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, Albert Newton (with Pat Thomas and John Edwards) and This Is Not This Heat which toured the UK, Europe, USA and Japan between 2016-2019 performing expanded versions of This Heat’s oeuvre to unfaltering critical acclaim. Hayward’s latest group, Abstract Concrete, formed from London players from a diversity of European underground scenes, released it’s self-titled debut album in November 2023.
Laura Cannell is an internationally acclaimed composer and musician whose music straddles the worlds of contemporary and ancient music, drawing on the emotional influences of the landscape. In 2024 she released a monthly EP series on her Brawl Records Label under the heading, ‘A Year of Lore’, and her 10th solo album ‘The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined’ came out August 2024 to rave reviews.
She is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 6Music and was recently featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme as well as two Spotlight Scene features on BBC 6Music. Laura has also performed throughout the UK and Europe and collaborated with the likes of writer and comedian Stewart Lee and the cellist Lori Goldston (Earth/Nirvana) with a 2024 duo album released on State51.
Recent performances include The British Library double bill with Gazelle Twin, ALICE - Copenhagen, Artist in Residence at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, performance & lecture at The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Laura was also a contributing composer/performer to the score of feature film HARVEST which premiered at Venice Biennale, New York and London International Film Festivals in late 2024.
www.lauracannell.com
www.brawlrecords.co.uk
“The raw beauty of her melodies glimmer through prickly thickets of stark and dissonant chordal drones” – THE WIRE
“this music feels ancient, it also feels brutally alive, as if a giant was waking from long slumbers, about to make its way in the world” – THE GUARDIAN
“beguiling, mournful solemnity wreathed in power and sonority. Cannell is one of the country’s most promising musicians.” – RECORD COLLECTOR
“an essential work of modern British folk and avant-garde composition.” – THE QUIETUS
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 broadcaster. She writes on underground and experimental music, and is a presenter on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. Her first book, The Foghorn’s Lament, was out in 2021 on White Rabbit Books. Her next book Clay: A Human History is out in 2024.
