A vibrant, disorientating collage of projected animations, short films, live drawing, poetry, live music & sound.
Students from the Visual Communication course at the University for the Creative Arts & the Free Range Orchestra curate a teeming happening of simultaneous performances. Previous events have involved dancers, multiple projections onto moving props, rock bands, specially designed costumes, a children’s book transformed into an installation & improvised cat voiceovers.
🔗
An aslant tour of art practices, curation, and ways in which we are encouraged to audience or might audience differently. Descend with your docent, Kat Peddie, for an event that combines elements of poetry, experimental and immersive theatre, music and visual art and art-making.
This production is brought to you by Kat Peddie (poet and text performer), in collaboration with Kate’s Bush. Kate’s Bush is a loose troupe of travelling players in the traditions of Poet’s Theatre, Peter Quince’s ‘rude mechanicals’, and folk traditions of mummers plays and pantomime.
Dr FrankenSTEIM’s monsters play crackleboxes: open circuits connected by the very flesh of the living, rendered into sound by Tim Fletcher, Peter Coyte & Sean Williams.
🔗
Two duets featuring four generations of the UK’s best experimental & improvised creative practice.
Saxophonist & composer Rachel Musson is a vital presence on the London free improvisation scene, playing regularly at Cafe Oto with Mark Sanders, Pat Thomas, Hannah Marshall, Julie Kjaer, Corey Mwamba, Olie Brice, Alex Ward & Alex Hawkins. Described as ‘a free-improviser sensitive to melody-like narrative & dramatic pacing’ (The Guardian).
Vocal experimenter Phil Minton has been performing for 50 years, appearing on over 100 recordings. His music uses all that the human voice is capable of. ‘This is the freest of free improvisation out there…hilarious, irritating, engaging, provocative, & utterly mind-blowing. From throat singing to burping, from duck calls to indescribable vocal acrobatics…Minton's art is not only profound—it's fun, full of humour & unpretentious glee’ (All Music)
Amy Cutler is a cultural polymath working with images, film, video, texts, sounds, speech, geography, design & music. She is also a producer, lecturer, academic & museum tour guide.
Sylvia Hallet is a solo improviser who performs internationally. In 1980 she was a founding member of Contradictions, one of several all-women improvising groups inspired by the subversive Feminist Improvising Group. She sings & plays violin, viola, accordion, electronics, folk harp, hurdy gurdy, bicycle wheel & saw.
The opening set features electronic instrument maker, sound artist & performer, Cutlasses. ‘Gorgeous, personal music with a raw aesthetic’ (Create Digital Music)
🔗
Rachel Musson
Sylvia Hallet
Cutlasses
Composer, producer, harpist & electronic musician, Bethany Ley uses the evocative space & sonic detail of granular synthesis to create environments for Kath Robert’s solo violin to breathe amongst influences as diverse as birdsong, musique concrète & Indonesian Gamelan. Taking inspiration from iconic British electronic music pioneers such as Daphne Oram & Delia Derbyshire, these pieces were made by extracting fragments from a single note’s harmonic series & unfolding them to create ‘atmospheres’ that contrast with the emotive, melodic presence of the solo violin.
Bethany Ley (piano, synth, electronics, samples), Kath Roberts (violin), Hamish Mitchinson (modular synthesis, samples)
The opening set features the noise-makers Shastik Cret Menagerie with a chaotic musical character study.
Kit Slawson (drums), Toby Slawson (saxophone), Tim Long (objects), William Burroughs (bass frequencies).
Photo credit Birte Carelse
🔗
If you’re interested in DIY underground culture amongst young people in East Kent, Bandit Bazaar is for you. Having started life as a zine fair, Bandit Bazaar has taken its emphasis on local DIY culture and expanded it to include musicians and performers of all types.
Bandit Bazaar Presents: "Offbeat and Track" a spotlight for local rap-scene contributors
Live MPC Beat-tracks performed by Lab Rat Records, who've been entangled with the Kent rap scene for just shy of a decade, Boom-Bap sample flipping for the old-school hip-hoppers. On vocals, we've got Char.b, Priest & Vapid adapting lyrics and freestyling their own flow.
padfad
William Burroughs x SP-404MkII
Priest Adeyemi x Akai MPC One
Flyer design by Loose End
🔗
Lab Rat Records
Char.B
Priest
Bandit Bazaar
Refugee Tales with Raga Gibreel, Fran & Flora, David Flusfeder
Refugee Tales is an annual walk in solidarity with detainees and refugees calling for an end to indefinite detention in the UK. It is a life-affirming embodiment of compassion and community with stories and music shared at the end of each day. This show is modelled on one of these evening events. Imagine you have walked a long way, made new friends, heard snippets of people’s lives and you arrive at Free Range ready to rest, get a drink and listen.
The first story, ‘The Stranger’s Tale’, will be told by Raga Gibreel. Raga is a journalist, a former refugee and founder of Green Kordofan, a charity providing opportunities through sports to children in Yida refugee camp in South Sudan.
You’ll then hear the ‘beguiling beauty’ (The Wire) of string duo Fran & Flora playing music from the traditions of Klezmer, Transylvanian, Romanian, Greek and Armenian music.
