March 2024

The Mole and I just got back from an incredible weekend in Naples, where it was a great pleasure to work with the production team there, largely based at RIOT Studio, a design agency located off of a gorgeous courtyard in the middle of the city, who have long been putting on very cool things in Napoli. Thank you to all of the speakers for their humbling and important talks (seriously, click that first link to check them out), and to the whole production team, with a special mention of Francesca N for the invitation and of Rossella C, for her essential help in getting You Are The Mole up and running with a LED wall of stupendous resolution and so bright! Sunglass intensities. A hopefully quite fancy film incoming, courtesy of a small army of well-drilled videographers at the event.

In other news: the lineup of artists for a little festival I’ve been organising to happen in Newcastle on the first three Sundays of May is confirmed! Click here to read more about the folks playing, and to get involved. Hopefully this is the first edition of a thing that will become an annual fixture in Newcastle, and in this first proof-of-concept version, there’s a nice mix of friends and collaborators current, past–and with a bit of luck, future, too–including Hyperdawn, Sarah Heneghan, Nina Guo and Ian Sankey, and Sam Baxter. And on the 12th, together with a core quartet of Northumberland Radical Fun group, I’ll be giving the first performance of material from the record I just finished up, called Action Vibration. Below you can hear a pre-mastered version of one of the tracks from the record, which we are still very much Learning How to Play in Real Life (coming to a label perhaps not-so-near-you in perhaps the not-so-near-future; there is some figuring out to do). Come down to the festival, which is called Significant Other! It will be fun, relaxed, and also interesting. Elder Beer in Heaton, the venue for all three shows, also stocks some incredible beverages you’ll be hard-pushed to find anywhere else in (this part of) the country…  

November 2023

Hooray! Ian and I spent a fantastic and totally productive last week of November in Sage 2 working on our evening-length weirdo spectacular about Luciano Berio, Karl Adrian Wettach (better known as ‘King of Clowns’, Grock and their unlikely geographical and artistic relationship. If you don’t already know him, peep one of Grock’s amazing shows at, for example, here, though like most of his shows, this one predominantly in German). 

The show, which is almost but not quite finished, has lots of fun things in it: a short film that documents a mad dash to the venue including backstage antics involving the mild destruction of Ian’s trombone (argh, sorry Ianni; I’m still breaking out in cold sweats over this blunder); a delightful story about endless private practice featuring a violently screeching art deco mirror; a roaring, rumbling bin, a state-of-the-art, wooden Hypobone, and a Pete Doherty-circa-2005 impression replete with smoke machines and the moodiest lighting; and an 18-minute musicological not-quite-spoof paper on Berio’s Sequenze, his broader contributions to electronic music, and the aesthetic overlaps of his brand of modern musicking and Grock’s approach to clowning. Oh, and Ian plays the original Berio like an utter don. Granted, I’m not impartial, but I’m also not lying: there are even Phat Beats. We almost video[graph]ed the work-in-progress showing on the Thursday evening, but decided it wasn’t quite as polished as we’d like it to be before presenting it to The Hordes of Internet, so for now here’s a photograph of the stage after soundcheck, just before being populated with theatrical amusements. Of course, better documentation will follow. Enormous thanks to all of the programmers, technicians, and Glasshouse staff for creating and facilitating the opportunity, and especially to Matthew Jones, who gave us the nudge we needed to apply. We’ll be back with the finished thing as soon as we have it done. 

Some more fun news that seems to signal a general return to Business as it Was Before Everything Happened; at the invitation of Willapa Bay AiR, I’ll spend the month of June on a twenty-kilometer long spit in the Pacific Ocean in Washington state near the Oregon border (seriously, check it out), working on a piece I have mentioned on this page a few times; Noble Gases, an operatish exposition on lighter-than-air travel, obscure wartime legislation on US helium exports, and the sonico-historical resonances between New Jersey and German house and techno music, wrapped neatly in a backpack for the power-pairing of Nina Guo (your new favourite singer), and Edward Kass (my mother’s favourite double bass player), AKA Departure Duo, and probably some video and text bits. This piece has been in the works for a while now, and it’s very satisfying to see the individual moving parts for its realisation begin to come together. Many thanks to the panel at WBAiR for having me, and hello in advance to my fellow residents; I’m looking forward to meeting you all! Let’s have a ball among the waves and oysters of oysterville…

