Friday, May 08, 2015
Club Integral - Camembert Japonaise - Sunday 10th May 2015
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A special event in memory of the late great Daevid Allen who played at Club Integral with you me & us (Chris Cutler, Yumi Hara, and Daevid) on 21 April 2013 and 2 May 2013. Rest in peace.
Featuring performances from Chris Cutler, Yumi Hara, Kengo Sakamoto, Kazuya Uechi, Geoff Leigh, and Tim Hodgkinson.
Okinawan musicians and promoters Kazuya Uechi & Kengo Sakamoto join London-based Yumi Hara and rock-in-opposition luminaries Chris Cutler, Geoff Leigh and Tim Hodgkinson for a night of cross-cultural free playing.
With projections by Rucksack Cinema.
Entry £5/£3
Doors 7.30 pm, performance starts 8.00pm
Tim Hodgkinson & Yumi Hara
Geoff Leigh solo
Geoff Leigh & Tim Hodgkinson
Chris Cutler, Yumi Hara, Kengo Sakamoto, Kazuya Uechi, Geoff Leigh, Tim Hodgkinson
With a brief opening set by Sound of the Sun with Jaime Rory Lucy.
Yumi Hara
Yumi Hara is from Tokyo and has been living in London since 1993. She is a Senior Lecturer in musicology at the University of East London, a keyboardist, vocalist, composer, and performer of improvisation. Yumi and Chris are the founders of the band ‘Artaud Beats, you me & us’ and has performed internationally. She also lectures about the art of improvisation and teaches Music Performance, Production and Music Technology at the university.
Geoff Leigh
Geoff Leigh is an English jazz and progressive rock musician, playing primarily soprano sax and flute. He was a member of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow and founded several bands himself, including Red Balune, Random Bob, Black Sheep, Mirage, and Ex-Wise Heads.
Aside from is own work he has worked with Robert Wyatt, Mike Oldfield, Slapp Happy, Hatfield and the North, Steve Hillage, various members of Henry Cow, Gong, and Soft Machine, Acid Mothers Temple, and Nurse with Wound. Recently he has been playing in Artaud Beats with Chris Cutler, Yumi Hara, and John Greaves.
In 2010 he did a short tour of Italy in February with guitarist Adriano Lanzi, The year also saw a handful of local performances, including two appearances at Brighton's Spirit Of Gravity, one with the Warrior Squares, the second with cellist Bela Emerson. Three new CDs were released: Radar Favourites, Ex Wise Heads, and Uwe Bastiansen's Stadtfischflex, featuring Leigh alongside Jean-Herve Peron and Zappi Diermaier (Faust), and Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow). He has recently been recording and touring internationally with Artaud Beats.
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler is a founder of Rock in Opposition, the CEO of the ReR record label, a drummer and writer. He is well known internationally as the drummer of the experimental rock group Henry Cow. He later started the Festival of Rock in Opposition and founded the Recommended label that introduces non-English speaking musicians to the English-speaking world. His publications include ‘File under Popular – Theoretical and Critical Writing on Music’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Under_Popular) and other work on musicology. His ongoing podcast series ‘Probes’ is his research of development in music after the 20th century from a historical perspective.
Tim Hodgkinson
As an improvising musician on reeds and lap steel guitar Tim Hodgkinson has performed all over the world with many of the most acclaimed artists in the field, and continues to be fully engaged in the celebrated Konk Pack trio with Roger Turner and Thomas Lehn. In 2009 he released KLARNT - a CD of solo clarinet improvisations.
With Ken Hyder, and Gendos Chamzyryn from Tuva, he works in the K-Space project: numerous tours of Europe and Siberia and CD releases - including INFINITY, a set of recordings that uses customised software to re-compose the music with each listening. In 2009, K-Space developed a sound-installation for the exhibition Shamans of Siberia at the Museum of Ethnology in Stuttgart.
As a writer, he has published articles and reviews on improvised music, musique concrète, spectralism, the ethnomusicology of shamanism, and the aesthetic problems of the impact of new technology on contemporary music making - in, amongst others, Perspectives of New Music, Arcana, Contemporary Music Review, Musicworks, The Wire, Cambridge Anthropology, Variant, Rer Quarterly, and Resonance Magazine. He is currently completing what will be his first published book, DEFAULT, for MIT press.
He has given lectures, workshops and seminars at Cagliari and Lyon Conservatoires, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, at Goldsmiths College and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, at Istanbul, Edinburgh and Cornell Universities, and art schools in several European countries, at COMA summer school, and at the Verband für Aktuelle Musik in Hamburg where he was artist in residence in 2010.
Kazuya Uechi
Kazuya Uechi is the owner of the Live House ‘groove’ (www.cosmos.ne.jp/~groove/schedule.html). He is a bassist from Okinawa and lives in Naha City. The owner of ‘groove’ for the past 24 years, he has released 2 CDs of traditional folk songs of Miyako Island from ‘groove line records’. He participates in a large number of live events and record production. As a bassist, he has been involved in many sessions with underground musicians from home and abroad. He formed the band ‘Jittyaku Orchestra’ (https://ja-jp.facebook.com/jicchaku) in 2005. He also performs with the rock bands ‘Shaolong To The Sky’ and ‘Maltese Rock’.
