Category: Music

Talk :

27 January 2024 Saturday 2-3:30pm

£5 | 12 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

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A talk by experienced improviser Caroline Kraabel

Exploring her own practice, along with a wider view of improvisation and identity: even the world of freely improvised music can be experienced as an enclave that excludes, despite the perceived association of improvisation with limitlessness and freedom.

How do people who improvise feel and think DIFFERENTLY from each other on the subject? How do we avoid or alter any dominance of particular groups over the theory or practice of improvisation? Does the experimental nature of improvisation make it easier for members of élites to shine in the field, because they have more pre-existing socio-cultural capital? Or, does improvisation come more easily for outsiders who are already primed to find alternative paths? How are improvisers affected by their musical and cultural histories? How does a group, maybe a large group, of improvisers negotiate space and time, noise and silence in a musical and just way?

For improvisers who have experienced forms of oppression in music making and/or life, is the aim when making music merely to recapitulate existing power structures, but try to place themselves at the top? Or to create new and fairer structures?

References: Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, by George E. Lewis, Columbia University

Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender, by Ellen Waterman, University of Guelph

https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/845/1396

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Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser, saxophonist, artist, conductor, and composer.

In 2022 Kraabel founded a large improvising group made up of all sorts of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers: ONe_Orchestra New.  (https://oneorchestranew.com/)

Interactive Tape Loop Installation :

11 & 12 May Saturday & Sunday 2:30-5:30pm

No booking required | Free Entry

Performance :

Session One : 11 May Saturday 6:30-7:30pm £10

Session Two : 12 May Sunday 6:30-7:30pm £10

£10 | 8 places each session | Session One Tickets & Session Two Tickets

The installation will consist of an ‘eternal choir’ created by a series of vocal recordings made on a single tape loop stretched across the project space and running continuously throughout the day (or at least until it finally disintegrates and a new one takes over). Visitors and participants will be invited to listen in then contribute their own voices, the only instruction being that they harmonise with whatever was on the loop before them. Removing the tape machine’s erase head from the equation means that theoretically it should be possible to build up multiple layers of interlocking voices that blend, morph and disintegrate together before your very ears. Although given that this is vintage technology, nothing is ever certain. What we can guarantee is that we’ll create sounds that nobody else has ever made before and we’ll create them together. Both days will culminate in an evening performance featuring all the tape loops that have survived. 

Sound Exhibition:

23 August 2024 Friday 5:30-8pm

24 August Saturday 2:30-6:30pm

25 August Sunday 2:30-6:30pm

41 minutes. Free Entry

Live Sound Performance:

Session One : 24 August Saturday 5pm. £7 [Cancelled due to illness of artist. Tickets bought will be refunded.]

Session Two : 24 August Saturday 6:30pm. £7 [Cancelled]

£7 | 8 places each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Sound Exhibition:

Field recordings by mathr & netz: Sound is everpresent in the human and natural world, so we often do not notice it. Even in the city, there can be birdsong, and even in the countryside, aircraft can be heard. Field recording is a space-time machine, and we can listen back later and in different places and be transported back to the original environment. Listening in a different context can surprise us with sounds we didn’t notice before but were always present. Recording nature is a way to document the changing world; the climate catastrophe means her songs may be very different in the future. 

Live Sound Performance:

‘Medial Dark Ages is a piece that uses field recordings, DIY electromagnetic detectors, and open-source electronic instruments. I have worked with bats, crickets, and sheep recordings in this composition. I have been experimenting with Bat5 Digital Bat Detector for the bats, which amplifies and filters the bat’s signals. The composition adheres to a postmaterialist perspective on technology, such as in James Bridle – New Dark Ages – and intends to fit music technology in the context of critical thinking and media archaeology theory.’

Exhibition :

6 September 2024 Friday 5pm – 7pm

7 & 8 September Saturday & Sunday 2:30pm – 4pm

Free Entry

Performances :

Set One : 6 September Friday 7pm | Benedict Taylor (viola) and Cath Roberts (baritone saxophone)

Set Two : 7 September Saturday 4:30pm | Barbie Mukoda (solo flutes)

Set Three : 7 September Saturday 6pm | Caroline Kraabel (alto saxophone) and John Edwards (double bass) [FULL]

Set Four : 8 September Sunday 4:30pm | Sue Lynch (solo saxophone)

Set Five : 8 September Sunday 6pm | Kate Carr (electronics) and Cath Roberts (electronics)

Tickets £7 – or £12 for two sets | 8 places available for each set | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets | There are still tickets available for all sessions except Set Three.

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Exhibition and live improvised music to celebrate the launch of Setlist zine vol. 4. Setlist is a series of A7 riso-printed mini-zines compiled by Cath Roberts (Ink-Paper-Sound Press), where artists are invited to contribute a tiny provocation/agitation/starting point to be used in improvised performance. The theme for Setlist #1 was micro-texts, Setlist #2 was all about images, Setlist #3 questions and Setlist #4 (miniature) maps.

This exhibition will focus on the two image-based zines, volumes 2 and 4, with work by Sam Andreae, Old Bort, Angela Guyton, Bell Lungs, Kim Macari, Khabat Abas, Sophie Cooper, Hannah McCann, Livia Garcia, Tullis Rennie and Benedict Taylor. To date only seen as tiny pages of an A7 booklet, artists’ zine contributions will be blown up to comparatively huge sizes and projected onto the space. Responding to the visuals with improvised live sets will be members of improvising large ensemble ONe_Orchestra NEw and Setlist artists.