Disappointment & Small Relief @ Aldeburgh Music

May 2016

In a week of outrageous misfortune (Norwegian Airlines please let me know if you find my missing laptop; Suffolk Constabulary give me a call if you ever manage to drag the stolen rental car out of the sea) something amazing happened at Aldeburgh Music with The House of Bedlam, Larry Goves, and Sam Quill with my main man Laurie Tompkins, one of the brains behind Slip. Each of us was charged with putting together a 20′ multi-movement piece for a concert that we’ll take on the road over the next year. Reeds:

I made a new live-typed text piece called Disappointment & Small Relief: Hospital Scenes, which tells the story of a doomed romance between Our Hero, a photosensitive in-patient at an eye clinic, and You: an ophthalmologist with a strobe-like smile. ‘Each passing day is one thing that is not another: Your ecstacy, and Our Hero’s worsening condition.’ Pretty sad, slightly happy, with drum machines and crass synths and saxophone and a piccolo for good measure. Viddy to follow, here for now is the second movement, in which our two protagonists fall fast and hard and head over heels.

Very warm thanks to Larry Goves, Harry Fausing Smith, Kathryn Williams, Steph Tress, and Tom McKinney for their skills, and to Aldeburgh Music for their amazing hospitality. A bunch of tunes from Disappointment & Small Relief will make it in some fresh fashion onto the forthcoming LP, a manic 45-minute odyssey tentatively titled JOYROBICS, and on track for a spring release. Shows with The House of Bedlam in Berlin and NYC to follow, but first up is at London’s Café Oto on December 5th.