Monday 10 October 2022, 8pm
‘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
Pleased to host an album release show from Sloth Racket; 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, appeared at numerous UK festivals, and are releasing their fifth album on the Luminous label this October.
Sam Andreae / alto saxophone
Cath Roberts / baritone saxophone and compositions
Anton Hunter / guitar
Seth Bennett / double bass
Johnny Hunter / drums
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
Cath Roberts (they/them) is an improviser, composer and artist based in Hastings, UK, whose work combines acoustic and electronic improvised music, experimental composition, and DIY publishing practices.
On saxophones Cath has collaborated with a wide range of artists and ensembles internationally for over a decade. Their band Sloth Racket has released five studio albums, touring widely and ‘lurching between riff and abstraction’ (The Wire) since forming in 2015. Other recent exploits include playing with Chris Corsano as part of his 2022 Cafe Oto residency, and being one of two UK artists (with Mandhira De Saram) commissioned by Australian Art Orchestra to co-create and perform Fresh Water – Salt Water in Melbourne and Huddersfield (a hcmf// and AAO co-commission, also in 2022).
Cath works with live electronics (SOMA Lyra-8 synthesiser, samplers, and small tabletop machines) in ongoing collaborations with Kate Carr (as Quartz Sand), Graham Dunning (as Grid & Robots) and Tullis Rennie (as Composite Mashworks). Be unafraid to open things up, a solo improvisation on tabletop electronics, was released on Fractal Meat Cuts in 2022. Cath’s sampler-based solo collage set appeared at hcmf// 2024, Sonics Hastings 2025 and Sacrum Profanum (Kraków) 2025.
In 2021 Cath was commissioned by hcmf// to create And then the next thing you know, a cross-artform installation/performance piece involving a giant, hanging, fragmented graphic score, elements of which are being integrated into a new audio-visual collaboration with Tullis Rennie. In 2024 Cath established the DIY small press Ink-Paper-Sound, and they co-run the Luminous label and the BRÅK concert series.
A double bassist based in Dundee, Seth Bennett came up through punk music, spending his twenties playing in a roster of different bands. On the side, he was improvising, exploring speculative sound through the lens of jazz music, as well as in more formless, functionless set-ups. As a self-taught musician with no formal training, Seth’s development as a performer and composer came largely through seeking out any collaborative opportunity he could find, be it working with English folk singers, contemporary dancers or jazz bands. Over the years, he’s also amassed experience as a bandleader, writing primarily for a free improvising trio while attempting to fully unlock the hidden potentials of his instrument.
sethbennett.com
Johnny Hunter is a northern UK-based drummer and composer who comes from a background of both the Avant-Garde and the more mainstream Jazz. His own “chordless” quartet, set up to explore the freedom and limitations of having no chordal instrument, has been recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3, and has performed across the country in notable venues such as London’s Ronnie Scott’s, the Manchester Jazz Festival, Birmingham Jazzlines at Symphony Hall, Liverpool International Jazz Festival, among many others. He also leads the piano trio Fragments, originally a workshop band formed to research and develop new approaches to improvising and composing for improvisers.
In 2018, he took part in Sound and Music’s New Voices programme which allowed him to compose an extended piece for a large ensemble of improvising musicians. He has also written works for various other ensembles, including Pale Blue Dot, a piece for string quartet with tenor sax and drums; Now It Can Be Told, which brings his Post-rock influences to the forefront and investigates the use of electronics in Jazz; Backlash, a piece for improvising “marching band” with the line-up of piccolo, trumpet, trombone, euphonium, accordion and percussion. Outside of his own music, Johnny performs in many other groups including Cath Roberts’s Sloth Racket, John Pope Quintet, Nat Birchall, Engine Room Favourites, and Swiss-UK collaboration MoonMot.
Anton Hunter is a guitarist, improviser and composer living in Manchester. He leads the 11-piece ensemble Article XI as well as his own trio. He appears in the quintet Sloth Racket, the trio Beck Hunters and a myriad of other different ensembles, ad hoc and otherwise. antonhunter.com
