Friday 17 March 2017, 7.30pm
[Modern Ritual] - A night of new performances exploring ideas of ritual through music and words, evoking real and fictional landscapes. Featuring solo sets from Charles Hayward, Laura Cannell and Hoofus, a new collaboration between Laura & Charles and a new performance/talk by Jennifer Lucy Allan and a reading from Luke Turner.
[Modern Ritual] is ancient, modern, experimental, real, fictional, personal, folkloric. It explores human and mechanical rituals, failure of ritual, through live improvisation and provides a platform to premier new works.
Charles Hayward will be performing his 30 MINUTE SNARE DRUM ROLL which takes a rudimental drum technique and extends this elemental sound out beyond itself into an undulating line that pirouettes and spirals through acoustic space, changing before of our ears. The pencilled, monochromatic sound suggests more than itself; time is the frame.
Overbow fiddle and double recorder player Laura Cannell will be performing new pieces from her latest album Simultaneous Flight Movement, and electronic improvisor Hoofus performs his rustic cadences, Modern Ritual will also give the premier performance of Jennifer Lucy Allan’s Foulis’s Daughter: A short history of the foghorn in 30 interrupted acts A spoken, sounded and interrupted performance/talk, tracing a rhythmic history of the foghorn at the edges of the Atlantic: along the fog-bound Labrador Coast; at a bend on the Firth of Clyde; on the tip of The Lizard and from the cliffs at the South Foreland in Kent. And, Luke Turner explores new paths with his writing on walking as ritual.
Charles Hayward is an English drummer/singer/composer and was a founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. He also played with early European improv group Mal Dean's Amazing Band and gigged and recorded with Phil Manzanera in Quiet Sun as well as a short stint with Gong. Since the late 80's he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations, including Massacre (with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith), Monkey Puzzle Trio and Albert Newton (with Pat Thomas and John Edwards). The project This Is Not This Heat has recently completed a 3 year series of performances in UK, Europe, US and Japan.
Throughout a nearly 50 year career Charles has developed idiosyncratic attitudes and insights into a wide range of soundwork, spanning improvisation, song, sound as sound, using order and chaos as creative energies. He curates a six monthly series of performances, workshops and installation called Charles Hayward Presents on behalf of Lewisham Arthouse for Albany Theatre. Recent releases include ‘Objects of Desire’ cassette on Blank Editions and the piano centred song cycle ‘Begin Anywhere’ on Klanggalerie & God Unknown Records.
“As impassioned and animated offstage as behind his massive drumkit, Charles Hayward radiates a genuine intensity. He first came to wide attention as drummer with the highly influential This Heat as the embers of Post-Punk simmered off into wilder experimental tangents. He has released a dozen solo and colaborative albums, and puts on rare solo live shows which pull the raw muscular percussion at the heart of Rock into new shapes with devastatingly powerful results.” – Freq
"Telepathic magic……. Hayward is one of the most life-affirming people who stalks this dark globe." - SOUND PROJECTOR
Laura Cannell is an internationally acclaimed composer and performer from East Anglia. Her music straddles the worlds of contemporary and ancient music, it is semi-composed, semi-improvised and draws on the emotional influences of the landscape whilst exploring the spaces between early and experimental music. She has released seven solo albums to critical acclaim, mainly performing on Overbowed Violin and Double Recorders. Recent EPs have seen her recording on church organs and vocals.
Following a couple of years of collaborative releases, remote projects, and sound installations Laura returns to her solo work and to Cafe Oto for the first time in since April 2019 to perform music from her new solo album ‘We Became Islands’ due for release in February 2024.
Laura has released seven solo albums, toured throughout the UK & Europe, and is regularly broadcast on the BBC. Performances include Deep Minimalism at Queen Elizabeth Hall, solo at King’s Place, touring & recording with cellist Lori Goldston (Nirvana, Earth), These Feral Lands Album (with writer/comedian Stewart Lee) and solo at The Barbican. Commissions have included: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Historic Royal Palaces sound installations both solo and with Mira Calix. She is regularly broadcast on the BBC, including live in concert and making playlists for Late Junction Mixtape, BBC 6Music and the World Service. She has also recorded a Maida Vale Session with harpist Rhodri Davies. Laura’s music has been used for film & television internationally and on the catwalks at Paris and London Fashion Weeks.
In 2020 she appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Documentary Life, Death and The Foghorn with Jennifer Lucy Allan, and curated and toured her Modern Ritual Series throughout the UK 2017 - 2018. She has performed solo extensively in Europe and has been featured in The Irish Times with Kate Ellis, The FT, The Guardian, The Quietus, and The Wire Magazine (Aug 2022). Other highlights include performing at Flow Festival (Helsinki), Fano Free Folk Festival in Denmark, Le Guess Who? In Holland, Unsound in Poland and many others.
Hoofus uses drifting oscillators, cryptic rhythm and tactile interaction between performer and machines to create music of wayward eerie wonder. Drawing on rustic, alienation and the reclamation of the manmade by nature, Hoofus explores the uncanny beauty of the intangible and occult seeping through into our post-industrial world.
Luke Turner is a writer and editor based in London. In 2008 he co-founded The Quietus, an online magazine devoted to music, arts and popular culture within the context of contemporary society. Turner is currently curating a series of live events as part of Hull City Of Culture 2017’s commemoration of the radical art collective COUM and as a journalist, he has contributed to The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Vice, the BBC, NME, Q, Mojo, Monocle, Nowness and the SomeSuch journal, among other publications in the UK and beyond. Aside from his cultural writing, Turner writes regularly on landscape, place, memory and self for the Caught By The River online magazine, including a regular column on Epping Forest. This writing is also forming the basis for a forthcoming book on urban forests, family, ritual, death and sexuality against the context of Western decline and environmental destruction.
Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and researcher. She is currently working on a PhD at CRiSAP (UAL) on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, and is also a freelance music journalist specialising in underground and experimental music. Previously she was online editor for The Wire, and now freelances for The Wire, The Quietus, The Guardian and others. She runs the reissues label Arc Light Editions with James Ginzburg, and is a core member of Laura Cannell’s Modern Ritual Collective. She has recently guested on BBC3’s Late Junction, and written a series on life living in a lighthouse for Caught By The River.