This post feels a little bald without some sound, so above I’ve dropped a tiny, very rough, (but still quite nice?) snippet of a side project I’m working on with the multitalented Rob Hughes under the moniker Wire & Wood; a guitar & xylophone softcore duo through which we’re trying to focus on honing forms that do the musical most with the material minimum. This sketch isn’t really what we sound like, but it’s the season of giving, and it’s something kind of warm in which to briefly bathe your eardrums, though to me feels sort of bleak and grey also, a bit like the Pacific Northwest? Happy whichever festival of light you do or don’t celebrate!

September 2023

Ian Sankey and I spent a really great evening at Cobalt, where we played a distinctly full-fat version of Spare Music together. The venue sound was great, the crowd were warm and lovely, and the staff in the kitchen fed everybody marvelously with a totally delicious daal-cabbage-flatbread-yoghurt fantasia. Here’s a short, rough-and-ready, pretty realistic if low-res video of the last part of our set, played in front of the venue’s own visuals, which I think work rather nicely on this particular clip. Thanks to Dan for the consummate engineering, to Kate for the invitation, conversation, and making us feel so very welcome, and to Faye MacCalman for an awesome second set. Congratulations are due to Faye also, who is one of the incoming Artists-in-Residence at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music (The Institution Formerly Known as ‘Sage Gateshead’).

Next up: lots of studio work for a late November residency together at Glasshouse’s second stage, Sage 2, to work on a half-hour investigation of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza V for trombone. Expect serious fun, deadpan irreverence, and bone-chilling horn playing courtesy of Ian, who can be seen below recording samples for one of our little interventions there.

A fresh installment from my buddy T.Z., probably worthy of your listening pleasure. Rumour has it they’re preparing a live set combining the five existing 2023 releases, in collaboration with our weirdo collective, Northumberland Radical Fun Group. Sounds below.

September 2023

This week I had the special pleasure of a very brief trip to Norway to play You Are The Mole at the Oslo Fringe. Because I had never played in Norway before, and because I knew exactly three people in the country, I feared for the worst: a mostly empty room of friends who had forgone an evening of Netflix to show their investment in our acquaintance. All the more delighted was I, then, to find the room not-so-sparsely populated at all. The festival takes place in a warren of interconnected venues down by the port on the fjord, opposite the opera house, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you’re ever in Oslo when it’s on, head down. Heck, go to Oslo for it – I’m planning to go next year as a punter, drop me an email and we’ll meet up. Thanks to Andrew for engineering, to Amanda and the OF crew for their warm welcome, and to M & D for drumming up a whole posse. And to TS, for his unforgettable, airborne hospitality. 

photo credit: Martin Thomson

My friend T.Z. has put out another strange, moody little record (embedded below and linked here), and I like it more than the last ones even. Give it a whirl! I want to also plug an EP by one of my all-time musical heroes, Rutger Zuyderveld, AKA Machinefabriek, whose videogame soundtrack Hinkelstap (‘Hopscotch’ in Dutch), I’ve been playing on repeat on my recent travels. At this point, I can hardly tell where the record ends and the wispy, washed-out, just-after-dawn light begins. For anyone with dotted note or double-clavé abuse issues, it’s irresistable. 

Some fun and exciting things on the horizon; a stripped-down live set for a smaller, four-piece manifestation of  Northumberland Radical Fun Group ahead of a kind of grand 45-minute album that has been 90% done for a year, a touring  piece about LIGHTER-THAN-AIR TRAVEL for the Berlin-Boston Departure Duo, and trombonist Ian Sankey and I will be back at The Glasshouse ICM (formerly known as Sage Gateshead) in November to work on a funny storytelling thing about Luciano Berio and the Swiss clown Grock, from whose garden Mr. Berio stole apples as a kid before dedicating his trombone Sequenza to him as a grown-up. Lo, what antics! Updates to follow. 

June 2023

Freshly back from Naples (my first time there; what a bonkers place!), where I was bowled over by the fun, quality and generosity of this year’s participants in Altofest. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get to do a gig or a project that’s really special, and that makes the joy, excitement and satisfaction of amateur making (I mean this in the proper sense, from the latin ‘amare’, to love) bubble up and inspire again. 

