Category Archives: LUME Lab

LUME FESTIVAL 2017 is almost upon us…

The second LUME Festival is taking place at IKLECTIK on the weekend of 24th/25th June. This year’s event will be a two-dayer, with a host of LUME’s favourite artists on the bill. Join us for two days of spontaneous musical explorations, collaborations old and new, live painting from Gina Southgate and all round good times!

Saturday: The Hat Speaks // Alex Bonney solo // Ma/ti/om // Archipelago // Sloth Racket // Corey Mwamba (LUME Lab Festival Special) // Gina Southgate

Sunday: The Hat Speaks // Tullis Rennie solo // Birchall/Cheetham/Webster/Willberg // Entropi // Metamorphic // LUMEkestra //Gina Southgate

Food // drinks // merch
2pm – midnight (live sets 3pm – 10.30pm)

Buy your tickets now from the Luminous Bandcamp site.

Praise for last year’s inaugural festival:

‘A glimpse of the kind of self-generated, mutually supportive communities we’re going to need if we’re to survive the years ahead.’ – Daniel Spicer, The Wire

‘Like all the best family get togethers LUME Festival should be an annual event. This debut was outstanding.’ – Thomas Rees, Jazzwise

LUME Lab Project Blog #4: Anton Hunter

Hello! My name’s Anton (that’s my grinning face in front of a wall up there). For the past few years I’ve been trying to focus my own composing on larger groups, which started with my 11-piece band Article XI, the goal being to get some of the feel and spontaneity of small groups to work on a bigger scale. Having the power and energy of a larger group but still allowing the individual musicians’ voice and personality to come through. That’s the plan anyway. Here’s a video of an Article XI piece if you’d like something to listen to while you read…

For my LUME Lab project, I’m debuting new music for a new ensemble, and I’ve purposefully chosen some people I’ve not worked with much before, but have been wanting to for a while. Namely:

Kim Macari Stone-Lonergan – trumpet
Dee Byrne – alto sax
Rachel Musson – tenor sax
Tullis Rennie – trombone
Cath Roberts – baritone sax
Andrew Lisle – drums
Tim Fairhall – double bass
and me – guitar

Over the past few months I’ve been meeting up with the musicians to improvise together in duos and trios. Initially we played completely freely to get a feel for how everyone fits together, and I recorded the sessions. I then went back and listened to it all and picked a few moments out, a melody or two, or some chords, or a riff. See exhibit A:

Then we all met up again, in different duos and trios and played the ideas I had transcribed, with a lot more improvising around them. Since then I’ve been hard at work, listening to these sessions and drawing elements in, expanding on some of the written passages, discounting others that didn’t work. This time the recorded material hasn’t been as much a source for me to transcribe, but a way to instantly get into the soundworld of a composition, and I’ve done a lot of improvising melodies whilst listening, or just after listening and so on.

I’m really looking forward to the gig: there’s going to be a whole load of space for these incredible improvisers to express themselves, and if you’ve seen or heard any of them before you’ll know not to miss the chance to see them again. We’re also going to play some hits from my back-catalogue. Or, rather, three or four tunes that I’ve written for different ensembles, so if the Article XI video above has finished playing, try clicking go on this one, with the LUMEkestra last year. We’ll be doing our own octet version of it.

Thanks for reading! Please buy a ticket or two in advance; your support is really vital for nights like LUME to survive, and Cath and Dee work incredibly hard to create a supportive space for new music like this. See you on the 24th!

P.S. Here’s a photo of me not in front of a wall, for balance.

LUME Festival 2017: full line-up

Announcing the full line-up for LUME Festival 2017 at IKLECTIK, London on 24th and 25th June:

Saturday: The Hat Speaks // Alex Bonney solo // Ma/ti/om // Archipelago // Sloth Racket // Corey Mwamba (LUME Lab Festival Special) // Gina Southgate

Sunday: The Hat Speaks // Tullis Rennie solo // Birchall/Cheetham/Webster/Willberg // Entropi // Metamorphic // LUMEkestra //Gina Southgate

Food // drinks // merch

2pm til late both days

Tickets on sale now from the Luminous Bandcamp site!

LUME Festival is support by Arts Council England.

LUME Lab Project Blog #3: Craig Scott

The next LUME Lab is almost upon us, and this month’s artist is Leeds-based experimental guitarist Craig Scott of the excellent Wasp Millionaire Records. You can reserve your place at his performance on 19th April at IKLECTIK, by purchasing an advance ticket from the Luminous Bandcamp site. Craig has been away working on his music at a retreat in the Yorkshire Dales, and writes:

First of all I would like to say thank you to LUME for this opportunity; having the funding to take the time out to write music for a specific purpose is not something I get to do very often.

