Sunday 22 January 2023, 2pm
This Friendship is Sailing features Maggie Nicols and Odie Ji Ghast on vocals, Sam Andreae on saxophone and home made instruments and David Birchall on guitar.
The group came together with various remote sessions in 2020/21 which produced a release on Beartown Records, described by Fotis Nikolakopoulos on Free Jazz blog : “the music is great (...) both sessions feel like long stories that follow a thread that comes into being on the spot. Gurgles and voices, homemade junk (either be it “real” instruments or electronics), reed noises and a constant chatter of ideas and irony. One the best albums I’ve heard in a while.”
Jo Hutton reviewed the bands first in-person live performance at Café Oto during the summer of 2021 in The Wire:
“The effortless freedom of a child’s voice stops the band with an emphatic funky “huh”. This moment sums up the essence of Maggie Nicols magic: everyone is welcome. All her work is a gathering of disparate souls where everyone’s excellence is assumed.”
This performance led to the idea of organising a tour of afternoon gigs where everyone is welcome and everyone’s excellence is assumed! The idea was for the gigs to be inclusive and child-friendly but still focused on freely improvised performance. To help facilitate this we have a craft workshops running during the performance led by artists Andrew Kerr and Lou O'Connor for people of all ages.
Maggie Nicols joined London's legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1968 as a free improvisation vocalist. She then became active running voice workshops with an involvement in local experimental theatre. She later joined the group Centipede, led by Keith Tippets and in 1977, with musician/composer Lindsay Cooper, formed the remarkable Feminist Improvising Group. She continues performing and recording challenging and beautiful work, in music and theatre, either in collaborations with a range of artists (Irene Schweitzer, Joelle Leandre, Ken Hyder, Caroline Kraabel) as well as solo.
It started as my solo work that is more linked with production. I tend to stick to my way of recording voice on dictophone device (or, these days, more often on my phone). Then I mash that lo-fi recording with samples, put my voice like a cherry on top.
In recent years Odie Ji Ghast became my performer name also, and I don’t hesitate to use it for whatever. Essentially though, this artist lives digitally more than stays gropeable, real and clean in the present. It is a voice that goes through microphones, dictophones, sound machines and wires. That is when Odie Ji Ghast happened anyway - when she got fascinated and heavily consumed by sound that is crackling. And can I take one step away from the sound of acoustic? Visible, front-line - for a second can I sneakily escape?
I play around with instruments from time to time but I take nothing but voice onto the stage. Because only that (and me fiddling with software at home) is what truly represents what this artist is solo. Plus some things I write, and some songs I sing when alone. So this is me trying to present a singular musical body in its most natural format.
Sam Andreae has been active across Europe over the last decade as a saxophonist, composer and organiser. Through improvisation and composition he explores a music of colliding sound gestures and aural detritus, built up from an intentionally fractured instrumental language and playful spontaneity. His compositions place a focus on gestural processes which in their unraveling reveal a trail of sound artefacts to be picked through.
“what Sam Andreae does is liminal music, he shows you the clicks, the noises, the breaths, the rattle and hum” – John Doran, Quietus, 2017 on BBC 3 Late Junction
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.
Ali Robertson has been making himself & others blush as the Giant Tank Institute For Low-Brow Avant-Thought’s resident organiser/improviser for more than two decades. He continues to court public shame alongside Malcy Duff in the duo Usurper while sporadically pleading for redemption via the Sonic Bothy Ensemble.
Coming up through the world of freely improvised music and spontaneous site specific performance happenings on the avant garde fringe, namely the London Musicians collective, The Klinker Club, The Termite Club, The London Film Co-Op, The China Pig, The Mopomoso, Southgate was encouraged by the absurdity of that scene to 'have a go'. In The early 90's already a bit jaded of making artworks solely in response to musicians own creativity she looked to making performance work herself. She took advantage of the arts council's improvised music touring scheme to co-organise three large scale nationwide tours. These saw site specific artworks made, manipulated, trashed, dismantled and moved on at every venue. Props and costumes were chosen for their absurdist qualities as well as for their visual and sculptural potential and their sonic abilities. Extravagant sets were made from street finds, domestic objects mixed with art materials, ladders, poles, foam, polystyrene. Southgate's degree training in metalwork gave her an ability to construct real time sculpture using anything to hand within the whole environment of the gig.