The final story, ‘Y’s Tale’ is from journalist, author and opera librettist, David Flusfeder.
🔗
Refugee Tales
Fran & Flora
Mermaid Chunky
We invite you to celebrate the Autumnal equinox, and the opening of our Autumn season, with the glorious Mermaid Chunky. Named after a type of wool from their hometown of Stroud, their music is a charmingly disorientating blend of lo-fi ceremony and play. Songs from their album, VEST, have been described as ‘bass thumping schoolyard chant with a heart of darkness’ and ‘ranty cosmic synth empowerment’ (The Quietus). With a lightly-worn inventive brilliance two best friends dressing up and playing around opens up a dream-like ritual space which feels genuinely subversive.
🔗
Mermaid Chunky
Website
Byron Wallen has been described as "one of the most innovative, exciting and original trumpet players alive" (Jazzwise Magazine). His 'Black Flag' project started life in 2004 as 'Dangerous Duets': a series of improvising duos performing live in response to the photography of Annabel Elgar. In 2022 this project was revisited and released as a book of photographs and a CD featuring Byron on trumpet and his long-term musical partner, Nick Ramm, on keyboards.
Informed by Byron’s own experience, this music charts the psychological and emotional frontiers of contact between a mother and her son separated by the Atlantic Ocean. It dives into the multi-layered toxic waste caused by global imperialism and colonialism and the creation of lost souls and generations living in socio-economic poverty confined within a mental bubble of paralysis. Byron invites us to "explore the shifting balance of power between the urban and rural with a glimpse of light before the Sun".
"A moment for transcendence on loop. A reminder of a home outside of ourselves. An affirmation that oneness of spirit is both our journey and destination. The Black Flag is an exercise in becoming. The spirit of hope, woven in sound"
(Dr Aditi Jaganathan)
🔗
Black Flag
Byron Wallen website
👁 Extract of a duet set with Lemn Sissay and Byron Wallen
👂 Listen/read about Black Flag (album 2022)
Nick Ramm website
👁 The Cinematic Orchestra - Time & Space (ft Nick Ramm)
👂 Hello Skinny - Hello Skinny (ft Nick Ramm) via Bandcamp
The extraordinary lyric poet Kelvin Corcoran will be reading from his collected poems, to be published by the prestigious Shearsman Press in May 2023.
"Corcoran has as wide a range and as rich a vocabulary as any poet now writing. He possesses a flawless ear, a fresh eye for image and detail, penetrating analysis and a storyteller’s gift. He can shift registers suddenly, from lyric to formal mode to common speech, and even a snatch of song … Kelvin Corcoran is one of the rare true poets. Reading him is a privilege and a pleasure, a new awareness’
(David Wevill)
Balladeste are Preetha Narayanan (violin) and Tara Franks (cello), who explore the versatility and sound potential of just two string instruments. With traces of contemporary minimalism, Indian classical and folk, they co-create all original compositions that are vibrant and experimental yet melodic and filmic in quality – songs without words with a contemporary alt-folk twist.
"music that can radiate suspense but at the same time is warm and intimate" (Songlines 4****)
"Absolutely stunning"
(BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour)
🔗
Kelvin Corcoran
Shearsmith books
👂 Kelvin Corcoran reading at Free Range in 2012
Balladeste
Balladeste website
👂 Balladeste - 'Dina Dukhio' via Bandcamp
👁 Balladeste - 'Being' via YouTube
Cellist, composer, producer & songwriter Francesca Ter-Berg was invited by Free Range to form a new trio and tonight’s show is the result: a brand new group of highly distinctive musicians performing together for the first time.
Francesca is known for her unique musical style blending Klezmer, improvisation and electronic synthesis. Jessica Lauren is a hugely experienced keyboard player and organist playing in the UK jazz and alternative scenes since the early 1990’s with a rare and refreshing minimalist sense of space in her improvising. Raimund Wong uses 4-track recorders with cassette-loops as rudimentary samplers, manipulating ‘found sounds’ through the language of dub and musique concrète. Raimund is also a visual artist, recognised for his graphic work for artists/promoters/labels such as Alabaster DePlume, Church of Sound and International Anthem.
‘Ter-Bergs vocals have a cool charm [whilst her] cello passionately laments’
(Clive Bell, The Wire)
Chase Coley is a musician, instrument maker, professional sound recordist and crab expert. For Chase, there is something primal and mysterious about creating new acoustic instruments: they become magical objects that move the air around us in unexpected ways.
Following his Chase's appearance for Dau's set in FR#251, Phil Self of Dau returned the favour to play in duo with chase.
🔗
Francesca ter-Burg, Jessica Lauren & Raimund Wong
Francesca ter-Burg website
👁 Francesca ter-Burg on Free Range TV via Youtube
Jessica Lauren website
👂 Jessica Lauren - Chichourlette via Bandcamp
Raimund Wong website
👂 Floating World Pictures (Raimund Wong & Chestnutt) - The Village Headman Pleading With The Old Ferryman via Bandcamp
Chase Coley
Chase Coley website
Crab Museum website
👁 Chase Coley video clip via Facebook