Altofest, organised by the Teatringestazione team, has a deceptively simple premise: solicit open submissions from performers around the world, make a selection based not on an explicit theme, but rather on subtle resonances between works, and embed the invited artists in the city itself by placing them in the homes of a network of Naples’ citizens, encouraging them to adapt the proposed works to respond to, fit in with, or otherwise incorporate the hosting homes–or indeed their hosts–into the performance. 

Concretely, this meant taking the lockdown piece You Are The Mole–eerily, YATM premiered in 2021 to a physical audience of zero, instead performed to a camera crew for streaming at a later date–and blowing new life into it. The result was an fun, off-kilter duet performed four times on the trot with my gracious host, the profoundly thoughtful and incisive Pina Lanna, in her living room, a space filled with Italian translations of the great works of sociology and literature from 20th century, and packed each run with a motley crew of locals and international visitors to the festival. My favourite rendition was the second one: everything clicked, Pina knocked it out of the park, and the piece still felt fresh and new, and the audience seemed to get a kick out of it. It was a special treat to finally do the piece in front of a fleshy, present audience, something that I had forgotten hadn’t yet taken place. Repeat performances are always a great way to get to know a piece and what does and doesn’t work in it; the laughs in this one came in some very unexpected places, and more frequently than I thought they would. Here’s a bit of ambient viddy from the festival filmed and edited by the lovely Giuseppe Valentino that gives a good sense of the heat and intensity behind the scenes (after a slow first week of settling in, making adaptations, and rehearsing, the four days of performances were very full-on, so forgive the bearded punter half-snoozing at the 7-second mark), with some of that second day performance cut in. I recommend checking out all of the artists at the festival; it was an astonishing mix of folks and ideas and hosted some genius performances.

So the art was cool, yes, but the real highlight of the festival for me was the social side of things; spending time with and getting to know actual residents of Naples, learning about the fabric of the city first-hand, and really living there as something of an insider was incredible. If you’re reading this as somebody who makes performances, I can’t urge you enthusiastically enough to submit for a future edition of the festival. If the point of all of this stuff is to make meaningful things happen with and through others, and for audiences and performers to draw sustenance from, then Altofest has it absolutely nailed. This wasn’t just a couple of fun weeks hanging out and playing shows in a busy, sweaty city, but a possibly life-changing thing. It will be a long time before the sights, sounds and smells of these four shows, in their four-hands form with Pina, fade from memory. 

Thanks to Anna and Giovanni T, all of their behind-the-scenes collaborators (you know who you are), and all the performers and audiences. Get in. Next stop for the mole: the Oslo Fringe in September. See you there?

Before I sign off on this one, we need to talk about partybag.

May 2023

Trombonist Ian Sankey and I took Spare Music for another outing, this time at the Elder Beer Café in Heaton, Newcastle, supporting Danielle Price and Martin Thomson of Dopey Monkey playing their Situational Soundtrack project with appallingly funky drummer Adrian Ortman. The vibe was good, the crowd a pleasure, and the early start in the open-topped courtyard presented a fabulous natural spectacle halfway the headline set: a set of solar halos flat in the sky at about 8pm, for which everybody stopped playing and took a moment to take it in. Aside from the really good music – you can find a few tunes from Soundtrack here (go have a listen, you’ll be glad you did) – this bizarre and spectacular thing made the night for me. It made the Northern Echo, and also the BBC. Upside-down rainbows! What’s not to love?!

Thanks to Dopey Monkey and Adrian for the invitation, and to Ed at Elder Beer for being a super gracious and very laidback host. We’ll be back with a series of shows that I’ve being scheming up for some time now. Keep your eyes and ears peeled, Heaton; there are some pretty cool music makers coming your way in the near future.

Ian and I will play Spare Music again at Cobalt Studios before we break for summer, and if you’re looking to put out a moody new piece that’s medieval and folky but also spectral and bumping on a your label, please get in touch; we’re looking to work with somebody to put this new, 25-minute slice out into the world. Supercut above; email for a private link to the whole thing.