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 an experimental cellist, improviser, and composer from Iraqi Kurdistan. She moves freely between artistic discipline and possibilities. Her works are inspired by a broad collection of methods, including noise, improvisation, and narrative storytelling as individual approaches. Therefore, she searches for unheard sounds or undiscovered spaces. Khabat is probably best known for her adapted cello and improvisational work exploring extended techniques, through which she started developing pieces that respond to the objects that are surrounding her or to her childhood memories. In her practice, she raises questions about what is out of bounds, raising the possibilities of sounds that cannot be controlled – in contrast to traditional musical values.
Dee Byrne is a saxophonist, composer and improviser with an interest in jazz and experimental music. Dee collaborates with artists from the UK and Europe who occupy the area of contemporary jazz, avant-garde and free improvisation. Her sextet Outlines serves as a vehicle for Dee’s exploration of group improvisation and original composition. Other bands include European Quintet Ydivide, Loz Speyer's Inner Space, UK/Swiss band MoonMot, London Improvisers Orchestra, and Orchestra New, an improvising ensemble led by Caroline Kraabel.
“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, and field recordist. He has appeared in collaboration through performance and recording with an array of artists including Claudia Molitor, John Butcher, Cath Roberts, Olie Brice, Kate Carr and many others. Tullis’s varied career to date has touched upon many different conceptual approaches, examining the impact of listening with jazz musicians Matthew Bourne and Graham South on vinyl-only release Muscle Memory ("...Rennie foregrounds the act of listening as an active component in the creation of musical experience” -– The Wire Magazine), and investigating the hidden process of performance preparation with Manchester-based Vonnegut Collective on 48 Hours (Moving Furniture Records). His recent studio work Fixed Freedoms, released on Matthew Herbert's Accidental Jnr label, is "a mutated set of electronic experiments that bends recognizable formulae (trance, dub techno, electro) into abstract landscapes" — Boomkat. He is co-founder of Walls On Walls with visual artist Laurie Nouchka, and a member of the Insectotròpics audio-visual collective, based in Barcelona.
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