I chose to write this new set of material for the Gastric Band, which is the same group of musicians that have been performing my Lobotomy material live. The band also consists of the entirety of Shatner’s Bassoon – a band that I have been making music with for a long time now- with the addition of ‘psychedelic father of two’ Sam Bell on percussion.

Oliver Dover clarinets / saxophones
Michael Bardon standing upright on electric bass
Johnny Richards keyboards
Joost Hendrickx drums
Sam Bell percussion
Myself guitar and electronics.

I spent the majority of January writing for this commission. I started off with making a list of considerations as to what I consider the strengths/possibilities/identifying characteristics of both my recorded/studio work under the Lobotomy name and of this band (as a unit and individuals). I tried to keep all the individual parts as simple as possible and always trying to make the sum of the parts to something more complex for the purposes of both ease of rehearsal and to make all the material as malleable as possible for elaboration through improvisation.

Some of the aspects of the music that I wanted to exploit included:

  • Simplicity in individual parts.
  • Large scale forms developing very slowly, material being slowly revealed and re-contextualised. (It was a blues all along!)
  • Space/lack of markers and its ambiguity to create false assumptions for the listener.
  • Microtonal melodic material and its relationship to tempered contexts.
  • Balance of duality and unity in time feel and weighting
  • For the mind and the booty.
  • An awareness and consideration of the different performers unique interpretation/ individual rationalisations of the material based on their different musical backgrounds.
  • Emphasis of the importance/impact of relative silence
  • Exploiting the joys of functional harmony!
  • Tri/bitonality.
  • Enducing trance like states.
  • The line between symmetrical melodic structures and diatonic structures in a tempered context.
  • Extended palette using live processing/ sampling, pre recorded samples and custom made Nord sample patches.

A disparate collection of subliminal musical influences probably include Joseph Shillinger, Sanjo, Gagaku, The Melvins, Thelonious Monk, Maurice Ravel, Captain Beefheart, Trevor Wishart, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman, Bela Bartok, Gnawa, Shellac, Seben, Lazaro Ros, Maquam, Blues for dads. (Make of that what you will, but it probably gives a clearer picture of what the music actually sounds like than all the pomp above.)

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to transfer some of the aesthetic and functions of the post production techniques that have become part of my palette working on the recorded Lobotomy material to a live setting. This manifested itself both in how I wrote for the band and in the development of a new live sampling and processing setup.

I’ve been wanting to do this for some time now. A while ago my dear friend and long term partner in crimes against music Oliver Dover found a broken mixing desk in a skip outside a school he was working at. I managed to get it working again: recycling/making/repurposing/bending old audio gear has become quite a large part of the Lobotomy aesthetic. So, paired with some of my home-made microphones, circuit bent cassette and reel to reel delays and some samplers I had a setup that I could use live which greatly extending the palette of the band and gave me some sort of illusion of control over the band in more macro sense.

Alongside the four new pieces I wrote specifically for this, I also decided to include one of the pieces I had written and recorded for the new Lobotomy EP that I’m currently working on. (Coming soon!)

Between conceiving the pieces throughout January and rehearsing them in late March they started to feel more and more like a fictitious fairytale I had told myself about possible musical situations. So, it was very satisfying to finally actually hear the pieces vibrating the air molecules around me when the rehearsal residency rolled round!

We spent the first week of March together in relative isolation in a farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales, rehearsing and recording this new material. It is becoming rarer and rarer nowadays to have the luxury of this amount of  dedicated time to rehearse new material with a group. For this opportunity I am most grateful. It really gave us time to work into the material and explore the different ideas and ways of  implementing the pre conceived material.

Having the ability to record the whole residency (the first time I’ve had the chance to hear my home-made microphone setup in action!) and the distance this provides – being able to listen from an outside view – has also been very useful in determining changes that need to be made to the pieces especially when it comes to decisions being made regarding form on a macro scale.

I am very much looking forward to performing this new material for the first on the 19th of April at IKLECTIK, I hope you can join us! (Tickets here)

I’d also like to say thank you once again to Cath and Dee at LUME for giving me this opportunity!

