Tuesday 19 March 2024, 7.30pm
To launch the third volume of the Setlist mini-zine series, improvisers from across the UK come together for live sets using material from the zines so far. The music will take as its starting points text and visual contributions by some of the following: Kim Macari, Bell Lungs, Anton Hunter, Angela Guyton, Graham Dunning, Kate Carr, Dee Byrne, Old Bort, David Birchall and Sam Andreae...
Setlist is a DIY publishing project by Cath Roberts. Artists are invited to create text and images as small provocations / titles / agitations / starting points for improvisation. These are then printed up into A7 riso-printed mini-zines ready to be used as tools in new situations. cathrobots.co.uk
Khabat Abas is a cellist, improviser, artist, and composer from Kurdistan who likes to transgress. She experiments with the cello structurally and musically, improvising, composing, creating sound installations and diverse cellos including her shell-case cello (made from a shell dropped on Kurdistan), and using her own body. She is inspired in part by the silenced stories of women, which she makes audible through her compositions, using diverse materials to protest against oppression rooted in social and political systems. She questions what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that contrast with traditional musical values and cannot be controlled or commodified.
Abas has performed with numerous ensembles, including the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, Sulaymaniyah string orchestra, Gothenburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, the Non-Ensemble for experimental music, London Improvisers Orchestra and ONe_Orchestra New. She has collaborated with curators, artists and musicians in Kurdistan-Iraq, Sweden, Germany, and the UK. Abas’s recent piece for electro-acoustic cello was performed in Slemani-Kurdistan as a part of the Global Listening Biennial 2021. She also performed at the Space21 festival in Kurdistan-Iraq in 2021, the Winter sound festival in Canterbury 2022 and the Borderline Festival Athens 2022, and she participated in the (Abandoned Space) project, a collaboration between the Sonorities festival in Belfast and Space21 festival in Kurdistan. Her compositions have been played as part of Klangwerkstatt Festival for New Music in Berlin, the Space21 festival in Kurdistan, and new jazz festival in London. She is co-founder, with Hardi Kurda, of Duo Moment; they have released two albums: Broken Resonance on the Space21 Label, and Illegal Performance, recorded at Café Oto 2021. She has been awarded grants from Salam culture house in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Swedish art council community, and Stim Forward Fund in Sweden.
Dee Byrne (alto sax) is a composer and improviser working in both jazz and experimental music (acoustic and electronic). Since 2019, explorating deeper into the area where structured, composed material meets with free improvisation, Dee came up with a bunch of new music, which has since been recorded with two ensembles: her new sextet Outlines, with an album on Whirlwind Records 2023); and UK/Swiss collaborative sextet MoonMot, with an album due for release on ENJA in 2023. Dee has been playing in mainland Europe as well as the UK, both with MoonMot and European quintet Ydivide (led by Swiss drummer Clemens Kuratle). She is also active with UK/Swiss trio Motherboard Pinball, long-standing duo electro-acoustic duo Deemer with Dutch sound artist Merijn Royaards; and with the London Improvisers Orchestra.
Since 2013 Dee has worked with improvising baritone saxophonist Cath Roberts under the Banner of LUME, a platform for improvised music based in London. Dee and Cath play in a regular duo and will be performing at the Summer Bummer Festival in Antwerp in August 2023.
“Bell Lungs” is the moniker of Scottish-Turkish vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and creative facilitator Ceylan Hay.
Her music takes a freewheeling, magpie attitude to ambient, noise, free improvisation, psychedelia, jazz, post-rock, minimalism and folk, creating subtly shifting sound worlds drawing on natural cycles, environmental disaster and the microcosmic aspects of relationships. Instrument collecting is a long-held passion, and she plays a startling number of instruments, integrating vocals, strings, keys, tuned percussion and woodwinds into lushly textured layers and loops. It is her vocal mastery which is most striking, a resonant instrument acting as a conduit for the emotions, described in reviews as “disarming” and “vaulting”.
Born in Leicester 1981. A musician living and working in Manchester in real time with sound and instruments. This performance practice as an improviser becomes a way to think more widely about how sound functions in space and the built environment. Improvising solo and with others using guitars, objects and non-fixed instrument structures. Performing with many Manchester based/related improvisors including Sam Andreae, Andrew Cheetham, Otto Willberg, Greta Buitkute, THF Drenching, Richard Scott, Philip Marks, Adam Fairhall, Luke Poot, London based Colin Webster and Amsterdam native Rogier Smal. One-offs and random stage/studio collaborations have involved working with figures such as Marshall Allen, Rhys Chatham, Mick Beck, Phil Minton and Mark Sanders.
Kate Carr is a London-based composer and field recordist whose work uses sound to explore the spaces we create together. She is particularly interested in shared public spaces, and the ways we deploy sound to connect, occupy, immerse and remove ourselves from locations, events and each other. Her live work is centred on objects, chance events and textures.
Carr also runs the label Flaming Pines.
More: https://www.gleamingsilverribbon.com/about
Tullis Rennie is a composer, electronic musician, improvising trombonist, sound artist, field recordist, and DJ. He currently lives in London. Recent activity has included a commission for the Vonnegut Collective (premiered at the RNCM, Manchester), two residencies at the UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro, and an hour-long broadcast specially composed for ResonanceFM. He is a founder member of Insectotròpics, a multi award winning audio-visual collective based in Barcelona. He has appeared as trombonist with with Anton Hunter’s Article XI and Belfast-based ensemble Foirmfada. His has been published in Organised Sound and Leonardo Music Journal. Tullis is a Visiting Lecturer at City University London. He recently completed a PhD in Composition at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast.
Sloth Racket is a band of improvisers from London, Manchester and Dundee. Baritone saxophone player Cath Roberts creates scores that form the skeleton of the music, and the band constructs a collective sound out of those pages in the moment. Since forming in 2015 they have toured regularly and appeared at numerous UK festivals. The band released their fifth album Organising Space on the Luminous label in 2022.
‘Watching Sloth Racket perform is a thrilling experience, conveying a palpable sense that the musicians are navigating the scores by the seat of their pants, making real-time group decisions that sculpt the compositions into unique shapes each time they’re played.’ – Daniel Spicer, The Wire, December 2021
