Gazelle Twin: The Entire City (review)

In the run up to our Summer Festival, we offered Twitter followers the opportunity to enter Freebie Friday competitions each week with the chance of winning a prize relating to an artist featuring in this season’s events. Paul Murphy won Gazelle Twin’s album The Entire City and has been kind enough to write a review which you can read below. Enter The Entire City…

The cover artwork for The Entire City, the impressive debut album from Gazelle Twin (aka Brighton musician and artist Elizabeth Walling) depicts a ruined and heavily overgrown cityscape, a skyscraper-scale Macchu Picchu. The inner sleeve photo depicts a dark, shambling shape walking (with dog) away from a shingled landscape with a nuclear power station looming in the distance.

Somewhere in between these two images lies Walling’s moody musical vision. Industrial, yet ethereal. Organic, often ephemeral, but diamond-hard on occasion. Sometimes the sound captures more than an echo of the 1990s Warp records ‘post-rock’ roster of acts such as Seefeel, Autechre and even the mighty Aphex Twin — and yet there’s a defiantly 80s feel to some of the synth sounds and percussive samples that provide the rhythmic drive for exquisite melodic lines provided by Walling’s beautiful and beguiling voice. Atonal harmonies glide alongside delicate, often alien chord changes. Vocoder effects, backwards voices and briefly repetitive modulating tones descend from the aether — it’s a heady, toothsome brew, resembling nothing if not some form of otherworldly communication: an electric seance.

Architecture, it has been said, is frozen music. Walling’s walls of sounds sweep and spread expansively, horizontally as well as vertical, to create considerable sonic edifices, each different, yet somehow unified. A disturbing sonic conurbation. An entire city, in fact.

Paul A. Murphy

Blog: http://paulmurphyandthebishops.blogspot.co.uk/

Gazelle Twin has co-curated Flow Forms as part of Associate Artist Scanner’s mini-series in our Summer Festival. Taking place on Friday 21 & Saturday 22 June, Flow Forms explores hidden underground spaces around Spitalfields via a trail of pop-up performances and installations by juice vocal ensemble, Anna Meredith and Laura Moody of Elysian Quartet. The secret locations will be disclosed to ticket holders at the time of the event.

Tickets for Flow Forms can be booked via our website or by calling 020 7377 1362.

Teaching Folk in Schools

Vivien Ellis

Vivien Ellis is an Associate Musician of the Digital Miscellanies Index at the Bodleian Library, working to extend public involvement in and awareness of Broadside Ballads, and other popular early vocal material.

“I am working Spitalfields Music as a specialist folk support musician in a project at Phoenix School. The school admits children with language and communication difficulties whose needs lie within the autistic spectrum. The young people on this project, the majority of whom are boys, are aged 14-16 years old and are from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. This project is very exciting, and I think the result will be amazing.

The project is an eight-week series of folk music-themed workshops culminating in a performance in Platform in Spitalfields Music Summer Festival,  on Monday 17 June, 6.30pm at Shoreditch Church; the young people, together with a team of five professional musicians, will perform  their own short suite of folk music with original material written on the project.

The project is led by oboist Julian West, who is Head of Open Academy, the Royal Academy of Music’s creative learning and participation programme. Emily Askew, a versatile young fiddle and bagpipe player, is teaching one of the students to play the pipes. Double Bassist Rus Pearson is teaching three students and one of their teachers to play the double bass and Spitalfields Music Core Trainee Music Leader Katherine Tinker, a talented young pianist, is teaching one of the students keyboard skills. Alongside the development of everyone’s instrumental skills, I’m turning the group into a choir and supporting an emergent percussion section of cajon, bodhran and frame-drums.

We’re creating a ‘dronescape’, recording sounds we hear around us in the school and in Bow which will form part of the sound score in the concert.

My brief was to find suitable material for use in the project. I used the indices at the Bodleian Library to find something relating to Bow, and of popular origin.  I went to the ballad index and found Bow Fair which turns out to be an absolute gem – I think that our performance of this ballad will be the first in the modern era. I have also found a jig entitled ‘Bow Bells’ which imitates a peal of bells.

