ultraniche have released my Kar Pouzi track ‘Clippity Clop’, on 7-inch lathe vinyl. A pummelling clip-clopping treat of baritone sax & electronics.
That Long Moonless Chase comes to Japan!
Noriko and I are super excited to bring our live audiovisual performance That Long Moonless Chase /その長い月のない追跡 to Japan in July 2023!
8-14th July 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Performances of That Long Moonless Chase, as well as solo sets from Kar Pouzi (Helen Papaioannou) & Noriko Okaku.
Alongside the live events, we will are delighted to have an artists’ residency at the museum, exploring new audiovisual work with folklore from the Kanazawa area.
16th July, UrBANGUILD, Kyoto
Helen & Noriko perform That Long Moonless Chase + performance from Kar Pouzi (Helen Papaioannou) + Noriko Okaku showreel.
17th July, Monade Contemporary,Kyoto
Helen & Noriko give an artists’ talk about their collaborative work.
22nd July, Kobo Chika, Tokyo
Helen & Noriko perform That Long Moonless Chase + an artists’ talk facilitated by Naok Fujimoto.
Thank you to Help Musicians & Daiwa Foundation for their support in making our events possible in Japan this summer!
Florilegio Feature - Video Interview
Garlic Hug Debut EP Release
At long last, we’re happy to announce the release of our EP The Truth About Carbs on Aphelion Editions!
Garlic Hug is a collaboration with Alessandro Altavilla. We had a lot of fun creating this music across 2018 and we recorded it in Sheffield in 2019 with the help of Lorenzo Prati.
Our EP journeys from stop-start rhythm games to garlic drones, to hiccuping beats and synth-sax skronk, rounded off with a text-to-speech apocalypse. Drawing from a playground of different instruments, we switch from improvisations with found recordings, to wonky instrumental duos & ritualistic coding psalms.
The EP is available in cassette, CD-R and digital formats on Bandcamp. We also have a few copies of the cassettes if you’d like to buy from us directly (you can contact me here). Thanks to lovely Liam from Aphelion Editions!
If you’d like to read more about our collaboration you can read more in this article, in Riffs.
Developing my practice
I’m excited to be delving into a period of development work, focusing on my electronic music practice for studio & live work. I’ll be working with the excellent Annette Krebs as I work towards a new live setup for baritone saxophone & electronics using Max, and the also excellent Mandy Wigby for inspiration in sound design & production.
Thank you to Arts Council England’s ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ fund for making this possible, I’m looking forward to producing some new works later in the year.
That Long Moonless Chase / その長い月のない追跡: AV performance with Noriko Okaku
Images by Noriko Okaku
That Long Moonless Chase is a live mixed media animation alongside music for electronics, recorded voices & baritone sax, made in collaboration with Noriko Okaku and including sound design elements from Başar Ünder. The work is based on folklore from Sheffield and Kyoto and is centred around two texts which Noriko & I looped between online translators in Japanese and English. The process of translating the tales back and forth between languages warped the stories into a bizarre new text which laid the foundation for our animation and music. I weave recordings of the auto-translated texts, narrated by Noriko and David Clarke, throughout the musical composition, and Noriko warps the text subtitles during the performance as their semantic associations are eroded.
The Japanese story takes place at Honganji Temple in Kyoto, which, Noriko told me: “is the headquarters of the Honganji sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, founded in the 16th century by Shinran. The legendary ginkgo tree that stands here is said to have been planted by Shinran”.
One of our stories is about a special ginkgo tree in Kyoto: “There are many old stories in Japan about ginkgo trees extinguishing fires. Ancient people must have known that ginkgo trees have the special ability to store water. The ginkgo tree mentioned in this story is particularly well known as the legendary tree that saved Kyoto from a great fire in the Tenmei period of the 18th century.”
Our piece draws on the miracle of this water-weeping ginkgo tree: “The great Tenmei fire of 1788 burned through the city of Kyoto and headed for Honganji Temple with no let-up in its momentum. The monks tried to put out the fire, but their efforts were unsuccessful and the fire only grew stronger. Just when they thought they had lost their way, the ginkgo tree spouted water and protected Honganji from the fire.” (Noriko Okaku)
We also draw upon encounters with Sheffield’s Gabriel Hounds, which David Clarke describes as “a folk belief that was once very common in the north country. There are lots of stories about a mysterious sound that was occasionally heard in the sky, usually in the depths of the night. It sounded like hunting dogs, ranging through the sky, and usually heard over houses and heard before death or some kind of disaster...” David supported us in our research for the Sheffield side of the project and we were also inspired by his book about ghost stories from Victorian Sheffield.
