An evening of improvised music from Bex Burch, Caroline Kraabel, Xhosa Cole, and Saadet Türköz
Doors 7pm
Tickets £6-10 Sliding Scale
Burch and Kraabel discovered their affinity and overlapping approaches to improvised music two years ago, building on this discovery with the Oto-Moers Quartet and in Burch’s Kantine Musik. Tonight they bring together a group of eminent friends to improvise with attention to the finest grain of acoustic and physical space, along with equality for sounds, identities, listeners, and improvisers.
For this special event at The Horse Hospital, Burch and Kraabel are joined by Xhosa Cole and Saadet Türköz.
The audience’s focus is so important. Their attention, their breath, is a gift that allows the improvisation to expand and live. There is reciprocity between hearers of sound who are playing and non-playing hearers, who complete the improvisation by lending it their attention and perceiving it as an evolving whole – where, who, why, how, what next – through the shifting definitions of space and relationships.
– CK
Photograph: Bex Burch and Caroline Kraabel by Schemmann
Bex Burch, percussion and voice:
Whether combining the rhythmic timbres of wood, metal and audience claps or duetting with the atmospheric and elegiac echoed sounds of water dripping into a metal basin, Bex Burch is a composer, percussionist, instrument maker and improviser who emphasises space, repetition and aspects of chaos. These themes characterise an ongoing approach she describes as messy minimalism.
Burch’s critically acclaimed 2023 debut solo album, There is only love and fear was released via Chicago avant-garde label International Anthem and named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the Month. She has previously released music as part of post-punk band, Vula Viel, Boing! with Leafcutter John, and the Strut released band Flock, a cosmic, boundary pushing quintet with Tamar Osborn, Sarathy Korwar, Al MacSween and Danalogue. Burch also runs the label Vula Viel Records, the domestic music event, Kantine Musik, and has collaborated with influential artists like Peter Zummo, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Ben LaMar Gay, Dan Bitney and Macie Stewart.
Bex spent three years in Ghana, including an 18-month apprenticeship from 2008 in instrument-making with master gyil player Thomas Sekgura, a formative experience that gave her a deep-seated respect for the powerful Dagaare music as well as the confidence to pursue a path that reflected her own voice and the myriad strands and tastes of her personality. A restless, questing spirit has informed her career since, from the open-hearted collaborations of her constantly shapeshifting musical releases to the creation of a new xylophone, a non-traditional instrument she handmade under Jamie Linwood’s mentorship, tuning its harmonics to maximise the resonances she wanted to hear.
Bex’s solo album There is only love and fear was the first release to spring from the ongoing practice of asking herself “what sounds do I like today?” and was recorded over thirty-two days of improvised sessions in the US with some of International Anthem’s finest musicians. The music she and the collective made oscillates between modes of quiet open-heartedness and powerful expression while emphasising deep listening and intuitive reaction. Domestic sounds dance around the recording while an extreme-weather siren brought about by a heavy storm during sessions initiated its own live-wire, of-the-moment response. Neorealist field recordings of the natural world encountered over its gestation period lend an autobiographical air to a subtly arresting, spiritually enriching suite of music.
Bex’s restless creativity and desire to embrace new musical challenges has seen her music straddle the divergent worlds of minimalism, avant-garde, post-punk, and improvisation with equal success. More solo and collaborative projects are being created all the time as Bex’s wide-eyed approach to improvisation continues to evolve and break new musical ground.
Beyond writing and performing music and running her expanding record label, Bex mixes, produces records, curates radio shows and runs ‘Kantine Musik’, a regular live music happening born of the quiet tradition of making music that brings people together, for each other. All of Bex’s work aims to celebrate excellence, the community and real connection through music.
Biography by Paul Bowler
Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser.
In 2022 Kraabel founded a large improvising group made up of all sorts of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers: ONe_Orchestra New. They explore improvisation and difference in monthly labs and regular performances (recent release, Live at the Vortex July 2024). Kraabel’s soundfilm, London 26 and 28 March 2020: imitation: inversion won the 2021 Ivor Novello Award for Best Sound Art Composer.
In 2024 Kraabel received a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England to work on a long text about improvisation in life, art, and music. WATCH THIS SPACE!
Other active groups: duo with John Edwards (double bass) – Soundtrips70 tour and 2024 CD, Sparrow Dance. Duo with recorder player Teresa Hackel, release pending! Duo with Zhuyang Liu (guzheng). Duo with percussionist Bex Burch. 2024 CD release of Still Dancing CD with Daniel Thompson (acoustic guitar) and Max Reed (dance). Duo with cellist Khabat Abas –Five Communiqués released 2023; Transitions Trio (with Charlotte Hug and Maggie Nicols, new CD release: On Dizziness); OTO-Moers Quartet, with Bex Burch, Simon Camatta and Raïssa Mehner; Fit To Burst, a song-based trio with Sarah Washington and John Edwards; a duo with Pat Thomas (CD release, whats wrong, August 2023); and the Poetry Quartet with Rowland Sutherland, John Edwards and Sofia Vaisman Maturana, which incorporates live poetry.
Kraabel has performed and recorded with many other improvisers, including Robert Wyatt (CD, LAST1 LAST2), Louis Moholo, Cleveland Watkiss, Hyelim Kim, Annie Lewandowski (duo CD, In The Garden City), Susan Alcorn (duo CD, Giving Out), Mark Sanders and Veryan Weston (trio CD, Playtime; duo CD on Emanem with Weston, Five Shadows), Mariá Portugal, Neil Metcalfe (duo CD, March), Crystabel Riley, Pei Ann Yeoh, Charlotte Keeffe, Alex Ward, Cath Roberts, Dee Byrne, Damsel Elysium, Chris Corsano. Radio: Improvisers and Improvisation, made with John Edwards, is a 22-hour radio piece including music, noise, electronics, live performance and many new interviews with improvisers; part of 2022’s Radio Art Zone.
Kraabel’s solo saxophone improvisations while walking in London and elsewhere with her infant child/ren in their pushchair were broadcast weekly 2002-2006 on Resonance 104.4 FM as Taking a Life for a Walk and more recently (without babies) as Going Outside. Other radio work includes a ResonanceFM series of interviews with improvisers in many media (music, dance, visual art, politics, activism), Why is Improvising Important.
Saadet Türköz is a singer, improviser and vocal artist. She has been living in Switzerland for over 40 years and is one of the most prominent figures on the independent music scene in Zurich. https://saadet.ch/
Xhosa Cole is a British tenor saxophonist. He was the BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year in 2018, and was named "Jazz Newcomer of the Year" at the Parliamentary Jazz Awards in 2019. Cole has released three albums on Stoney Lane Records.