Future Projects
Carnival of Souls
A suite of music for expanded band with projections, animations and puppets. A circus procession erupts in a dreamtime explosion of underground characters and histories. Devised in association with John Fox.
Deep down 'Somewhere' they lie, the rejected and forgotten, the 'impossibles', the 'inbetweens' and 'improbables', the half finished or barely imagined. Something stirs them, they wake and head for town. Will their procession tear the town to pieces or will they put on a show? Will their show bring down the walls anyway, as they pound the earth with their angry joy. They form a giant circle begin.......
Worlds Unknown
Worlds Unknown takes it's inspiration from vernacular traditions of English music making, in particular the funeral songs, street bands and church bands of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, as well as Ballads and protest songs, and the hidden stream of radical and visionary ideas that runs through English culture. The music and songs where ordinary people expressed themselves, a medium where the spiritual, celebratory and political meet.
The project involves a group of musicians primarily known for their work in free improvisation, free jazz and experimental music but also with roots and interest in folk music, the nonconformist church and radical history. Reinterpretations and ravings, drawing on English dissenting traditions. Funeral hymns, Muggletonian and chartist songs, settings of Abiezer Coppe and Blake and new pieces&
Pandaemonium Masque
A revel combining sound, song, spoken word, animated imagery, processions and performance with fire sculptures and pyrotechnics, inspired by British political and religious visionaries. An elemental circus in which giant figures, towers and beasts sing and rant. At the shows centre is John Pordage, divine, radical and mystic, indicted for various heresies including bringing down the holy city in his front living room and summoning dragons in the cornfields of Berkshire.
Land of Chalk and Flint
A suite of music for expanded band evoked by the southern English landscapes of chalk and flint and the ridgeway, a milk white path through landscape, myth and history. Inspired by the remarkable paintings and writings of artist Pete Hay.