The other key sit in our work is the Sheffield Cathedral (formerly known as ‘the old parish church), which was the site of a well-known experience of the Hounds in 19th century. David told us that “there is a really good first hand account of the Gabriel Hounds from a very well known Sheffield journalist called John Holland, one of the editors of the Sheffield Iris, born in 1794 in Sheffield. He’s left us an account of an experience he had one night in the mid-19th century. He was leaving his offices of his newspaper in York Street, Sheffield and he was walking back through the churchyard:
“A mimic pack of beagles low did bark, Nor wondered I that rustic fear should trace, A spectral huntsman doomed to that long moonless chase.””
I made field recordings around the cathedral, as well as other nearby and places of haunting in Sheffield including Campo Lane, Bunting Nook and Pearl Street. Başar then worked his magic on these to create some audio samples for our soundscapes, as a part of his sound design process.
We came across other literature & accounts of the Gabriel Hounds informed by 19th century life in Sheffield. The Gabriel Hounds are interwoven into Charles Reade’s novel Put Yourself in His Place, set in mid-Victorian Sheffield, at the time of the Trade Union outrages & culminates with an account of the 1864 Great Sheffield Flood. David Clarke told us more:
“The characters in his novel start to hear these weird noises in the air, that they describe as the Gabriel Hounds. And he actually uses the experience of John Holland…you get these supernatural sounds that are giving the characters a sort of premonition, that something really awful is going to happen, and then the novel reaches its end with the collapse of the dam...That reinforced the folk belief that these were supernatural sounds, and that if you hear them, disaster was sure to follow.”
That Long Moonless Chase / その長い月のない追跡
#moonlesschase t-shirts available online at Noriko’s shop!
FAMLAB Commission: That Long Moonless Chase / その長い月のない追跡
I’m thrilled to announce this FAMLAB commission, which premieres at Sensoria Festival 2021 on 7th October.
In a mash-up of sinister folk-horror and fantastical mythical imagery, That Long Moonless Chase / その長い月のない追跡 is a surreal audio-visual performance based on two folkloric legends from Sheffield and Kyoto. The performance is a collaboration between animator Noriko Okaku (JP/UK) and composer/performer Helen Papaioannou (UK) in a mixed-media animation with baritone sax and electronics, with sound design from Başar Ünder (TK).
The work probes collective memory and processes of storytelling from different perspectives based on two key city sites and folkoric texts. At the heart of the work are Sheffield’s Gabriel Hounds, a demonic corpse-hound procession, which has literary associations with the city’s cathedral and the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, and a 400-year old water-weeping ginkgo tree at Honganji temple, which is said to have saved 18th century Kyoto city from a disastrous fire. The tree still stands today, while Sheffield’s River Don is still a force to be respected.
The exchange between the tales is mediated by the looping of the Japanese and English texts through online translations, warping the legends into a bizarre and spectacular new mythology. Listen out for the voice of Noriko Okaku narrating her own text, and Sheffield folklore and contemporary legend expert David Clarke, who narrates translations of a text by 19th century journalist John Holland, depicting his experience of the Gabriel Hounds at Sheffield Cathedral.
Watch our trailer here.
#moonlesschase
#SensoriaFest
Expect the Unexpected - Album Release
Notes Inégales release Expected the Unexpected on 24th September on NMC Recordings and I’m delighted that this includes a recording of my piece ‘Seesaw’.
On 30th September there is a Live stream launch party to celebrate the release of Club Inégale's latest release, recorded live during the 2017 London Jazz Festival.
Director of the club, Peter Wiegold writes:
“In 2017 the EFG London Jazz Festival reached its 25th anniversary and Festival Director John Cumming and I decided to celebrate this by commissioning 25 pieces to be performed in two marathon days at Club Inégales….
There were some amazing performances, and huge fun was had, with four evolving big bands over the four sessions, club players plus guests, nobody knowing what was going to happen. And I pay tribute to resident band, Notes Inégales for their ever imaginative and flexible responses across so many pieces.”
