Short 16mm film and sound piece made with filmmaker Huw Wahl. This is an exploration for a longer work we are developing at the minute thinking through collaborative creative processes, lines of travel, and the access/redevelopment of interstice sites on the River Mersey/Manchester Ship Canal.

BBC Radio 3 New Music show logo

Really pleased that 3 pieces of music I’ve been involved with making and a short interview were included in a Manchester special episode of BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show last night. One of the pieces was the first ever public presentation from work in progress on my MA. That piece is a recorded performance except made around Pomona Island. You can also hear some of mine and Otto Willberg‘s Murky Sovereignty record which was released last year on Cafe Oto’s Taku Roku label and an excerpt from Watergrove II a moorland/treeline improvisation made above Rochdale with my fine colleagues Adam Fairhall, Fran Comyn and Michael Perrett You can listen again for 30 days.

A Manchester-London lock-down special by bassist Otto Willberg & guitarist David Birchall, “exploring certain spaces that are out of touch, maybe forgotten, bypassed, existing on the fringes – ’shadowed spaces'”. Created by sending each other recordings of themselves playing in spaces near to their respective abodes, they melded the material together by revisiting the spaces and playing each of the recordings back to activate each others’ acoustic. The result – like a photo of a murky landscape processed through multiple exposures – is a frothing mudbath of hollers, bellied drones, clattering percussion, creeping voices and caustic vibrations, resonating through streets, tunnels, open spaces and deep into our mind nuggets. David and Otto’s work together in junk-rock/no-wave group Historically Fucked and in various free music settings has showcased their taste for bin rattling improv-flex and obscene humour, but we’re pretty certain they’ve never made anything remotely like this. Music that teeters the line between the banal, the deeply weird and the beautiful. Fans of Peter Brötzmann & Han Bennink’s ‘Schwarzwaldfahrt’, Blood Stereo’s aural slimeballs and Idea Fire Company’s intimate ritualistic melancholia – dig!