October 2023 and we were invited to be part of the Shekou Theatre Festival in southern China, a trip organised by Lesley Zhang from Creative China. Shekou is a district in Shenzhen, China’s third largest city with a population of around 18 million; the city is often referred to as ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ because of its status as a global technology centre.
November 2022 and we were back in Portugal, this time performing Orchestra of Samples at well-being and land-regeneration event Primal Gathering in Odiáxere, near Lagos in southern Portugal.
While in the Portugal for the music industry conference WOMEX (an abbreviation of World Music Expo, as it focuses on world music), we were introduced to multi-instrumentalist Carlos Rodrigues aka Kabeção – a wonderful self-taught musician, instrument developer and sound explorer.
October 2022 and we were in Lisbon, Portugal, at the huge music industry conference WOMEX (abbreviation of World Music Expo), an event that focuses on world music, with talks, showcases and evening concerts. While there we also took the opportunity to record musicians, some being members of Portuguese 10-piece band Criatura, particularly those playing traditional instruments, such as adufe drums, bagpipes and fado guitar.
After a week in Pondicherry, India, where we performed Orchestra of Samples, we headed to the huge metropolis of Bangalore. With a population of 11 million, the city is regarded as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’, with technology companies and many educational and research institutions all based there.
While in India, for our performance of Orchestra of Samples in Pondicherry, we were introduced to the wonderful composer and mandolin master Uppalapu Rajesh, known as U Rajesh. Renowned for his innovative take on Carnatic Indian classical music, Rajesh feels musical techniques come after savouring the music, saying audiences should use their heart to enjoy music first.
This month we were invited for a residency at More Music, the forward-thinking community space and education charity in the UK’s northwest Lancashire coastal town of Morecame. As well as being a performance venue, they have a recording studio, education activities and youth centre with outreach programmes working with local schools via Lancashire Music Hub.
We’ve been commissioned by cultural arts organisation ArtReach, who were inspired by our creative process of working on Orchestra of Samples, to create a performative installation for their Journeys Festival with Somali-British poet Momtaza Mehri, sampling a number of musician sanctuary seekers and refugees now settled in the UK and Europe.
After performing a number of times together on Orchestra of Samples in recent years, we finally organised a session with the maestro himself, trombone virtuoso Dennis Rollins MBE, on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year in London!
Meeting and recording musicians is always a joy, and a wonderful artist we met through organising our community music project Plugged – an initiative promoting emerging artists – was clarinettist and EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) player František Holčík.
We first met Layil Barr in 2018 when recording musicians for our commission to create part of the opening of London’s first ever Borough of Culture (held in 2019) but had only now got the chance to record her for Orchestra of Samples.
Originally from Sri Lanka and blind from birth, percussionist Ghow Ratnarajah is an expert with mridangam and kanjira drums – the primary rhythmic accompaniment in Carnatic music ensembles – he also sings in both Tamil and occasionally Hindi. We’ve both performed and worked with Ghow a number of times, including on shows in the UK and in India, and last year on our documentary project Our Journeys for the London Borough of Culture 2020, so it was great to finally recorded him for Orchestra of Samples.
With Covid restrictions in the UK easing more and more, we headed north to the city of Manchester for our first trip outside London since the pandemic began! Just east of the city, in the foothills of the Pennines is the small town of Ashton-Under-Lyne, where we were recording Sufi singer/songwriter, musician and peace activist Sarah Yaseen.
Originally from Italy and now living in the UK, Alex Akal is an experimental musician who connects traditional instruments with contemporary music. A multi-instrumentalist with a taste for progressive and psychedelic rock, he blends instruments and sounds from around the world, creating his own unique style of music. As well as singing, he plays didgeridoo, drums, electric guitar, bass guitar, fujara (a Slovak flute), dan moi (a Vietnamese mouth harp) and both Native American flute and dvojnice (a flute played in many parts of the Balkans); as it happens, we previously recorded dvojnice in Croatia and then very recently a fujara too, with its beautiful deep bassy sound.
London based ‘Fordey’ Forde, who’s actually now performed with us a number of times, especially as part of our Dhol Addiction project with east London’s Dhol Academy, is an incredibly talented percussionist we’d met through our old friend Paul Gunter from Stomp.
With east London’s Big Creative Academy supporting Orchestra of Samples with the use of their recording studios, we organised a filming and recording session with Saul Eisenberg aka The Junk Orchestra. From performing, teaching and workshopping to appearing on numerous television shows, The Junk Orchestra rock ‘n’ recycle a huge collection of re-invented objects all salvaged from “the industries of the sprawling metropolis” as he puts it!
Having set-up recording sessions with both multi-instrumentalist Andrew Cronshaw and duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan, both introduced us to their fellow musician friend Ian Blake. A talented composer and producer himself, Ian plays woodwinds, keyboards and bass, and we recorded him improvising on bass clarinet and soprano sax.
We were incredibly pleased to be introduced to British multi-instrumentalist Andrew Cronshaw, who plays a wonderful range of non-mainstream instruments, and we recorded him playing three: a 74-stringed electrified chord zither; then a fujara (a nearly 2 metre long 3-hole overtone vertical whistle from central Slovakia); and a marovantele (a double sided 44-stringed hybrid of Finnish kantele and Madagascan marovany which Andrew designed himself).
Continuing with our 2021 UK recordings, particularly looking for lesser known instruments, we read about Armenian duduk player Tigran Aleksanyan, so decided to get in touch. He’s one of few people in the UK who’s a master of the ancient Armenian instrument, which is a double reeded oboe-like woodwind hollowed out of apricot wood; it has a beautifully melancholic sound. We also recorded him playing pku, the single-reeded horn.
In early 2021, with the pandemic and resulting lockdowns continuing, we were fortunate to receive funding from Arts Council England to further develop Orchestra of Samples, so began organising recording sessions with musicians in the UK, starting in London while lockdown limited our travel.
After just over a week in the Indonesian city of Solo – aka Surakarta – working with Indonesian artist Tesla Manaf as part of the British Council’s Connections Through Culture initiative, we travelled over night by train to Bandung, a city few hours south of the capital Jakarta. While there, as well as meeting up with the British Council, Tesla also arranged a recording session with the supremely talented multi-instrumentalist Manshur Praditya who plays (and built his own) Angklung.
Rumah Banjarsari – or Banjarsari House in English – is a fantastic independent arts centre run by artists for artists, and was first set-up in 2017 in the grounds of the former home of the extended family of the Mangkunegaran royals, the house itself is now a museum (Mangkunegaran is a small Javanese state located within Surakarta, in a similar way to Monaco or The Vatican). Quite a number of international artists come here to perform, practice and hold workshops – particularly in the field of ethnomusicology.
In a week of meeting so many great musicians in Surakarta (locally known as the city of Solo) and hearing so much about the ISI – Institut Seni Indonesia (the Institute of the Arts Indonesia), where many of those we recorded studied, we actually had the opportunity to visit the ISI and record a section of gamelan there. So one evening Indonesian artist Tesla Manaf, who we’re working with as part of the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme, introduced us to ISI lecturer Mukhlis Anton Nugroho, who allowed us to attend a gamelan rehearsal of his students.
We’d timed our week in the Indonesian city of Surakarta, known locally as Solo, to coincide with its week-long festivities celebrating the 275th anniversary of the founding of the city, which was on the 18th February 1745. One of the week’s opening events was an outdoor concert by traditional local band Barona, and intrigued by their surprisingly Latin-sounding music we decided to speak to the group after their performance.
