Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

After a pretty long lead-in, the Cyborg Soloists project with the Zöllner-Roche duo and Royal Holloway, University of London happened last week at Rich Mix in London. Huge thanks to Zubin Kanga, Caitlyn Rowley, and Marcella Keating for putting the show together, and to Heather Roche and Eva Zöllner for playing my quiet, little piece, which is called Signs of Life, so well. Here’s a very short clip of the last minute-or-so from soundcheck filmed on a phone–the organisers have some nice documentation in the works, but it gives an fine sense of the general situation, though the sound is about as shoddy as you’d expect. I’ll post the better documentation when it arrives.

Exciting times ahead – I’ll be in Naples for half of June for Altofest 2023, which if you don’t know about you probably should; it’s a completely fascinating performance festival-cum-social experiment run by Anna Gesualdi and Giovanni Trono of TeatrInGestAzione with their community of Neapolitans, and they’ve won all kinds prizes for their curatorial nous. As I understand it, it’s a fortnight-long artistic utopia in what I hope will be unbroken sunshine. Then back out to Oslo for a much briefer period at the start of September for the Fringe festival there, both times with my catchy video piece about the end of the open internet and freewill more generally. More details as I get them; in the meantime, pray for good global health and reliable travel!

One last thing – a friend sent me a link to some of their new stuff, (embed below), and it’s kind of nice, dreamy, tender stuff. Recommended…

Winter 2022-23

Ian Sankey and I have a fresh half-hour piece for trombone and live electronics called Spare Music, and after having tested it at a vast and very fancy church in Kensington, and a significantly less fancy but considerably more interesting auditorium made of old pianos in Edinburgh, we’re excited to be filming and touring the work later this winter. If you want to come to the taping, let us know – we’ll have limited free spaces, which is happening at a gorgeous, 12th century chapel (with a fascinating history) tucked just inside the Northumberland National Park. (You’ll need a car to get there, and warm clothes while there to survive). If this sounds like something you’d want to be a part of, then get in touch via email (see the about / ‘???‘ page for an address). We’re also very glad to report that we’ll be in residency with Sage Gateshead’s Foundry programme later in the year, to work on a new set that takes Luciano Berio’s famous Sequenza V for trombone and turns it into an hour of bizarre, irreverent and, we hope, beautiful storytelling.