I have a question

In my research to understand more about climate issues for our next KlangHaus ventures, I came across the idea of vertical farms. Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in vertically stacked layers inside a building in a controlled environment. Our shopping centres in my home city of Norwich, Castle Mall and Chapelfield Intu are not thriving, MY QUESTION IS, could they become vertical farms? Could we as citizens become connected to the food we eat through proximity to seeing it grow, maybe we could help grow the food we eat? One problem with vertical farming is proximity to market. Another problem is a good source of labour. I’m sure you could sit with a piece of paper and write a whole stack of positives for having an innovative city farm. Of course there are the whole plethora of reasons why not.

I have spoken to folks about this idea of having city centre vertical farms, where we the citizens can help grow food for ourselves, or at least connect with it, walk amongst it, watch it grow, learn about it. Get the schools in, the allotment champions, have socials, have gigs and art installations. Their eyes light up.

With failing harvests, impoverished soils why use swathes of landscape to grow our food? If the land wasn't used for farming, what would it look like? What do you see?

Then, second push, turn our decimated north city concrete shopping precinct into an Eden project for the east... again, having farming as well as tropical plants, socials, gigs, art, dance, cross generational events, celebrations of food seasons, group meals. If it had the investment to start, at least a quarter of the country would come and visit it.

What are the steps to realising such ventures, would they work? Do people want it? What are the blocks?

I'm going to make a radio documentary following this line of enquiry. I want to use sound, play with sound and conjure up a future I'd like to be part of.

http://vincent.callebaut.org  french architects vision.

Apocalypse - The nuts n bolts

I'm really proud of the video we ended up with from the live stream event last Thursday... but just wanted to share the nuts and bolts. In order to pace out where we needed to be, we broke the song down into bars and eventually when filming just into seconds and minutes. Jon did a recording counting out the bars so we could take audio cues during practice sessions. I listened to it so many times that I can only hear the song in terms of where I should be.

We are really proud of the green screen section where we walk through a door in the Outpost building in Anglia Square out onto Cromer beach. The continuity was crucial and photos and diagrams were made as we were responsible for ourselves and the order and selection of items we were wearing. Everything had to be secured well for our walk into the sea. We did lose a kettle to the waves. Luckily not the same kettle I wore into the sea last September that, even though it was an electric kettle, it still works perfectly... 

Huge thanks to Nathan Clarke for directing, brain surgeoning the shots and putting the whole thing together with camera folks, Tom and Dhugal. Thanks to the wonderful Pasco Q Kevlin for his guest appearance and to Outpost for the commission to do this. 

Attention to detail lights my fire and I spent many an hour creating the Apocalyptic maps and charts... which are for sale here at Bandcamp. Sharing the process seems a good way to feel connected.

Live Streaming during Covid19 restrictions...

Next week we will be doing a Live Stream from Outpost Gallery of the latest Neutrinos release, Apocalyptic. The live stream will be recorded so we thought we'd make a video for the song, in the moment. This involves the planning I love, counting out bars, counting seconds it takes us to move from one scene to another. It felt very much like the process of making a KlangHaus. Practicing shots and angles, placements of artwork and props. Continuity of what we are wearing. There is an outside pre-recorded location which we shot last Thursday and we have to make sure when we plan the preceding shot, which will be in Outpost, that we look exactly the same. The song is a free form improvisation that Mark unravelled in one take. He says,'Apocalyptic is an improvisation on the end of days, the end of things and perhaps the beginning of new things. It’s playful, it’s a notional visit to Waikiki and Honolulu by way of Cromer. Why Waikiki? It’s such a lovely word to sing and WaiWai not? Honolulu, it’s all disappearing, we’re all disappearing, and this is just a little poem to us all disappearing into the sea, back into the sea, the lovely sea, where we all come from.' You can tune in live 19:00 30/07/20 at this link twitch.tv/outpostgallery. The cover artwork to the music is another in the series of Paul Flack, Nathan Clarke is film director. a sneak preview of the track itself is available here.

20 Years of The Neutrinos 26.01.19

Celebrating 20 years as a band brought with it hind-site and experience. When we were preparing and rehearsing, we imagined ourselves onstage. I realised that I had enough breath to sing everything well and that feeling breathless onstage was mainly nerves. I decided not to be nervous and to have enough breath. It worked. The same with learning lyrics, I remembered the feeling of only knowing them sketchily. I didn't want that feeling, so I decided to learn the lyrics and over-learn them, so that my nervous in-the-moment brain could cope. It worked. I fluffed them a bit, but I recovered immediately, because I had made the decision that I would be alright. We had moved the stage into the centre of the NAC auditorium before and played in-the-round, so we had good experience to plan and imagine potential difficulties. We hired in more sound equipment because we knew it would help the audience enjoy the experience more. The show was a clear demonstration of our experience as so many comments from audience members said we looked like we were having such fun, "a joy", they said. It's a privileged to get to this point. 20 years of The Neutrinos didn't feel like, 'oh you still doing it then,' it felt like a celebration of 20 years of what were had learnt in a huge noise-clash of fun. The Butcher celebration Weekend inspired us to bring in the extra guitarists for the final song Isotope... it was immense.

