The next SOUNDkitchen event is on Thursday 23rd June 2011 at Hare and Hounds. We are very excitied about our headline act Pleqwho is joining us all the way from Poland. Pleq is the solo project of Bartosz Dziadosz, an experimental musician who combines elements of drone, down tempo, glitch and modern classical. He creates his work by fusing together independently synthesized sounds, often incorporating violin, the unexpectedly melancholic sound of a piano and sometimes female vocals.
Also on the bill is Birningham based Mark Harris, no stranger to SOUNDkitchen having performed at our opening gig with modulate and one of the contributors to our first collaborative project STONEsoup. He will be performing a solo laptop set.
Fianlly we are welcoming Leicester based turntablist and composer James Kelly to perform a live vinyl remix of his studio album Transformation of the Mind with live vocals from Ola Szmidt.
Check out the links and SOUNDkitchen website for artist bios and soundcloud audio samples.
The next SOUNDkitchen event is happening this thursday 17th March at Hare & Hounds, Birmingham. Featuring the first performance from BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) and DJ Seb Merrick playing a mix of Balkan and electroacoustic music!
I’ve just completed a new 5 minute piece composed especially for SOUNDkitchen’s STONEsoup event this Friday 4th March at mac, Birmingham. 12 sound artists have submitted up to 5 minutes of composed material or field recordings sourced in Birmingham. The contributions have been mixed by SOUNDkitchen’s artistic director Annie Mahtani into a one hour concert that will be diffused over the BEAST multichannel sound system.
My piece Tesseral Form No. 2 (Residence) draws sounds from my archive of recordings made around Birmingham city centre along with sounds sourced in a couple of houses I’ve lived in in Brum over the years. The work is the second in an ongoing series provisionally entitled ‘Tesseral Forms’ that uses articulated blocks of sound as a structural process much like the tiles in a mosaic. In this piece I was interested in the juxtaposition of internal and external spaces, domestic and public.
tessera |ˈtesərə|
noun ( pl. tesserae |ˈtesərē|)
a small block of stone, tile, glass, or other material used in the construction of a mosaic.
Click on the image for more info about the gig on the SOUNDkitchen website.
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Anvil & Stirrup’s ThousandUnfold has been selected for inclusion in an online jukebox as part of the Audiograft festival of sound art and contemporary music in Oxford this week.
SOUNDkitchen launches their first series of concerts with the Opening Banquet at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham on 17th February 2011. Here is the flyer with info on all the gigs. More info, artist bios, audio etc on the website.
I’ve started doing some work with Get On The Radio. They are a team of experienced and enthusiastic creatives who have come together through a shared passion for creative education and the exceptional teaching and learning potential of radio broadcasting.
They’re currently working in schools across the Midlands setting up pupil led radio stations. They have a great team that provide everything from technial advice, installation and training to setting up a school radio station with production teams for a variety of radio programmes.
They have strong links with radio professionals and programme makers who can deliver specific masterclasses. I’m working with them as a producer, helping pupils to generate content for their shows such as theme tunes, jingles, features and sound effects.
It’s a fantastic method for encouraging independent, cross-curricular learning in an exciting and creative way.
Creativity Culture & Education (CCE), the charity that run Creative Partnerships, have a number of ‘Legacy of Creative Partnerships’ videos amongst other things on their vimeo page.
“The abolition of a flagship scheme to improve the teaching of the arts in English schools has been condemned by teachers and leading names in British culture as a “foolhardy” move that threatens the education of the most vulnerable children.”
For an example of the kind of impact and legacy Creative Partnerships has had in one Black Country school watch this video from Trinity CofE Primary school:
I’ve recently joined SOUNDkitchen. We are a collective of composers and sound artists with backgrounds in electroacoustic and experimental music. The organisation is the brainchild of Annie Mahtani, ex BEAST, and is dedicated to promoting the work of composers and sound artists working in the field of sound.
We’re kicking off with a pilot series of gigs at the Hare & Hounds in Birmingham and one at mac (Midlands Arts Centre) over the coming months. We’ve been busy putting together a programme of emerging and more established electronic music acts from Birmingham and beyond, mixing up current and ex BEAST composers with the likes of modulate, Nic Bullen and Simon Whetham.
I’ll be performing a live laptop set with Antti Saario as Anvil & Stirrup in the April gig and contributing to a new, collaborative composition for the gig at mac in March.
The Kings Cross or KX Collective are a group of young musicians (12-19) interested in contemporary music making who come together under the guidance of the London Sinfonietta. I recently led a workshop for the collective alongside animateur Jackie Walduck and three players from the London Sinfonietta.
The workshop was inspired by the work of Matthew Herbert whose new work ‘One Day’ was commissioned and performed by the London Sinfonietta during the workshop weekend. Herbert’s work incorporates field recordings, found objects, live sampling and live performers. The video below features Herbert talking about his approach to writing ‘One Day’:
Taking inspiration from Herbert’s work, in particular his P.C.C.O.M. - Personal Contract For The Composition Of Music [Incorporating the Manifesto Of Mistakes], the KX Collective explored experimental approaches to making music including improvisation, recording and sampling sounds, composing with sound, responding to recorded sounds using instruments and the voice and combining this material into a new musical composition.
The workshop was part of an ongoing programme of opportunities for young people in the Kings Cross area of London to take part in a diverse range of music making activities, working with professional musicians and expanding their musical horizons.
