Dreamspace line-up for Spring 2019: Luke Sanger, Mikey Page, Nik Void, Luke Abbott, Loula Yorke and Pymt Lym

Wicked news that Norfolk and Norwich Sonic Arts Collective are bringing Atari Punk Girls to the Shoe Factory Social Club in Norwich on Saturday 23 March. I’ll be running workshops for girls on safe soldering, making a stepped-tone generator and sound composition, all followed by an evening performance at Plink Plonk where the Atari Punk Girls will be, quite literally, bringing the noise!

This workshop uses teaching materials and printed circuit boards designed by Nina Richards and the Yorkshire Sound Women Network.

Atari Punk Girls

I’ll be running some workshops teaching girls how to solder and build their own stepped tone generators during 2019. I’m working in collaboration with a range of brilliant new partners in Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex.  I am really excited  …. but shhhhhh …. that’s all the details I can release for now! 😀

UPDATE And we’re live! See the dedicated Atari Punk Girls page in the projects section of this website.

Inspired by Rachel Mars’ and Rhiannon Armstrong’s ‘Ugly Singing’, I’ll be facilitating a ‘Decode Your Voice’ workshop at Firstsite in Colchester on 12 November with experimental sound and music collective, CLIP.  We’ll use active listening exercises to uncover and explore the qualities of our own spoken voices, and use digital effects to bend and stretch them into exciting new shapes.

Headfuk [HDFK] – the soundsystem and associated record label that started it all for me – celebrates its twentieth year with a free party in London on 14 September 2018.

It’s hard to overstate the impact the Headfuk crew had on the London free party scene at the turn of the Millenium. Up-front about their anti-capitalist, non-hierarchical principles of organisation and support for cutting-edge experimental and live performance, a community of people opened up new buildings week after week, bringing a huge cross-section of Londoners together: squatters, students, site kids, estate kids, surburbanites, city girls; exposing us all to sounds, visuals and ideas that weren’t being championed as hard elsewhere in the party scene at the time.  Headfuk spawned a record label specialising in Breakcore, the discography for which is here, and the TAA exhibition movement – which, impressively, remains active in the face of contemporary aggressive anti-squatting legislation.

In 2011 I assisted fellow Headfuk stalwart, photographer Molly Macindoe, with the herculean task of cataloguing the date and location of every rave she had photographed between 1997-2006 in order to create a comprehensive index to her hardback book Out of Order.  The book serves as a paen to the lost and demolished architecture of London; to the construction of liminal spaces – temporary autonomous zones within which people’s creative actions and decisions could be momentarily shielded from late capitalism’s glare, and of which Headfuk undoubtedly became the bastion.

Produced in partnership by NNSAC and originalprojects; YARMONICS is a free sonic art and new music festival that celebrates the sounds, people and places of Great Yarmouth. YARMONICS has invited a number of sound artists, musicians, writers and artists to create work that responds to specific spaces and places in Great Yarmouth, including  CLIP who I’ll be joining for the day on Saturday 22 September 2018 to perform a version of Terry Riley’s “In C“.

“In C” is a response to the abstract academic serialist techniques devised by Schoenberg that dominated Western university composers for many decades and is often cited as the first minimalist composition. However, this performance has a twist – that twist being the performance venue, the venue being the actual sea.

DIY 15: 2018 – Rhiannon Armstrong & Rachel Mars: Ugly Singing

Between 31 August and 2 September 2018 I’ll be participating in Ugly Singing, a three-day workshop at Snape Maltings, one of the world’s leading centres of music but, brilliantly for me, right here in Suffolk. I am beyond excited!

Led by the award-winning team behind Our Carnal Hearts, and together with six other live artists, I’ll be leaning into the rough, the raucous and the untraditionally beautiful capabilities of the human voice.

This event is part of the Live Art Development Agency‘s “DIY15” programme.