This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Summer Sounds”
Kate Carr (objects and electronics), David Birchall (guitar) and Tullis Rennie (trombone) are three improvisers based in London, Manchester and Hastings. Their first recorded release Zippered Time, Winged Dialogue is a document of their first musical encounter – recorded live at Cafe Oto in 2024 and released on the Flaming Pines label.
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Immediately each player starts floating strange riddles to the other two. Rennie’s trombone vacillates between morning yawn and mammalian purr; Birchall’s guitar evokes boats knocking against harbour stilts but also the crackle of an incoming radio transmission; Carr’s setup (noise box ukulele, balloons, tubes, bottles) gives rise to a peripheral shiver of static which, upon closer inspection, houses a swirl of high howls and comedic squeaks. Initially these feel like the tentative moves of an improvisatory trio in calibration, yet gradually it becomes clear that evading certainties is the whole point. Even when they rouse into brass snarls and shrieks of indiscernible sources – which is the closest they come to choosing one path over another – the trio retreat again almost immediately, abandoning the onset of solidity, the flattening assuredness of cacophony, to return instead to the richness of liminality and potential. For the entire duration, all doors – those leading to placidity, or to eruption, or to absolute silence – are kept wide open. —Jack Chuter on Zippered Time: Winged Dialogue
Kate Carr’s practice explores the encounters, textures and technologies entangled with field recording using movement, objects and experimental recording techniques. She creates intimate, delicate and hybrid soundworlds which centre the interactions and collectivity which generate soundscapes. Carr works works across composition, performance and installation. In her live work she is increasingly examining some of the ambiguities of field recording, pursuing a practice which blurs live foley work with field recording techniques. She runs the sound art imprint Flaming Pines and has founded the sound art duo Rubbish Music with Iain Chambers. Her music can be found on the labels Room 40, Persistence of Sound, Helen Scarsdale, Longform Editions and Flaming Pines. Carr is Australian, and lives in London.
David Birchall is a performer living in Manchester. He has played improvised music in the UK, Europe, Russia, Palestine, USA & Japan and undertaken artist residencies at The Penthouse (Manchester, UK) and Beppu Project (Beppu, JP). His work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 6 Music & SWR in Germany. He organises and co-curators the Curious Ear series for improvised music in Manchester.
Tullis Rennie is an electronic musician, field recordist, composer, improvising trombonist, whose work "foregrounds the act of listening as an active component in the creation of musical experience” – The Wire Magazine. His latest album Safe Operating Space (2024, Efpi Records) is a hybrid of club music and acoustic free improvisation, reflecting on themes such as global heating, AI-generated deep fakes, family life, and Kate Bush. His work encompasses audio composition, sound installation, community-engaged participative projects, multi-modal works, and live/improvised performances – presented across 20 countries, alongside broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, NTS and ResonanceFM. He is co-founder of community arts action group Walls On Walls, and of Barcelona-based audio-visual collective Insectotròpics. Tullis's previous studio solo release was Fixed Freedoms (2022) on Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Jnr label. He is Senior Lecturer in Music at City St Georges, University of London.
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