Distinctions release: Dominic Lash's Consorts
Dominic Lash has released Distinctions, a live recording of a performance at Cafe Oto in January 2020 in celebration of his 40th birthday. It was a memorable gig and wonderful to play with a host of great improvisers, so it’s brill to listen to how this comes together on this recording.
Lash says: “Consorts is a flexible ensemble formed in 2013 to explore the possibilities of combining sustained-tone music, improvisation (both guided and free), and the relationship between acoustic and amplified sound.”
New Garlic Hug video: 'Party'
As part of Isolated Mass #9 on 21st May, Alessandro and I filmed a new Garlic Hug video:
It was great to be a part of this event, to discover some new artists & to connect with friends and performers we might not see for a while. Big thanks to the awesome Isolated Mass for keeping us connected through lockdown, and looking forward to the next one….
Kar Pouzi - Red Sprite Release
My EP Red Sprite has landed!
It’s a strange time to get going with Kar Pouzi, my new solo project. I was really looking forward to playing some Kar Pouzi shows this spring, but I’m also really grateful to don’t drone alone for helping me share Red Sprite through this release.
Can’t wait to unleash some mega pent up gig withdrawal vibes in some thunderous Kar Pouzi sets when gigs return…..
Thanks to the lovely folks at don’t drone alone, and to Tye Die Tapes for their work on the mix & master.
Digital downloads & cassette preorders are available here: https://dontdronealone.bandcamp.com
Risk Related Workshop
This month, I worked with a wonderful group of people for my Risk Related workshop in partnership with Radar at Loughborough University. Supported by a grant from the Hinrichsen Foundation, I’ve been creating new musical games that explore elements of risk in the relationships between performers, drawing on conversations with academics at Loughborough. Workshopping these ideas with a mix of students, academics from different fields, arts enthusiasts and musicians proved a great way to explore our relationships with risk, and to experiment with how these games might evolve into compositions.
My conversations with Dr Ksenia Chmutina and Monia del Pinto (School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering) fed into games exploring socially constructed risk. This emanated from discussions about risks that emanate from social relationships and societal structures, how these interface with the organisation of the physical structures that we inhabit, and how this renders some more vulnerable to certain risks than others.
This led me to think about musical games which create different balances and imbalances within the group dynamic through ‘stacked’ situations and systems in which risks and power relationships are experienced differently. For example, individuals were given particular roles or sets of conditions which affected how far they could interact with and affect others. In a musical, performance situation, this led to some quite hilarious scenarios and made for a lot of fun.
We also explored the impact of disruptions from other people, or from changes within the group environment. These disruptions influenced types and patterns of sounds, relationships to pulse and rhythmic cycles, and the fragility or robustness of these bonds.
The discussions I had with Dr Paul Kelly and Prof. Paul Thomas (Department of Chemistry) were particularly rich in investigating strategies and systems for coordinating collectives, and relationships between control and stability. With Thomas, this centred around the complex coordination of emergency response teams to chemical or biological incidents, with the nature of communication between individuals and groups being key. With Kelly I delved into ideas of coordination at the nano scale, considering bonds between tiny particles in crystallisation and the formation of polymorphs – substances which can variably take on different structures or forms. Ideas of bottom-up self assembly and ‘disappearing polymorphs’ led to some precarious musical scenarios in which patterns and groupings of people evolved in flux between states of varying stability, risking collapse and loss of musical structures and patterns, but also giving way to the emergence of new musical and social relations.
It’s been fascinating to encounter and explore these different ways of thinking about and experiencing risk, as well as providing plenty of food for thought for new compositions….
I’m very grateful to the Hinrichsen Foundation for their support.
Risk Residency with Radar
In December I’ll be starting a project in collaboration with Radar – Loughborough University’s contemporary arts programme. I’ll be exploring risk in the communicative systems of music ensembles, informed by collaborations with academic researchers from different disciplines at Loughborough.
I’m lucky to be collaborating with four fascinating researchers, who I’ll be meeting across December and January. We’ll be exploring the ways in which they encounter, relate to and approach risk in their work through discussions, visits to their workplaces.
I’ll be working with:
Ksenia Chmutina Monia Del Pinto Paul Kelly Paul Thomas
These collaborations will feed into a workshop in February 2020 for those interested in risk and/or experimental group performances (no musical experience needed). We’ll explore the different roles risk can play in group performance, informed by ideas encountered in the researchers’ work and my own compositional methods relating to risk, group performance and games.