Kengo Sakamoto
Kengo Sakamoto is from Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan and has been living in Okinawa since 2000. He is an electric bassist and has released 4 studio albums and 4 live DVDs with the progressive rock group, Koenji Hyakkei (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Denji_Hyakkei). As well as Japan, he has performed at music festivals in the United States, France, Portugal, Germany and solo in Taiwan and San Francisco. He is also a professional music therapist. He strongly believes that his relationship with music has developed by living in Okinawa.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Monday, December 01, 2014
Elephantine
Extract from live recording at Silver Elephant Club, Tokyo, 19/11/2014. Flute processed with Mini Kaos Pad & Pure Data.
Click on header for direct link.
Click on header for direct link.
Photo: Sennen Musi
Monday, November 24, 2014
Lindsay Cooper Concert
Originally posted on FaceBook 22nd November 2014.
Just about recovered enough from my trip to Japan to crawl out of bed after 12 hours semi-sleep. Been reading posts & comments about the Lindsay Cooper memorial concert, so thought it was about time I put some thoughts to paper. Several people have asked me why I wasn't playing on this (alleged) "Henry Cow Reunion". Firstly, to dispel any illusions, it was NOT a HC reunion - with the exception of Michel Berckmans, musicians from HC & other bands who played with Lindsay got together to play her music - I never played with Lindsay, apart from a guest appearance on one HC concert in 1974. But the main reason for my absence is the fact that my reading is not really up to scratch, & over the years I've been drawn more & more into improvised music - I can't even remember the last time I played any serious written music, but probably 20 odd years ago. I was invited to play on the concerts, but everyone involved knew it would be a knife-edge affair, with very little rehearsal time, & I thought it would be too much of a struggle for me, & probably a hindrance to the overall success of the project. As many of you know, the above-mentioned trip to Japan was to play at the RiO JAPAN Festival with The Artaud Beats, with Chris Cutler, John Greaves, & Yumi Hara. I also played 7 other concerts, the last 4 being in Tokyo on the same days the rehearsals took place, so it was a simple choice for me - stay in Tokyo & play with musicians I hadn't played with before, or come back to London & add perhaps a little too much of my well known chaos to an already on-the-edge performance. Most of the FB comments so far have been positive, although there are always those folks who complain that it was under-rehearsed & a bit rough at the edges - what did they expect? There was no arty-*arty funding, no rich patrons, no record company backing, no agents, managers, or other music industry parasites cashing in on some kind of imaginary nostalgic romantic glorification of the past, not even any real support from the music press - just a handful of dedicated musicians getting together as friends to pay homage to a recently departed friend in the best way they know how, & against all the odds. Thank you Lindsay for your contribution to a music form which will no doubt live on for many years to come, & hats off to all the guys & gals who put these concerts together.
PS. If there is ever a real HC reunion, I'll do my best to dust off the reading skills & put my all into it. Enough said.
Just about recovered enough from my trip to Japan to crawl out of bed after 12 hours semi-sleep. Been reading posts & comments about the Lindsay Cooper memorial concert, so thought it was about time I put some thoughts to paper. Several people have asked me why I wasn't playing on this (alleged) "Henry Cow Reunion". Firstly, to dispel any illusions, it was NOT a HC reunion - with the exception of Michel Berckmans, musicians from HC & other bands who played with Lindsay got together to play her music - I never played with Lindsay, apart from a guest appearance on one HC concert in 1974. But the main reason for my absence is the fact that my reading is not really up to scratch, & over the years I've been drawn more & more into improvised music - I can't even remember the last time I played any serious written music, but probably 20 odd years ago. I was invited to play on the concerts, but everyone involved knew it would be a knife-edge affair, with very little rehearsal time, & I thought it would be too much of a struggle for me, & probably a hindrance to the overall success of the project. As many of you know, the above-mentioned trip to Japan was to play at the RiO JAPAN Festival with The Artaud Beats, with Chris Cutler, John Greaves, & Yumi Hara. I also played 7 other concerts, the last 4 being in Tokyo on the same days the rehearsals took place, so it was a simple choice for me - stay in Tokyo & play with musicians I hadn't played with before, or come back to London & add perhaps a little too much of my well known chaos to an already on-the-edge performance. Most of the FB comments so far have been positive, although there are always those folks who complain that it was under-rehearsed & a bit rough at the edges - what did they expect? There was no arty-*arty funding, no rich patrons, no record company backing, no agents, managers, or other music industry parasites cashing in on some kind of imaginary nostalgic romantic glorification of the past, not even any real support from the music press - just a handful of dedicated musicians getting together as friends to pay homage to a recently departed friend in the best way they know how, & against all the odds. Thank you Lindsay for your contribution to a music form which will no doubt live on for many years to come, & hats off to all the guys & gals who put these concerts together.
PS. If there is ever a real HC reunion, I'll do my best to dust off the reading skills & put my all into it. Enough said.
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