on Spotify
👁 These words on YouTube
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: [email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 1227 922994
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.
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