As pandemic lockdowns around the world began to ease and outdoor events began to slowly happen, one area of London decided to have a whole weekend of online only events, celebrating the East End’s Borough of Newham and its incredible cultural diversity.

From 14 – 16 August 2020, for audiences to watch worldwide, Newham Unlocked streamed a live programme of arts and music, including circus, cabaret and theatre performances.

Having created a number of new tracks during lockdown, we performed Orchestra of Samples on Friday August 14th with a line-up of Graham Daniels on electronics and video, Michael Neo on keyboards and guitar, Michael ‘Fordey’ Forde on percussion and long-time collaborator Alejandro de Valera on one of his custom built fretless guitars (filling in an array of Covid-19 track-and-trace forms and travelling especially from France, beating quarantine by one day!).

Watch the 30-minute show below.  Full track listing and all musicians sampled is in the YouTube description, tracks are:

1. @0:50 SITAR HERO / 2. @6:05 KORA BOREALIS /
3. @10:23 RIBAB JAM / 4. @15:00 SOMEWHERE ELSE /
5. @20:52 HERBAL HAZE / 6. @25:10 PLAYTIME /