The origins of Bow Fair lie in an annual 15-day fair which, from at least 1686, took place each May in Haymarket, and then moved to the site of today’s Curzon Street and Shepherd Market giving the area the name Mayfair. In 1764 the well-to-do residents felt it lowered the tone of the area and the Fair moved to Fair Field in Bow. It flourished in Bow until the mid 19th century, when the drunken rowdy behaviour of the crowds caused the authorities to ban it.

Puppets were evidently a popular entertainment at the Fair. Mr Flockton, who is mentioned in the ballad, was the last great proprietor of such shows and whose puppets were at the height of their glory in about 1790. Other attractions, mentioned in the ballad, included jugglers, fencers and boxers, ballad-sellers, swings and roundabouts, sausage stalls and gambling tables. An eccentric character called ‘Tiddy Dol’, who sold gingerbread in ornamental dress at the fair in Haymarket, figures in Hogarth’s picture of the ‘Idle Apprentice’.

We are on a wonderful journey of discovery together, learning the Bow Fair ballad. As no melody for the song is indicated we’ve found and adapted our own. Wanting our performance to be interactive, with audience participation, the students have created their own chorus made up of cockney rhyming slang.

Within the sessions we are having lots of discussions about what we recognise in the song – what is it talking about? Where are all the local places mentioned in the song, and do they still exist? What kinds of people are mentioned in the song, and would we recognise them in Bow today? It’s a really great process and we all love singing the song. It is unfolding a whole vibrant world to us – a ‘peep through the casement’ – without hyperbole, without mentioning the word ‘history’.”

The Bow Fair Ballad comes from a collection of popular musical and poetic ephemera bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by Walter Harding. The Harding Collection represents the largest of its kind collected by a private individual in any library in the world.

More information about Walter Harding and the Harding Collection can be found here: http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/about/harding-collection.php

JULIUS comes to Boxpark

From 7 to 14 June, Elastic Theatre’s JULIUS will be presented at Boxpark, Shoreditch, and you can see it for free! Written and directed by Jacek Ludwig Scarso, the performance is a collaboration with Savage Mills and features a new score by Ivan Hussey of Celloman. JULIUS is a coming of age story which explores the intrusive thoughts and rituals associated with OCD. This is its UK premiere so be the first to see the completed work!

‘When an adolescent in a rural town learns from his flamboyant teacher about Julius Caesar’s many lovers, he begins to experience intrusive thoughts about himself as a Roman Emperor, in very bizarre situations…’

Details of timings are below.

Photos by Ludovic Des Cognets.

Monday – Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11.00am – 7.00pm
Thursday: 11.00am – 8.00pm
Sunday: 12.00pm – 6.00pm

The English Restaurant Announces Their Trio of Desserts for Food, Wine and Song

For those who are just as passionate about good food as they are about good music, The English Restaurant has decided to reveal a tantalising taste of the menu in anticipation of Food, Wine and Song on Friday 7 June.

Pastry Chef at The English Restaurant, Rob Meldrum, will be preparing a trio of desserts adapted from the Food, Wine and Song cookery book. He’ll be serving:

Orange omelette
Pear frangipane tart
& Saffron cake

Rob is no stranger to spinning sugar and creating culinary masterpieces out of pastry. His impressive back story begins with him learning French patisserie skills with le pâtissier extraordinaire Nicolas Houchet. Following that, he became Head Pastry Chef at former Notting Hill restaurant Pharmacy, owned by contemporary artist Damien Hurst, and has worked at Clapham’s boutique café Le Macaron where he perfected the art of making macaroons!

Food, Wine and Song is a concert by The Orlando Consort at Christ Church Spitalfields followed by a three-course meal at The English Restaurant. Full event tickets are £59 (concert-only tickets are £12, upgrades will be available, subject to availability, on the evening at the venue).

Music and Emotion: Songs from St Anne’s Primary School

Throughout the summer term, Indian classical vocalist Ranjana Ghatak and story-teller Vayu Naidu will be working with children from one of our Neighbourhood Schools, St Anne’s Primary School in Whitechapel to explore emotions through music, stories and poetry.

Their first session was so successful, we wanted to share this recording taken yesterday morning. We’ve obviously got some very talented young singers in the borough!

In these weekly meetings, the children will explore five emotions – love, fear, anger, wonder and courage – and focus on expressing feelings through music.

Watch this space!