Black Forest Orchestra live at the Woodland Gathering Festival

Here's a recording of a set I played at the Woodland Gathering Festival in July with the Black Forest Orchestra. The group is made up of members from several other experimental music groups, Shaun Blezard from Clutter, Ian Simpson from Noise Research, and Glenn Boulter from Focal Gaol. The Woodland Gathering is a two-day festival run at Fellfoot Wood in the Lake District by Radio Black Forest. The recording was made and broadcast by Phantom Circuit, a programme broadcasting "strange and wonderful sound waves". Go to about 6 minutes in for the Black Forest Orchestra set.

Phantom Circuit #80 (17th Aug 2011) by Phantom Circuit on Mixcloud

I'll post some photos from the festival here soon, so watch this space...

The a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra: Musical Settings Part I

On Sunday I played with the a.P.A.t.T Orchestra in a concert that included work by Cornelius Cardew, Liverpool composer, Richard Harding, and Argentinian composer, Alan Courtis. The concert was the first part of a series of events that will take in various unusual locations in and around Liverpool. This one was at the bandstand in Sefton Park.

The first piece was Alan Courtis' In-Formed Music for newspaper ensemble, which was much as described on the can: creating sounds and textures using newspapers, which had been supplied by the Echo newspaper. More interesting was the next piece, Richard Harding's Untitled, which, while tonal, used aleatoric and improvisational processes to create shifting clouds of sound. Finally came Cardew's piece, Paragraph 7 of The Great Learning. The work is for voices, and with the 23-strong ensemble sounded quite stunning, resounding in power and beauty in equal measure. Using guided improvisation, Cardew's piece starts with dense and dissonant harmonies, slowly evolving into a sparser harmonic field, though still retaining the power of the massed voices.


Here's a short article about the event.



There are also some photos of the concert taken by Michael Pace-Sigge.

DJing and Free Improvisation

While I was delivering a series of workshops at Band on the Wall in Manchester recently, I was interviewed by Dan Leach for an article about the connection between DJing and free improvisation. The article explores the ways in which an improvisatory approach can help DJs, and is now available online.