Supersonic Festival
Air Loom at Supersonic
Supersonic Festival Floodgate Street (festival hub) Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SU, UK
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A live performance of Air Loom at Supersonic, Birmingham’s internationally renowned festival of experimental music.
Air Loom is a new album of dreamlike music, distilling a lifetime’s work with ancient instruments and extraordinary electroacoustic techniques. Following our UK tour, I’m delighted to be performing Air Loom live at Supersonic with vocalist Sarah Gabriel and percussionist Stephen Hiscock.
Centre stage is the clavisimbalum, a sonorous, fourteenth-century cousin of the harpsichord. Its plucked, soft iron strings ring with a rich, dark reverberance – a sound that hails from Eastern European folk and the Renaissance court. To this we’ll be adding voices in close harmony, recorder, theremin, percussion and robotic carillon, an instrument I’ve devised and built to play bells at inhuman speeds, creating a haze of delicate, metallic sound. As we play, sounds are deftly contorted, fragmented and recombined using bespoke electronic and digital techniques. My own variant of the loop pedal stretches every strand of sound subtly as it plays, transforming the most consonant music into something more angular as it makes beguiling musical collisions.
Air Loom is the follow-up to 2017 album Ealing Feeder: “Music possessed of an eerie instability…a whole universe unto itself brimming with fresh propositions and new directions…a shimmering minimalist masterpiece’ (Wire Magazine, May 2017).
