IMAGINED VILLAGE AND AIDAN O’ROURKE FOLK DOUBLE BILL

Listen to Sheema Mukherjee talking about her  New Music 20×12 commission from Imagined Village – ‘Bending the Dark.’

Also check out Aidan O’Rourke talking about his New Music 20×12 commission from An Tobar – ‘TAT-1’

See sets from both in a folk double-bill on Saturday 14 of July, 8pm at Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Find out more / Book Tickets 

Watch a film of the New Music 20×12 composers talking about their commissions

You can experience all 20 commissions across one weekend at Southbank Centre from 13-15 July. Don’t miss your chance to get involved in talks, debates and workshops, as well as a unique opportunity to book a one-to-one composer surgery with one of the New Music 20×12 composers.

Find out more / book tickets

PRS for Music Foundation’s New Music 20×12 is a UK-wide commissioning programme initiated by Jillian Barker and David Cohen, and delivered in partnership with the BBC, LOCOG and NMC Recordings.

Caught by the river – Blog Series – #2 Robert Mcfarlane

On Friday 25 May, some of the UK’s best loved writers and musicians form a cracking line-up for the Caught By The River Variety Show.

The show features live music from Diagrams, Tim Burgess discussing his new book, Richard King reading from his account of the history of independent music – ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Culture Show presenter – Michael Smith, and more.

In the second part of our blog series, we have an extract from Robert Mcfarlane’s new book The Old Ways. Macfarlane’s work documents his explorations into British landscapes, mountains, moors, islands, salt marshes, and sea-caves, writing about modern society’s relationship with the wild.

Two Augusts ago, I joined a crew of five sailing an old open boat from the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, to the remote skerry-island of Sula Sgeir, which lies forty miles due north of the northernmost-point of Lewis – far out into the Atlantic.

Sula Sgeir’s form is geological-brutalist. It is a jaggy black peak of gneiss, the topmost summit of a submarine mountain, and it is home to ten thousand gannets and (until recently) the only albatross in the North Atlantic. The sea has bored clean through the southern part of the island to form a series of caves and tunnels. In big Atlantic storms, the waves break over its summit.

The boat we sailed to Sula Sgeir was called Jubilee, she was seventy-five years old, and she was a sgoth Niseach: a class of Lewisian working boat, lug-rigged, clinker-built, double-ended and open, designed for sturdy seaworthiness up there off the Butt of Lewis where the Atlantic currents meet the currents of The Minch. She was skippered on our voyage by Ian Stephen – sailor, poet, story-teller and life-long follower of the sea-roads – and under Ian’s safe steerage we sailed her overnight to Sula Sgeir, up through an ocean of phosphorescence and stars, at last reaching the skerry at dawn.

The story of that unforgettable journey is told in full in a book called The Old Ways. A year or so ago, though, I was fortunate enough to be put in touch by Jeff Barrett with Chris Watson – the sound-artist, natural-history sound recordist, and Caught by the River favourite. Jeff had it in mind that a collaboration might develop, and so it has. At the Caught by the River Variety Show at the Southbank on May 25th, Chris and I will be performing a sound-story of that voyage – the text spoken by me over a bedding track, with Chris drawing on his extraordinary sound archive to respond to and improvise out of the words themselves. Our aim is nothing more or less ambitious than to evoke the profound and abiding strangeness of sailing that old boat up that ancient sea-way into that vast ocean to that lonely island – and to carry our listeners with us.

What you will hear, therefore, might best be imagined as a dream-voyage or wonder-journey – what in Gaelic is called an immrama – and in this sense precedents for it might be found in very early Celtic sea-stories: the lyric accounts of Mael Duin or St Brendan, say, sailing their hide-hulled boats westwards and northwards, out of the verifiable and into the miraculous.

To buy tickets for this events and check out the full line-up, click here.

Ether 2011: Adrian Utley (Portishead) & Will Gregory (Goldfrapp) collaborate for The Passion of Joan of Arc

Adrian Utley

Will Gregory, photo: Chris Chrisodoulou

Shot in France in 1927 by Carl Theodore Dreyer, the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc was the victim of 55 years of bad luck. Censored before its release in 1928, the original negative was destroyed by fire. Then a second negative re-edited by Dreyer from alternate takes was also thought lost to fire. For more than half a century, this great classic of silent film was known only in mutilated copies, or in a sonorised version which made numerous changes to the original.

Then in 1981, an original Danish copy, complete and in very good condition, was miraculously discovered in a closet of a Norwegian mental institution.

Now Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory and Portishead’s Adrian Utley have collaborated to give The Passion of Joan of Arc a 21st-century make-over creating an original score set to the silent film.

Southbank Centre welcomes this fusion of 15th-century French heroism, 20th-century movie history and 21st-century music-making to close Ether festival 2011.

Catch The Passion of Joan of Arc at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of Ether 2011 on Thursday 28 April. Get tickets here

Ether 2011: Upload your sounds for Tim Exile’s live gig

In addition to being one of the most exciting live performers around Tim Exile has established himself at the forefront of interactive music making.

For Ether, a festival dedicated to the cutting edge of music making, we’re working with Tim to take this online collaboration even further.

As part of his main Ether performance Tim will be mixing in sounds and music created by the Ether audience itself.