10 years of The Butcher of Common Sense 10.11.18

We invited some mates, gathered many instruments, we made soup, we wrote an album in an hour, we played, we searched, we explored, we ate curry, we sawed up lots of instruments, much to some folks distress...it sounded immense though... we played covers of Butcher songs, we played loud, we drank booze, we asked for help and something special happened. 10 years of the Butcher of Common Sense celebrated.

Unusual changes

Never had a come-down like it. Exhaustion and then illness. Normally a huge show has the recompense of singing and performing for the next 20 days which re-fills my pot, but here the safety net was different and I blindly fell into an abyss of gloom. Luckily my attention span is short, so my abyss moment lasted about 8 hours before emerging just a bit ill. An unusual upshot of all this work, is extra listening...or maybe I was just too tired to jump in like I normally do....but back in the bar, folks would reel out a long sentence, pile through a long drinks list, but rather than me interrupt, I just waited and then asked questions.... to my surprise, people responded with warmth, I was tipped, thanked, smiled at.... how extraordinary... my previous thought was being efficient....jumping in quick to ask details....but no, people want to be listened to, not 'corrected'. Listen, wow... life changes in unusual ways.

What The Guardian said....

Concrete Dreams: new show celebrates Southbank's history of performance Exclusive: exhibition looks back on London cultural centre’s legacy through 50 years of archive material Chris Wiegand @ChrisWiegand Mon 9 Apr 2018 16.33 BST Last modified on Mon 9 Apr 2018 23.55 BST An innovative new exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre gives visitors a performer’s perspective of its newly renovated brutalist venues, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. Concrete Dreams, which opens on Tuesday, is a tour through 50 years of archive material, imaginatively presented in dressing rooms, bathrooms and other backstage areas. It is a tribute to the eclectic talents who have played there over the years. Rifle through a box of index cards and find handwritten notes recording performance dates for Stan Getz, Roaring Jelly and André Previn. In one room, you can watch a Deep Purple gig, scan one of David Bowie’s set lists, see Cleo Laine’s dressing room sign and programmes for poetry festivals featuring Wole Soyinka. Meticulously kept attendance books list artists who played there and how many tickets they sold. Pick up the receiver of a dial telephone and hear oral histories from those who worked at the venues. Concrete Dreams is heaven for architecture nerds too. Original hand-drawn plans for the building line the corridor walls and are used in animations projected on to office windows, accompanied by Steve Reich’s music. The exhibition features original plans of the building. You can watch TV documentaries about London’s 60s building boom and listen to Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech about the “white heat” of technology. In wood-panelled dressing rooms, concrete cores removed from the QEH during rewiring are displayed alongside scale models. The tour ends with an arresting live performance in the Purcell Room that captures the venues’ incredibly eclectic artistic history with sophistication, style and humour. The finale features footage of Merce Cunningham’s dancers, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Lemn Sissay among many others. The exhibition has been created by design practice LYN Atelier and performer collective KlangHaus, who had a hit at the Edinburgh festival in 2014 with an atmospheric gig-come-installation staged in a former small-animal hospital. That show was a sort of musical mystery tour, with projections on the walls and performers popping up in unexpected places, playing right under the audience’s noses. The company’s ethos is to make “a collaboration with buildings” and they say they became obsessed with concrete while preparing the new exhibition. They have even used tracks by musicians who trained as architects: the composer Iannis Xenakis and Pink Floyd. The bathroom is used to display images from the Hayward Gallery. KlangHaus’s Jon Baker explains that they chose to open and end the tour with birdsong – a reference to the bird noises on Cirrus Minor by Pink Floyd, who played at the QEH in 1967, and to the influence of birdsong on other artists whose work has been heard at the venues, from Olivier Messiaen to gamelan musicians. “We had this weird notion that when you build a building, what you’re actually doing is enclosing the outside. You’re colonising a space that was once outside,” says Baker. “So we wanted to bring the sound of birds into the building.” As part of the Concrete Dreams season, there will be a concert of Sam Lee’s Singing With Nightingales, an evening of “human-bird duets”. Georgia Ward, participation producer at the Southbank, said: “We wanted to talk about the amazing history and design of these buildings, but also the performative history. There were some real firsts here: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Jessye Norman did an extraordinary performance, Different Trains by Steve Reich. We knew KlangHaus could play with the archive in a beautiful, creative way.” The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall was built in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. Sixteen years later, it added the QEH, for classical music, dance and opera, and the smaller Purcell Room for chamber music, solo concerts and cabaret. Concrete Dreams also acknowledges the history of the Hayward Gallery, which opened in 1968. A backstage bathroom features displays from the Hayward’s 1969 pop art show and the 1972 exhibition The New Art, where Gilbert and George were billed as George and Gilbert. On the bathroom wall, beautiful silhouettes of photographed visitors at the gallery’s 1970 Kinetics exhibition stand out against the white tiles. The free, one-hour guided tours, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, are designed for 15 visitors at a time. Concrete Dreams runs until 29 April and culminates in a three-day festival including a workshop run by the Rambert dance company who once rehearsed in the QEH’s foyer.