This project is supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation
Salt - Foster/Grigg/Papaioannou
New tape release just landed!
A recording of a live improvised set at Salt Cafe Bristol with some favourite Bristol collaborators - Matthew Grigg and Robin Foster. Released by Unknown Tongue
AlgoMech Festival 2019 - Playground Rituals Workshop
Thanks to the AlgoMech team for producing a brilliant festival in May. I enjoyed putting on this workshop with a great group of participants at Access Space and its given me lots to think about for further developing my ideas.
In this workshop we explored how the algorithms that govern games can be transformed into musical pieces. I mapped the rules and possible outcomes of games onto graphic and instructional scores, which we used to create new musical pieces during the workshop.
The number-based procedure of Hopscotch gave rise to a human step sequencer, brought to life with percussion, party hooters, bells and whistles.
By exploring the choreography of the feet in Elastics (or Chinese Jump Rope), I generated number sequences which we used to map patterns of interaction and movement across the workshop space. The participants also created duo pieces by applying their own rules to graphical patterns and number sequences. I loved seeing the mix of ideas they came up with!
Through the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors algorithm we also explored how we might make a piece out of a competitive game, assigning sounds and actions to the variable actions and results of this game.
Thanks to everyone who came along!
New Solo Set
I’ve recently been working on a live solo set, which I’m excited to present for the first time this November at the Daylight Music series in association with EFG London Jazz Festival.
Working with sampled synths and my baritone saxophone, I play with incessant repetitions of pulses and scales which rise and fall. While at times I blend my sax together with the synth samples, other moments draw on the contrast between these sounds sources.
I’ve also been exploring the sense of a duo between myself and the sampled material, as I – optimistically – aim to keep up with the metric precision of the MIDI sequencer, and the level of continuity in the sound of highly repetitive synth parts. I’ve been enjoying the challenge of drawing out intensity from simple patterns or pulses, exploring prolonged states of repetition and slowly creeping evolutions.
I’ll be joining Sigbjørn Apeland and Danalogue at Union Chapel, London, on 17th November.
Atlas Stabbed release - KURO with Helen Papaioannou
Photo: Alessandro Altavilla
Playing with KURO (Agathe Max and Gareth Turner) has been a wonderful part of my time living in Bristol.
I'm happy that the end of my time in the south west was marked by this recording of Atlas Stabbed, a split release with Minami Deutsch on God Unknown Records.
Garlic Hug First Outing
I’ve been spending April in Taranto, Italy working on new projects, eating lots of amazing food and catching up with family & friends. On 20thApril I’ll be playing my first performance as part of Garlic Hug - a new duo with Alessandro Altavilla.
We’re a new racket of skronky sax, heavy drones, field recordings, frenetic beats and chunky synth riffs. Baz the baritone was a bit too big for this trip, so I’ll be playing on alto and various beat-making devices…
Delicious puccia
On 20th April we’ll be playing in Taranto and on 22nd April we perform at MUZIC PLUS, Altamura, Bari.
New Piece for Ligeti Quartet
I’m excite to take part in a workshop with the Ligeti Quartet at the end of April, for which I’m developing sketches for a new composition. This workshop features as part of the launch for University of Sheffield’s Centre for New Music (CeNMaS) and the Sound Agendas conference between 27-29thApril.
After this first workshop I’ll be completing the piece in time for a final workshop and performance from the Ligeti Quartet in Autumn.
The composition explores the idea of a sonic strobe, with the sounds of the quartet turning ‘on and off’ according to rhythmic cycles and patterns. A glissando runs through the part of each player, tracing different textures and directions which the performers continue to imagine internally during silent moments.
My sketches explore different balances between silence and sound; I’m interested to see how the musicians independently imagine sound during silent passages, before converging again as a quartet. Other passages emphasise collective, unison rhythm, with the music flickering on and off.
Finding a simple way to notate this piece has been a challenge, but I’m nearly there, and looking forward to taking this further with the performers during the workshop...
Composer-in-Association with Workers Union Ensemble
I'm very excited to become Workers Union Ensemble's 2016-17 Composer-In-Association!
I'll be composing a new piece for the ensemble to be premiered at next April's Nonclassical Club Night, and can't wait to get working with this fantastic group.
We're looking to raise some funds to support this commission - if you can help, please take a look at the ensemble's Kickstarter!