You can record or upload your sound for Tim to use in his set by heading over to: http://soundcloud.com/southbankcentre/dropbox

Additionally as part of the festival Tim will be hosting 3 Jamshops where you can make music with him up close and personal by collaborating in a group jam. Get a hands-on experience of Tim’s unique bespoke live electronic music performance machine, create and manipulate your own sounds, jam along and be sampled, and come away with your own exclusive recording of the experience.

Ether 2011: Trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey Live with Philharmonia Orchestra

Following a sell-out success in June 2010, Southbank Centre presents Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey with live music.

Conducted by André de Ridder, the enormous forces of Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices join together to perform the film’s extraordinary soundtrack, as live accompaniment to a screening in Royal Festival Hall.

Long recognised as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, 2001 – A Space Odyssey is celebrated for its technological realism, its innovative Oscar®-winning special effects and a bold use of music. The film brought worldwide fame to both Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra and the music of Gyorgy Ligeti; it also created one of cinema’s most memorable images as a spaceship floats serenely through space to the strains of Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz.

Here’s the official trailer from 1968.

 

 

Presented in association with the BFI (British Film Institute), with support from Warner Bros.

Catch 2001: A Space Odyssey Live at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on 7 & 8 April 2011 as part of Ether 2011. Get tickets here

Ether 2011: Tim Exile’s Jamshops – the interactive jamming experience

Tim Exile hosts a series of Jamshops where you can make music with him up close and personal by collaborating in a group jam. Get a hands-on experience of Tim’s unique bespoke live electronic music performance machine, create and manipulate your own sounds, jam along and be sampled, and come away with your own exclusive recording of the experience.

Tim demonstrates what you’ll be doing at his Jamshops in this video.

 

 

Tim Exile’s Jamshops as part of Ether 2011 at Southbank Centre from 2 – 5 April. Come along, jam together. Get tickets here

See Tim Exile’s solo gig at Southbank Centre on 6 April. Get tickets here

Ether 2011: Win Exclusive Promo of Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta

As part of Ether 2011, Micachu & The Shapes and Southbank Centre Resident Orchestra London Sinfonietta are teaming up once more for a night of 21st-century experimentalism. To celebrate another of Ether’s ground-breaking collaborations, we have 10 exclusive promo copies of Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta’s new release Chopped & Screwed to give away.

Discussing the project, Micachu, aka Mica Levi, said: ‘Our own instruments sound a bit percussive, a bit like samples, a bit different. When I write songs on a guitar I find my hands falling into the same bar chords all the time, but if you have something new in front of you there are no rules. No one else has ever played one before so you can approach music differently just make it up as you go along. Doing a project with the London Sinfonietta is an amazing opportunity for us.’

To enter, simply email competitions@southbankcentre.co.uk by 20 March with ‘Chopped & Screwed’ in the subject line. Winners will be chosen at random. Please include your name, address and contact number.

See Micachu & The Shapes and London Sinfonietta playing live at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of Ether 2011 on 5 April. Get tickets here.

Line-up announced for Ether Festival 2011 & listen to our Ether Spotify playlist

Ether, Southbank Centre’s annual music festival of innovation, art, technology and cross-arts experimentation, returns from 24 March – 28 April for its tenth year this year with a mix of rock iconoclasts and contemporary classical pioneers.

From Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke playing alongside London Sinfonietta and members of The Nazareth Orchestra in 2005 to Chris Cunningham’s mind-and-eye-blowing audio-visual spectacular in 2010, Ether has presented groundbreaking work for a decade now.

As we celebrate its tenth birthday, this year is no different as we bring you one-off collaborations and groundbreaking work including post-punk pioneers Killing Joke, Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey with a live score from the Philharmonia Orchestra and special shows from the likes of Tim Exile, Will Gregory, Pantha du Prince, Wolfgang Voigt and Micachu & the Shapes.

We have a selection of events focussing on contemporary-classical innovator Iannis Xenakis and his architectural approach to composition, plus Rites, a special performance of Stravinsky’s early modernist masterpiece The Rite of Spring, with stunning 3D visuals. Southbank Centre Resident Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, also perform a series of concerts including the work of minimalist composer Louis Andriessen.

Plus workshops with Tim Exile, the Xenakis International Symposium, free gigs and much more.

We’ve put together an Spotify playlist for you to sample some of the upcoming Ether artists. Listen here.

Get the latest news first plus Ether playlists and free downloads.

Twitter.com/etherfestival

SEE FULL ETHER LISTINGS AND BOOK TICKETS AT

SOUTHBANKCENTRE.CO.UK/ETHER

What do David Byrne, Devendra Banhart and M.I.A all have in common?

Q: What do David Byrne, Devendra Banhart and M.I.A all have in common?

A: They’ve all been inspired by modern Brazilian music.

The fascinating film Beyond Ipanema – Brazilian Waves In Global Music looks at how the cross-pollination of musical styles – as well as sampling and globalisation – have helped Brazil to secure a unique position in global music culture, influencing some of Europe and North America’s biggest stars. 

Check out this video which includes an interview with the makers of the documentary.

You can see Beyond Ipanema – Brazilian Waves In Global Music on Thursday 2 September 2010 in Spirit Level at Royal Festival Hall.