WOMAD 2017 was simply fantastic! We performed on the Bowers & Wilkins stage to a wonderful capacity crowd and even did a cheeky encore cutting up and remixing Seu Jorge who was playing the main stage.
While there we were interviewed on Radio WOMAD 87.7FM, interview below alongside tracks from the album. Big thanks to the WOMAD press team. Tracks from Orchestra of Samples played: Hangman, Beachcoma and Rapscallion.
Summer 2017 and we’re halfway through the Orchestra of Samples tour! So time to round up some of the interviews and album reviews over recent weeks. Having kicked-off the tour in Hull as part of Hull – City of Culture 2017, here’s us on local BBC radio making fools of ourselves…
Early January 2017 and we were performing Orchestra of Samples in Colombia, in the beautiful South American tropical coastal city of Cartagena for a special event organised by the Lux Festival. The event was held…
It’s not often you get asked to perform in a cathedral!
This year, events at Coventry’s Festival of Imagineers took place in the ruins of the old Coventry Cathedral, heavily bombed during Word War 2. We were scheduled to perform Orchestra of Samples outdoors in the ruins but due to rain the festival had to move many of the days events inside the new cathedral right next door. Alejandro de Valera, our long time French guitarist, came over from Paris to join us on this one, playing his self-built fretless guitar.
Summer 2016 and we performed Orchestra of Samples in the UK city of Leicester for the Journeys Festival, who’d introduced us to Iranian percussionist, composer and producer Arian Sadr, who performed the show with us. So given a…
Spring 2016 and we returned to China for some dates, including at the well known Club Tango in Beijing and a festival in the coastal city of Xiamen, but also to perform some of our our movie remixes at the opening of the GMIC16, the Global Mobile Internet Conference in – quite incredibly – the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing (short video clip below).
Awesome awesome night! Always great to play on home turf, not just the UK but the good old East End of London! Guesting with us were members of afrobeat/world/jazz/funk band Yaaba Funk – both percussionists Clive Wales and Paul Brett and the superb trumpet player Byron Wallen, often cited as one of the best trumpeters in the World.
Well, what a fantastc review from Cultured Vultures! Click here to go to the article… but a few choice extracts below…
“I’ve been to a lot of live events and seen and heard some fairly unique things… Nothing could prepare me for Orchestra of Samples though.”
Hola España! It’s the third time we’ve been asked back to perform at the Abycine Film Festival in Albacete in Spain, and it’s always such a fantastic event! This time we performed Orchestra of Samples at the gala opening night of the festival, at the spectactular Teatro Circo de Albacete – one of only six existing 19th Century theatres of its kind left in the world. It’s the second time we’ve performed the project in Spain and French guitarist Alejandro de Valera once again joined us on stage. Was also great to see the peice in the local paper the following morning over breakfast…!
Ola folks! We’ve just taken Orchestra of Samples to Brazil, playing in Belo Horizonte as the first international artists to perform at the wonderful arts venue Cento Quarto, as part of a Brazilian mini-tour where we also played at La Paz club…
Whilst in Istanbul this month performing our other film remix project at Ghetto Club, we also delivered two lectures about our work and Orchestra of Samples at both Istanbul’s School of Audio Engineering and at Bahçeşehir University. The university also arranged for us to film a former student on their roof terrace, the amazing tanbur player Korkutalp Bilgin. The tanbur is the very long necked stringed instrument usually found in Turkey, the Middle East and Southern & Central Asia.
December 2011 and with the Arab Spring still in motion across the Middle-East and North Africa, we headed to Egypt to perform at the Disco Cairo 2011 event at Scharazad in the West El Balad area of the capital. Only just this year, the country has been through the Egyptian revolution but is still in it’s transitionary period and while we were there, there were still mass demonstrations in the streets and particularly in the famous Tahrir Square.
While in Mexico to perform at the huge Sonorama Festival in the incredible Azteca Stadium, we were introduced to Humberto Alvarez, formally from the well known Mexican band Sangre Asteka. These days Humberto is an expert in pre-Hispanic music, which we recorded him playing – from Aztec whistles and drums to playing a virtually Neolithic ‘stone xylophone’, which he feels would have been one of the first instruments humans likely invented