LUME Lab project blog #2: Julie Kjær

For the second project in our LUME Lab series, we’re excited to welcome acclaimed saxophonist/woodwind player Julie Kjær. Her performance is on 16th March at IKLECTIK, and you can buy tickets in advance from the Luminous Bandcamp site. In this blog post, Julie gives us an insight into what she’s working on…

Jule Kjær: A study of the double bass (and a bit of the bass clarinet too)

What a great challenge and lovely opportunity to be asked to write some new music for LUME’s new constellation the ‘LUME Lab’. I’ve chosen to write for a quintet comprising 4 double basses and a bass clarinet. (and possible a bit of alto flute + sax)

For a long time now I’ve been wanting to get closer to the double bass, to dig into its lovely woody and stringy deep and to get a better understanding of the instrument. Such a lovely instrument with so many possibilities. Creaking woody sounds, screeching strings, low frequencies and humming sounds of the bow on strings.

During the last 3 weeks I’ve been investigating the world of the double bass. I’ve been listening to lots of music, reading wise words and meeting up with one of my double bass heroes, John Edwards, to watch him do his wizardry on the bass and take as many notes as possible. I’ve also been lucky to be able to borrow a double bass myself and get some hands-on experience to get a physical feeling of how it is to play – checking out the different sounds myself.

The next 3 – 4 weeks I will be processing all this collected material and info and use it as inspiration for the piece I will be writing. The compositing work will be based on the way I’ve been working with composing for the last 5 years, mainly with my trio, Julie Kjær 3, which is combining written material with improvised sections, experimenting with rhythm, sound and extended techniques.

After this I will be meeting up with the group for rehearsals leading up to the concert on the 16th March. The rehearsals are also an important part of the process, where the material is tried out, molded and shaped by the whole group.

The 4 double bass players I’ve asked to play are great players and improvisers. They are all busy on the London experimental and improv scene, but can also be heard in other parts of the music scene playing a.o. folk music and Jazz. I will be playing the bass clarinet part.

Lineup:

Seth Bennett double bass
Olie Brice double bass
Thodoris Ziarkas double bass
Tim Fairhall  double bass
Julie kjær bass clarinet/alto flute & composition

LUME Lab project blog #1: Word Of Moth


Dee Byrne (alto sax), Cath Roberts (baritone sax), Seth Bennett (bass), Johnny Hunter (drums)

Word Of Moth is a collaborative quartet set up by LUME founders Dee and Cath: we needed something musical to offset all the admin work we do together! The band has just got a new drummer, Johnny Hunter, and so we’ve used our LUME Lab slot to develop the new lineup, taking existing material in new directions as well as working on some brand new music together. The band is recording its debut album this month, and heading to Switzerland to play at the Jazzwerkstatt collective’s tenth anniversary festival, so this LUME Lab date is the start of some exciting moth times. A few words about what we’ve been doing before you join us on 8th February

Dee writes:

We had a good rehearsal yesterday [25th January], working on some new material, which we’ll perform at IKLECTIK on 8th February and will also be recording on 16th February. The line-up in Word of Moth (drums, double bass, baritone sax and alto sax) is a new challenge for me to compose for; the absence of a chordal instrument encourages me to take a new approach and look more creatively at the specific roles of each instrument. The horns can comp a bass or drum solo as well as play melodies and improvise, which is a fun extra element.

The new compositions I brought to the rehearsal were not polished arrangements, but instead took the form of a few distinct sections, which we then workshopped and arranged as a group. It’s a fun and collaborative way to work and led to some cool results! Some of the things we looked at were transitions between different sections such as introducing a riff/theme during a solo or half the group moving to the next section resulting in two sections overlapping (that sounded great!)

Cath writes:

For Word Of Moth I’ve found myself taking a different approach to composing than I usually might. My current concerns with my regular band Sloth Racket are about using a combination of graphics and conventional notation to create structures for us to improvise our way through. This involves lots of cutting, sticking and photocopying to create scores as if the computer had never been invented.

For some reason though, for WoM I’ve found myself writing pieces that are more like short rock/pop songs! For the LUME Lab rehearsals I’ve been bringing in simple riffs or hooks, sometimes with an attached melody, but not much in the way of fully developed structures. This has led to some pretty stripped-down sounding music, with a lot of space for us to improvise and develop the tunes together. Plus I get to rock out playing some heavy riffs on bari, or rock out while listening to Seth playing them on bass, which is extremely satisfying.

It will be good to pull the pieces together and try them out at our LUME Lab gig – by which time we should be a step closer to being ready to go into the studio too….

Word Of Moth’s LUME Lab gig is 8th February at IKLECTIK, near Waterloo. Doors at 8pm, music 8.30pm. Tickets are on sale now from the Luminous Bandcamp site, and we’d love to see you there.